Béjart, who played the role of The Poet (who directs the characters, who largely rebel against him), said of it, “It’s a difficult ballet because it’s not story. It’s visions, and sometimes so many visions happen in so little time in so many different places on the stage that you cannot absorb all of them at one sitting….It’s constructed like a movie, more or less, and like a symphony….The dream is coming and, more and more the dream is destroying the structure of classical music and classical ballet, as though dream and the subconscious are stronger than the rigid structure of ballet, and they destroy it….But the real story of the ballet is the fight between the creator and the interpreter. When it starts, [dancer Jorge] Donn and I are both sitting, like fighters, in the ring which is made from broken classical ballet barres. It’s a fight.”

By Stoop’s estimation, in addition to Donn as the Hero (who “is many personalities, including a rock singer and a clown and, at the end, becomes born again as the Poet”), the characters in that “fight” also included a young girl, a wife, novelist George Sand, Dionysius, Zarathustra, Pegasus, an eagle, a serpent, three Muses, a group of rugby players, and some motorcyclists. And, Stoop concluded the list, “There’s a great deal of death around, too.” 

The post TBT: Maurice Béjart’s “Difficult” Ballet <i>Dichterliebe</i> appeared first on Dance Magazine.

When Collins was interviewed for Dance Magazine’s February 1954 issue, she was in her third season with the opera while using her downtime to prepare the concert-dance programs she toured around the country during the off-seasons. She recalled auditioning for Léonide Massine as a teenager and being offered a place with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which she turned down because “for the corps de ballet, he said he’d have to paint me white.” After, she said, she “cried for an hour. And went back to the barre.”

Asked how she resolved her dual training in ballet and modern dance, she said: “There is no conflict. You need both to extend the range of the body. The illusion you communicate while dancing depends on what you feel about your dance. For instance, I love Mozart. For that I need elevation and lightness, which I’ve learned from ballet. I love spirituals, too, and for that there is modern dance and a feeling of the earth.” 

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“Through the early decades of modern dance in this country, The 92nd Street Y became a safe haven for many artists who were not being presented anywhere else in New York City,” says Alison Manning, co-executive director of the Harkness Dance Center and director of the Harkness School of Dance at 92NY. Dance legends like Erick Hawkins, José Limón, Sophie Maslow, Pearl Primus, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn all performed on 92NY’s stage. Although the organization also had classes and concerts in other dance styles, it was a hotspot for modern dance in particular just as the genre was beginning to take off in the U.S.

This year, as 92NY celebrates its 150th anniversary, honoring those dance roots is at the top of the list of priorities. The organization is installing a major exhibit called “Dance to Belong: A History of Dance at 92NY,” from March 12 to October 31, in 92NY’s Weill Art Gallery. It kicks off with a one-night-only performance on March 12 meant to connect the venue’s illustrious past to the promise of what’s ahead. The Limón Dance Company will perform José Limón’s beloved There is a Time, paired with Omar Román De Jesús’ Like Those Playground Kids at Midnight. The Martha Graham Dance Company will perform Appalachian Spring Suite, paired with an excerpt from Jamar Roberts’ We The People. And Ailey II will perform a series of excerpts from Ailey classics, including The Lark Ascending, Streams, and Blues Suite, plus a premiere by Hope Boykin.

“We are highlighting that, in the moment when modern dance was wrestling into relevance in this country, The 92nd Street Y played a pretty critical role in opening doors for artists who needed space and support,” says Manning.

The programming for the upcoming performance began with Limón’s There Is a Time, she says. “The piece represents such an important message about our own 92NY history. There have been ups, there have been downs,” she explains. “And we as an institution have weathered both times of great challenge and of joy, but that we were at the forefront for many overlooked artists, during this important period in modern dance history, in providing support, time for joy, time for grief, whatever they needed to make their work.” 

The one brand-new work on the bill is a premiere by Boykin, who says it’s an expression of her gratitude to the legends who paved the path before her. Creating it for this concert was a “no-brainer” she says, since 92NY not only gave some of those legends a platform, but offered her one too: Her first full-evening show of her own took place there in 2021. “This work is a thank-you,” says Boykin. “A thank-you for the lessons, and paths made clear. This work will be a celebration of who I have become as a result of the work so many did before me.”

Putting together the March 12 program has brought home for Manning just how pivotal a role 92NY has played in the story of modern dance, and her role in stewarding that forward for the next generation. “My vision centers around trying to make sure that artists who need a platform and haven’t had an opportunity have it,” she says, “and artists who already have substantial support and known work can lift up these younger, less established artists simply by sharing the space and being presented on these same stages.”

