Pioneering Women
My first exposure to “Appalachian Spring” was the music—a sixth grade fieldtrip to the Denver Symphony Orchestra—long before I heard about Martha Graham.
Continue ReadingWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
Astonish me,” said impresario Serge Diaghilev to choreographers, composers and collaborators of his famed Ballets Russes, the bespoke company that reigned supreme from 1909 through 1929. And so it was that during this year—with two wars raging and Covid strains still running rampant amid a world seemingly going mad—there was a boatload of fabulous dance in the City of Angels that managed to, well, astonish this writer.
My first exposure to “Appalachian Spring” was the music—a sixth grade fieldtrip to the Denver Symphony Orchestra—long before I heard about Martha Graham.
Continue ReadingAn enduring image from Jody Oberfelder’s new site-specific dance “And Then, Now,” is of the lithe, 70-year-old choreographer perched up on a tall hill at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, framed by enormous trees and an expansive blue sky.
FREE ARTICLEJukebox musicals tend to come in two packages. The first centers a celebrity musician or musical group and uses the subject's body of work to tell a biographical narrative (“Carole King,” “The Temptations,” “The Four Seasons”).
FREE ARTICLEI may never know what it is like to be an octopus, but I can begin to imagine what it might be like if I was an octopus.[1] Equally, I may never know what it is like to be a dancer, and someone who communicates with their body, but, thanks to a special in-house showing of Prue Lang’s work-in-progress, “Poesis,” as part of her Australian Ballet’s residency program,[2] I can imagine what it might be like if I were. And so it was, that I found myself once more, in the late afternoon, in the van Praagh studio, of the Primrose...
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Thank you for this fun wrap-up. I always tell students to use colorful verbs to describe dance, and you’ve packed in the verbs. You’ve also given me a hit of all the things I missed on the other coast. Tnx much.