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.
Early this week, the world of New York City Ballet was enlivened by the arrival of more than two hundred dancers, all former members of the troupe. The company is celebrating its 75th year of existence. Some of these dancers, like Robert Barnett, age 98, were there practically at the very beginning. Barnett joined in the company’s second season, in 1949, as did Barbara Bocher Henry, who signed up when she was only fourteen. The two were often partnered onstage in the four years they overlapped at the company. Both traveled to New York for the festivities.
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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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While Barbara Bocher Henry was clearly a gifted strong technician, when asked to confirm Robert Barnett’s memory of her executing an unassisted arabesque promenade en pointe, she could not take credit. She could however do it unassisted on demi-pointe and once remembers doing 10 pirouettes en pointe at La Scala!