Román De Jesús points out that this is precisely what this particular program is doing for him. The emerging choreographer has recently been racking up fellowships and awards, like the Dance Magazine Harkness Promise Award, yet he still struggles to find resources and venues to showcase his work. “To me, standing on the same stage as legendary companies and alongside fellow emerging artists symbolizes representation, inclusivity, and hope,” he says.

92NY’s long tradition of inclusivity is ongoing, and it will continue to be a place where dance history is made for many more decades to come.

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“I’d call it musical-comedy dancing,” Marge recalled of their style in the July 1976 issue of Dance Magazine, “somewhere between ballet and ballroom, with a little hoofing thrown in!” The couple’s kids-next-door charm made them an in-demand act, booking nightclub, television, and film appearances, including the Jack Cole–choreographed Three for the Show, a slew of movies under the auspices of a seven-year contract with MGM, and a short-lived 1957 sitcom loosely based on their careers.

Gower was also a successful Broadway director and choreographer (with Marge acting as his assistant when not busy raising their children), earning a 1963 Dance Magazine Award and eight Tonys for musicals like Bye Bye Birdie, Hello, Dolly!, and, posthumously, 42nd Street.

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The December 1958 story—and that month’s cover, above—showcased some of the photos of Goslar that Playhouse Pictures used for reference for a series of animated recruitment trailers commissioned by the U.S. Navy,­ which won a gold medal for the best complete television animated film of 1957 from the New York Art Directors Club. The film is the story “of a young man who wants excitement from life. His Fairy Godmother, bumbling, turns him first into a chicken, then into a horse, then into a medieval knight—and, of course, none of these are what he wants. Then she reaches triple-hard to transform him with a touch of her wand, and in her enthusiasm whacks him, getting him what he wants—a chance to join the Navy. The wand flies wildly off, Fairy Godmother explodes into thin air.” 

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We stand in stunned silence. I grew up in a performing arts family and had never once correlated being gay with being bad. My director’s tone, however, tells me a very different story. My brain files the conversation under the heading “Being a Lesbian Dancer Is Not Okay.”

I wish I could say that after high school, my world opened up wide, and I saw an abundance of representation within the dance world. I didn’t. Though I had out-and-proud peers, they were the subjects of frequent whispers. I still didn’t see any female or female-identifying professionals out. I didn’t have my first queer female teacher until graduate school. I went through multiple dance history courses without so much as a mention of a queer female. 

I came out publicly after completing my MFA. As I continued to study dance history, it felt odd not to see myself in anything I was reading and watching. It really seemed as though queer women were just absent from the dance history canon. In contrast, queer men were widely acknowledged—we know about Alvin Ailey, Bill T. Jones, Merce Cunningham, the complicated history around Vaslav Nijinsky. We have records of queer men in dance even if they lived in eras when homosexuality was punishable by law or shunned by society. 

Why does the dance world celebrate the queerness of men while simultaneously suppressing its queer women? It drove home my internalized feelings that queer women were, in fact, not welcome in the dance community.

In 2019 I began to teach dance to high school students, and the more time I spent with them, the more I wanted better for them. I wanted them to see themselves in our history. I wanted them to see themselves represented, to see career paths beyond what I had chosen. Statistically, there had to be queer women in dance’s narrative—so where were they? Was their absence a fault in my education or memory, or in the field of history itself? 

This year, I began to search in earnest for the queer female dancers of the past. (I’m nowhere near the first person to probe for similar answers in queer dance history; Clare Croft and Peter Stoneley are two trailblazers that spring to mind.) I had expected to unearth communities, modern greats who had “special friends” or “roommates” or “fellow spinsters with whom they lived their entire lives.” Instead, I found very little. And what I have seen, I’m baffled by. Why, when I learned about Yvonne Rainer, was her sexuality never mentioned? Though I do not believe we should “boil people down” to their sexual orientation, are we not considering representation for those in our classrooms? Why do we strip women of the same identities we applaud or at least acknowledge in men?

It feels like both a society-at-large and a dance-community problem. The dance world is so gendered. Its treatment of people according to their gender identities is painfully unequal. And we have historically gone through periods of acceptance, tolerance, and oppression of the LGBTQIA+ community, with no linear timeline. The side effect is that we have figures of dance history who could not come out, regardless of their wants and desires. 

As I continue my research, I ask two things of the dance world: Can we create space for queer women to be out, celebrated, and acknowledged? And can we work together to find and recognize our queer female dance ancestors? When we root ourselves in our past, we give ourselves something to grow from.

If you have information about queer women in dance history to share with Wesler, please get in touch via her website: sammwesler.wixsite.com/sammwesler

The post Queer Women Are Disconcertingly Absent From the Pages of Dance History. Where Are They? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The Colombian American artist-activist had a knack for creating works that polarized critics, some of whom dismissively labeled his choreography, often about the Black experience, as too undisciplined and Pomare himself as an “angry” young man. “How many critics really understand the discipline it takes to erase all white influences,”­ Pomare wondered, “and yet dramatize precisely the world the black artist is struggling to escape from?”

Though his style and subject matter varied widely, as a choreographer he is perhaps best remembered for his pieces drawn from observations of urban America—like the controversial Blues for the Jungle (1966) or his signature solo Narcissus Rising (1968)—as well as 1967’s Las Desenamoradas, his haunting adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s play The House of Bernarda Alba. “I don’t create works to amuse white crowds,” he told Dance Magazine, “nor do I wish to show them how charming, strong, and folksy [Black] people are — as whites imagine them — [Black people] dancing in the manner of Jerome Robbins or Martha Graham. Instead I’m showing them the [Black] experience from inside: what it’s like to live in Harlem, to be hung-up and uptight and trapped and black and wanting to get out. And I’m saying it in a dance language that originates in Harlem itself. My audiences […] sense this and identify with it in a way no white man ever identifies with most white works.”

The recipient of a 1974 Guggenheim Fellowship and the first director of Harlem Cultural Council’s Dancemobile project, Pomare led his company, which toured widely in the U.S. and abroad, until his death in 2008. 

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To contemporary audiences, Limón’s sense of identity might seem intrinsically linked to his artistry. But when Puleio took over the Limón Company in 2020, he realized that the group hadn’t worked with a single Mexican choreographer (though it had engaged other Latinx dancemakers) besides its founder, who passed away in 1972. While a few early Limón pieces exploring his culture remain in rotation, his 1939 Danzas Mexicanas, for instance, had been lost almost entirely after the choreographer did not teach it to any other dancers.

For decades, the development of American modern dance was largely seen as a reaction to classicism. But many other forces drove modern pioneers’ art. “At the heart of modernism, there is trauma,” says art historian Bruce Robertson. Robertson­ and dance historian Ninotchka Bennahum are the curators behind the New York Public Library for the Performing­ Arts’ exhibit “Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900–1955,” which recognizes the foundational—and often overlooked—contributions that marginalized dancers, including Limón, made to the development of American modern dance. The exhibit, which runs in New York City through March 16, 2024, and at University of California, Santa Barbara,­ from January 25 through May 15, 2024, considers the genre’s more radical roots. “Why don’t we see the traumatized body, the stateless body, the asylum-seeking body, as a way of analyzing and seeing dance?” asks Bennahum. “Form and content, codified technique. Why is that the only thing that produces an artist of greatness?”

It’s a question that extends beyond the exhibit’s 1905-to-1955 time period. While “Border Crossings” considers who’s been left out of the historical narrative, some artists currently working with modern traditions are also trying to reframe the legacy of modern dance, acknowledging how issues of identity and politics have shaped, and continue to shape, the form.

Following in the Founders’ Footsteps

For the leaders of legacy modern dance companies, new commissions can be a way to honor under-recognized aspects of their founders’ legacies. One of Puleio’s first commissions after becoming director of the Limón Company went to Mexican choreographer Raúl Tamez. The resulting work, Migrant Mother, partially inspired by Limón’s 1951 trip to Mexico City, won a 2022 Bessie Award. “I felt like I had to go back to the roots and rediscover who José was, why he made the work he made, and then work with choreographers that are living and breathing in that same ethos,” says Puleio.

The Martha Graham Dance Company is revisiting its founder’s radicalism, honoring the countercultural elements of Graham’s oeuvre through a combination of reconstructions and new commissions. MGDC artistic director Janet Eilber says that though Graham always claimed she was apolitical, her work tells a different story: In 1936, Graham famously turned down an invitation to perform at the Berlin Olympics because she did not support the persecution other artists were facing in Germany, coupled with the fact that her company was largely made up of Jewish women. In reaction, she created Chronicle. In 1937, she made Deep Song and Immediate Tragedy to honor the women in the Spanish Civil War. And her 1944 Appalachian Spring featured the then-new company member Yuriko and sets by Isamu Noguchi, both freshly released from Japanese incarceration camps.

“It was a statement,” says Eilber. “Among the many other messages in Appalachian Spring, there’s the element of America being made up of immigrants, and needing to assess its own morals and how we treat people in this country.” This month, the Graham company will restage some of those early solos at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a complement to an exhibit about American politics in the 1930s.

Choreographers making new works at legacy modern companies are discovering ways to bring their 21st-century voices into dialogue with older traditions. When the Paul Taylor Dance Company commissioned choreographer and Ballet Hispánico School of Dance director Michelle Manzanales in 2019, she found herself at a crossroads. Manzanales, who is Mexican American, often references her heritage in her choreography, but the Taylor company’s repertoire largely does not reflect that approach. “I love to use music in different languages, but I wondered how the Taylor audience would react to that,” says Manzanales.

Ultimately, she chose not to compartmentalize that part of her identity. Her piece, Hope is the Thing with Feathers, which premiered in 2022, is set to a playlist of songs in both English and Spanish, with the Taylor dancers even lip-syncing lines from the Mexican musician Carla Morrison’s “Pajarito del amor.” “It’s interesting how, as a society, we want to see this part of Limón or that part of Limón, or this part of Michelle or that part of Michelle,” Manzanales says, “but really we can’t escape who we are.”

Carrying the Message Forward

Modern dance’s recontextualization efforts are reaching beyond the stage and expanding into educational and outreach programming. Chicago-based artist and educator Vershawn Sanders-Ward, for example, is working to bring more aspects of the modern dance matriarch Katherine Dunham’s legacy into the studio. Dunham was also an anthropologist who traveled throughout the Caribbean, bringing dances from the African diaspora back to the U.S. Her art and activism are so deeply interwoven that the one can’t be siloed from the other—which is one of the reasons she has been pushed to the sidelines of modern dance history.

“Miss Dunham was clearly a multi-hyphenate. She was a performer, a choreographer, a scholar, and an educator,” says Sanders-Ward, who is in the process of becoming a certified Dunham instructor. Sanders-Ward makes it a point to incorporate the cultural background of Dunham technique when teaching, and hopes that Dunham’s activist legacy becomes a more prominent part of dance education.

Elsewhere, the New York Public Library has created an educational curriculum around “Border Crossings,” and Bennahum will be hosting a Limón symposium at University of California, Santa Barbara, in January 2024 to bring scholars and artists together in conversation. Next year, Graham, Limón, and other companies will join forces for a conversation at 92NY “to look at the iconic works of the 20th century and how they should be viewed in light of today’s conversations,” says Eilber.

Bennahum and Robertson hope that their exhibit will help dancers—and audiences—expand how they think about the modern dance canon: A more complete understanding of the diverse factors that shaped the form’s development will help better shape its future. And they stress that even their very intentional project was only able to feature a small percentage of modern dance’s overlooked artists.

“Dance history has a very long way to go,” says Bennahum. “We’re trying to rewrite the field.”

The post The New York Public Library’s “Border Crossings” Exhibit is Part of a Developing Conversation About Modern Dance’s Radical Roots appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Trinity was finished and premiered there (to rapturous reception) in 1970; the music for Reflections (1971) was found amongst a stack of secondhand records from a shop on Shattuck Avenue; Kettentanz (1971) was inspired by Arpino’s feeling that “Vienna was a European Berkeley,” as he put it; and Sacred Grove on Mount Tamalpais (1973) was first seeded by a self-professedly out-of-character hike up that local peak.

“Berkeley is my spiritual home,” the choreographer and Joffrey Ballet co-founder told us. “The Berkeley scene is like no other; it is a whole entity to itself. Every time I come to California I am imbued with new impressions, new impulses…. In Trinity and Sacred Grove on Mount Tamalpais I have been able to look at the world through the eyes of the young—to touch the heart of the matter of what it is to be young in this place and time. I could not have done this unless I had gone to Berkeley.” He continued that he and Robert Joffrey had noted the positive impact the environment had on their dancers, as well: “As artists, they are very sensitive to an atmosphere and at Berkeley we all felt, very intensely, the free, open spirit that is the stamp of The Joffrey.” 

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By 17, she was the prima ballerina of the Zagreb Opera Ballet; in 1936, she was among the winners of the Berlin Dance Olympics, the exposure from which propelled her to a successful solo career, a starring role in the French dance film La Mort du Cygne and a three-year contract with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Though she recalled joining the troupe as “a disastrous move…. I wanted to dance, but rarely got the chance,” it was through the Ballet Russe that she met Frederic Franklin, with whom she would form the short-lived Slavenska-Franklin Ballet and star in Valerie Bettis’ landmark A Streetcar Named Desire, and that she was able to relocate to the U.S., where she would perform, teach and direct for the rest of her life. 

After visiting Slavenska and her husband at their California home for the 1973 profile, writer Viola Hegyi Swisher reported, “The family includes dazzling tropical and gold-fish; cocker spaniels Nefertiti, Don Pedro and Doña Maria; a smart, shiny black crow admirably named Zarathustra; a pair of romantic white pigeons, Sir Lancelot and Gwenivere…. Nestling neatly in the refrigerator beside the dinner steaks and the luncheon ham is a little covered container. It holds pampered Zarathustra’s live worms.” 

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After studying ballet under Marie Rambert and Audrey de Vos in England and a brief career in Italian musical revues, Setterfield followed the advice of her friend David Vaughan and used her savings to move to New York City in the 1950s. She quickly began dancing with both James Waring and Merce Cunningham. While she was a memorable performer with Cunningham’s company for many years, it was through Waring that she met her husband, David Gordon, with whose choreography she has become indelibly associated, from early works at Judson Dance Theater (“I was in the hospital giving birth to Ain during the first Judson Church performances,” she recalled) to Gordon’s Pick Up Performance Co(s).

“I can please David, and thrill him, and disappoint him more than anyone else, because he expects more from me,” she said. “He can unnerve me, make me crazy and furious. We expect more from each other, so we almost always go through hell and high water, or fire and brimstone, for a piece to arrive at performance.” Gordon’s postmodern works frequently made use of spoken text, the skill for which Setterfield has carried to and from her career as an actor in film and stage works, including a lauded turn, at age 81, as the titular character in a 2016 production of King Lear. She and Gordon, who died in January 2022, jointly received a Dance Magazine Award in 2019.

The post TBT: Valda Setterfield on Going “Through Hell and High Water” While Collaborating With David Gordon appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Lerman’s prediction proved correct: Rivera, now 89, has been nominated for 10 Tony Awards (winning two, for The Rink in 1984 and Kiss of the Spider Woman in 1993), originated the role of Velma Kelly in Chicago, and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2002 (the first Latino American to do so), the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 and the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre in 2018.

“I definitely came along in a golden age,” she told us in February 2004. “[Jerome] Robbins, [Bob] Fosse, Gower Champion, Peter Gennaro, Michael Kidd, Jack Cole—all of the greats. And they were all so different! It makes you a much more interesting person to have all these styles put on your body…. I wouldn’t trade being a dancer for anything. It’s the reason I’m still here.”

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In her 40 years in the role, “Gegi” spearheaded the expansion of that small subset of materials into one of the largest dance archives in the world—and an invaluable resource for dance artists, researchers and enthusiasts alike. Upon her retirement in September 1987, Oswald told Dance Magazine, “I think the thing I’m most proud of is watching people use the library.”

Oswald’s championing of the division was in turn championed by the dance community: She received the Capezio Dance Award in 1956, and a 1972 gala to save the collection saw the likes of George Balanchine, Margot Fonteyn and Alvin Ailey pitch in.

Oswald died in 2019 at age 97, the same year the dance division celebrated its 75th anniversary. 

The post TBT: Genevieve “Gegi” Oswald, Founding Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Having trained with the likes of Doris Humphrey, José Limón, Merce Cunningham and, of course, Graham after becoming interested in dance in college, Taylor proved to be a prolific, chameleonic choreographer who drew from an eclectic musical palette. Of the 147 works he created in his lifetime, many are considered modern classics, from the sweeping examination of pedestrian movement that became Esplanade (1975) to the playful and virtuosic Arden Court (1981) to the transcendent Promethean Fire (2002).

Reflecting in our February 1976 issue, he said, “I don’t know if I got better or worse from year to year, but I know I changed. I’m still changing. I never want to go on doing the same thing forever.” It was a sentiment he continued to echo, noting in our April 1980 issue, “When you present one-choreographer programs, I think your audience has a right to expect variety.”

Taylor inspired a particular loyalty among his dancers that saw many dedicate much or all of their careers to his company. He received numerous awards for lifetime achievement, among them a Dance Magazine Award (1980), a Kennedy Center Honor (1992) and the National Medal of Arts (1993), as well as a MacArthur “genius” grant.

He continued choreographing until the end of his life, premiering his final work, Concertiana, in March 2018. He died that August at age 88.

The post TBT: Paul Taylor On Not Wanting to “Go On Doing the Same Thing Forever” appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Right after Sanasardo’s concert season at Hunter College that year, Feuer had gone to teach a two-week workshop in Stockholm. She never returned. And Sanasardo had found a larger studio right around the corner. So, I moved into Paul’s vacant third-floor studio on 19th Street, landing right in the heart of the downtown dance scene.

I spent my time teaching here and there, taking class and rehearsing. So, except for my obligatory scholarship classes at the Martha Graham School on East 63rd Street near First Avenue, my dance life comprised rehearsing with sundry downtown choreographers and taking as many classes as I could afford to catch up on my dance technique, including ballet classes at the Joffrey Ballet School on Sixth Avenue and 10th Street. Before moving to New York, I had been ostensibly studying architecture at MIT, taking a few classes at Boston Conservatory, teaching myself by watching movie musicals, and practicing stretches and turns.

Being enamored by the Cunningham technique, which I had tasted at the Dance Circle in Boston, I was fascinated by the possibilities that were percolating around me in New York, where John Cage, Philip Corner, Charlotte Moorman were redefining music, and Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Alex Hay and others were stretching the limits of painting. I was surrounded by the avant-garde. Then, to boot, Robert Dunn—husband of Cunningham dancer Judith Dunn—began teaching a course in new approaches to dance composition at the Cunningham studio on Sixth Avenue, at 14th Street.

Of course—encouraged by my friend and guardian angel David Vaughan—I took Dunn’s course, along with other dancers I already knew from Boston, like Ruth Emerson and Becky Arnold, and people I’d met in Merce’s classes, like Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Bill Dunas, Lucinda Childs and others. In 1962, a group of these dancers, spurred by Dunn’s inspiration, formed the Judson Dance Theater, presenting their experiments at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South, where something called the Judson Poets’ Theater organized by Reverend Al Carmines was already redefining theater performance. 

Dunn devised simple exercises that generated pedestrian activity as activity, as dancing. One of my favorites was “Line Up and Pass Through.” I use that exercise to this day (with attribution) in my Dance Research classes. 

I was eager to perform for almost anyone who would challenge my precious dance technique—Donald­ McKayle,­ Merce Cunningham, Pearl Lang, Joyce Trisler—and did, but I was not willing to ditch technical dancing after working so hard to gain some measure of proficiency at it. I did a few Poets’ Theater shows, performing as one of three witches, alongside a singing one and an instrumental one, in Carmines’ version of Snow White. I also choreographed his musical Joan, which even had a short off-Broadway run.

I wasn’t much of a fan of Alvin Ailey’s work or that of most of the Black dancemakers I knew, with whom I felt no simpatico, since I had grown up in a largely white world and culture. Donald McKayle was the notable exception, especially since he had hired me from Boston and begun my professional dancing career. I kept busy making dances and dancing with friends and started my own company, The Solomons Company/Dance. I attended concerts by several members of the Judson group, including their epic first concert in 1962, which transformed them into a force, a legend in avant-garde dance. Although my company did perform at the Judson Church, it was not under the aegis of Judson Dance Theater.

I didn’t think twice about not being “invited” to join JDT, since I didn’t want to be constrained, as it were, by its aesthetic philosophy, as expressed later in the “No Manifesto.” I was still a fan of music and costumes and theater, albeit abstract. Then, in 1965, Merce Cunningham invited me to be the first Black man in his company—and the rest, as they say…

Gus Solomons jr performed with Pearl Lang, Donald McKayle, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and others, and founded The Solomons Company/Dance, as well as PARADIGM.

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Arthur Mitchell was my mentor. He was the miracle who crossed my path and introduced me to the world of professional ballet. He transformed my universe into sold-out performances, worldwide travels, and even the privilege of being the first Black ballerina featured on the cover of this magazine in 1975.

His unique brand of discipline, work ethic and presentation both onstage and off was drilled into the minds and bodies of his emerging Black ambassadors of ballet: “Hold your head up high, walk into a room with confidence. People will take notice and say, ‘Who is that!?’ ” We applied this same pride to Dance Theatre of Harlem’s performances onstage.­ The ultimate reward was respect and longevity for the world’s first successful company of Black ballet dancers—and continued excellence in whatever path his dancers chose after the ballet slippers and pointe shoes came off for good.

Studying with someone with so much drive and energy accelerated the learning process for all of us. Details that would normally take years to perfect were within grasp much sooner. When Mr. Mitchell entered the dance studio, you were expected to give 100 percent, always. If you weren’t dancing, you were listening and learning on the side, adopting any corrections given as your own. He would admonish, “You can’t learn ballet by osmosis!”

Mr. Mitchell was like a tornado, a controlled whirlwind of determination that brushed obstacles away, protecting the eye of the storm which contained his dancers and the direction he planned for them. No financial hurdles, need for studio­ space, arguments or rationale against ballet for Blacks could deter him. His intensity could be nearly intolerable at times, but was conceded by all as effective. He was always moving forward. You didn’t want to feel his wrath if he had to repeat something you had already been told.

Arthur Mitchell destroyed the myth that Black people could not or should not pursue careers in ballet. The repertoire was as classic, neoclassical and diverse as his dancers. DTH’s Creole Giselle was performed to rave reviews with the groundbreaking concept of changing the locale from Germany to Louisiana­ to make it more relevant for his dancers. The company­ introduced George Balanchine ballets to countless audiences outside of New York City, performed dramatic ballets like A Streetcar Named Desire and Fall River Legend, and dazzled audiences with its fantastic Firebird. Innovative works by Geoffrey Holder, Louis Johnson and Billy Wilson, renowned choreographers of color, were treasured crowd favorites.

Yet today, after all these years, I am saddened that there are still so few dancers of color in other well-established ballet companies, and I refuse to believe that it’s because they are not good enough. I’ve been privileged time and time again to see excellence up close—and color was not the determining factor.

That’s not to say that Mr. Mitchell’s influence can’t still be felt. There are many former DTH students and company members whose work ethic and discipline continue to reflect his principles, whether as dancers, teachers, choreographers, artistic directors or even doctors, lawyers and college deans. He would be so proud.

I have worked with Ballethnic Dance Company in Atlanta­ as a coach, teacher and rehearsal director for years. The co-founders, Nena Gilreath and Waverly T. Lucas II, trained directly under Arthur Mitchell, and they continue to instill his brand of excellence in their dancers. I am elated that their company has enjoyed over 31 years of existence and is still going strong. I have the same confidence in Collage Dance Collective in Memphis under the direction of yet another DTH alum, Kevin Thomas. They remind me very much of the young and focused group we once were under Mr. Mitchell.

Another contribution Arthur Mitchell made to the world of ballet was the promotion of flesh-colored tights. These were brought to his attention by Llanchie Stevenson (now Aminah L. Ahmad), one of his founding ballerinas, who insisted on wearing brown tights over her standard pink ones in class and rehearsal. It made perfect sense to him since this matched her overall skin tone. Decades later, dancewear companies are finally offering tights and pointe shoes in several flesh-colored shades, understanding the importance of continuing the lines of the legs through the tips of the toes.

I am blessed to be a member of the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy, an organization composed of five ballerinas dedicated to giving voice to those individuals responsible for Dance Theatre of Harlem’s success in its early years. We are determined to preserve the legacy of Arthur Mitchell and other visionaries who contributed to the promotion of dancers of color in ballet. Let us continue to celebrate Arthur Mitchell: the man, the dancer, the trailblazer.

Lydia Abarca Mitchell (no relation to Arthur Mitchell), a former Dance Theatre of Harlem principal and founding company member, is Ballethnic Dance Company’s rehearsal director.

The post Looking Back at the Trailblazing Legacy of Arthur Mitchell—And How He’s Still Influencing Ballet Today appeared first on Dance Magazine.

It is from this tumultuous time that the culture called “hip hop” will spring forth in the Sedgwick and Cedar Houses in the Bronx five years later, on August 11, 1973.

The culture is born of struggle and oppression, resulting directly from the end of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and the culmination of the Vietnam War. Many Black and Hispanic people in New York City are jobless, living in crime- and drug-ridden neighborhoods. Gangs are prevalent, and poverty is high. As was the case during slavery and Jim Crow, African Americans and their Hispanic brethren look to music and dance to uplift their spirits.

As the Godfather of Soul, James Brown’s music is prominent in that upliftment, and inspires a new style of dance and culture. His emphasis of the drum sound, specifically treating all the instruments like drums, shapes the basis of the sound that will define hip hop: the “break beat,” which is the part of the song that breaks down into just the rhythm section, primarily with percussion. The DJs at the time extend this using a technique coined the “merry-go-round,” in which the drums are manually looped, keeping a continuous rhythm to allow the dancers more time to “go off,” and dance harder. The architect of this is DJ Kool Herc. It is at his parties—starting at the first one on August 11, 1973—that this method is honed, and it becomes the basis for the culture. Kool Herc and his partner Coke La Rock name the dancers “b-boys” and “b-girls,” the “B” emphasizing the break beat, and breaking is born. With James Brown being so influential, he is considered the first b-boy.

During this same year as the birth of hip hop, we experience the death of whom many consider the second b-boy: Bruce Lee. His biggest film, Enter the Dragon, has just been released. He tragically dies before it comes out, but his impact on popular culture is cemented. His fluid fighting style, confidence, swagger, footwork and speed influence the burgeoning breaking movement.

Meanwhile in Brooklyn, a 5-year-old me has just become enamored with a TV show that debuted two years prior. “Soul Train” had invaded American TV screens in 1971, showing live Black music and culture to the masses for the first time. Its impact on the psyches of Black and Hispanic youth cannot be overstated. A young Donald “Campbellock” Campbell shares his dance style, now known as “locking,” on this show, and his manager, Toni Basil, is widely credited for coining the term “street dance.”

Flash forward to ’78. My being a direct beneficiary of the Civil Rights Movement manifests in my getting bussed to a largely white school, where I’m exposed to classic rock: bands like Aerosmith, Queen, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. The rapper Keith “Cowboy” Wiggins is said to have invented the term “hip hop” this year, the onomatopoeic phrase mimicking the marching cadence of soldiers. A year later, “Rapper’s Delight” is a smash hit, becoming the first rap record played on commercial radio and selling 2 million copies. But breaking has lost its steam, with dances like the hustle and the freak taking over the dance floors.

Then, groups like the Rock Steady Crew and the Dyna­mic Rockers reinvigorate the dance, with an evolution of movement not seen in the previous generation: They introduce faster footwork, spins and aerial acrobatics with an even greater competitive zeal. The new decade of the ’80s ushers in an explosion of rap music. More dance styles debut on “Soul Train” with the Electric Boogaloos performing popping and electric boogaloo. I make my own foray into dance in 1982, the same year an article in The Village Voice about Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation marks the first time the name “hip hop” appears in print. The term is used to identify the entire culture of the DJ, emcee, graffiti artist and b-boy. By 1985, the culture explodes globally, led by the dance and the music that inspires it. Overexposure and commercialization leads to breaking being treated as a fad. But a change in the tone and texture of the music brings about what some refer to as the “Golden Age.”

The proliferation of sampling in ’86 brings a resurgence of the breakbeat. Saturday afternoons are filled with kung fu cinema, and the martial arts of the East permeates the minds of kids in the West, inspiring new movements in the dance once again. Cartoons, toys and TV shows influence dances like the Smurf, the Cabbage Patch, the Steve Martin and the Alf. These steps become mainstays in the New York night life. A new form of the b-boy emerges, and freestyle hip hop is born, remixing breaking with popping and the latest social dances. The dance is popularized in the emerging music-video culture of MTV and BET. My first crew, the J.A.C. dancers, is featured in videos by rap legends KRS-One, Salt-N-Pepa, Whodini, LL Cool J and others. In 1989, with the help and urging of my mentor and big sis Robin Dunn, we start the very first hip-hop freestyle class at a mainstream studio at Broadway Dance Center in New York City. The culture comes full circle, and inspires the hearts, minds and bodies of youth around the world.

Emilio Austin Jr. (“Buddha Stretch”) is a b-boy, emcee, graff writer, DJ, choreographer, hip-hop scholar and teacher. He co-founded the crew Elite Force, which grew out of MOPTOP.

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2016: I was asked to create a duet for RAWdance (Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein) in San Francisco at a time when my heart was caught in a perpetual state of reeling from the constant murders of African Americans by law enforcement, most recently the murder of Walter Scott, who was shot in the back in South Carolina after being stopped for a nonfunctioning brake light. I knew I had to address the killings, but I didn’t know how. I felt incompetent, my work felt inadequate. So after a career dedicated to the intersection of choreography and social activism, I created Enough?, a piece that asks whether dance can meaningfully address social movements like Black Lives Matter.

1991: I was finishing Urban Scenes/Creole Dreams, my first commission for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a work juxtaposing the early 1900s stories of my sharecropper Creole­ grandmother in the swamps of Louisiana with my own stories as a gay African American in New York City’s East Village at the apex of the AIDS pandemic. The work called out the sexism, racism and homophobia that extended from my grandmother’s era into my own. One night after rehearsal I participated in ACT UP’s (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) takeover of Grand Central Terminal at rush hour in order to bring that evening’s commute to its knees and force attention to America’s anemic response to the AIDS pandemic.

And take over we did. Being part of hundreds of screaming protesters taking up space in Grand Central turned an act of desperation into an act of empowerment. AIDS received the attention we demanded. What AIDS did not receive was empathy. We were hated by the understandably livid commuters; they spat at protesters, shouted AIDS-phobic slurs, and the event was one step from erupting into violence. Our protest was necessary and I was honored to be there. But I wondered what the impact might be if the commuters could deeply feel the enormity of the grief that propelled us into this takeover?

Creating this empathy was not the purpose of our takeover. But it became the purpose of my art-making. Without losing the political urgency of my work, I now wanted to create those bridges of empathy that would better transcend the boundaries of difference and allow the disenfranchised to shout tales of their personal and political histories while also allowing viewers to see themselves in the lives of these very disenfranchised. As a politics major at Princeton, I understood that a necessary first step in oppression of any kind is to dehumanize the oppressed. At that protest, my mission consciously became to “re-humanize.” Urban Scenes remained an urgent calling out of racism, sexism and homophobia, but the piece became less about those “isms” and more about the eternality of devastating loss due to those “isms.”

1991–2016: I created a body of work with this new mission at its expressive core. These works often contained text that told the nonlinear narratives of marginalized BIPOC and LGBTQ people. But it was dance’s ability to speak deeply through an abstract metaphoric language that gave these works their emotional wallop and potential to jump the boundaries between us. I knew how to speak most accessibly through text, but I knew how to speak most deeply through dance. If the goal was to create bridges, then abstract kinetic languages were the stepping-stones to those bridges. And making work in this way was enough.

Until it was not.

2022: With the advantage of time, I look back at the creation of Enough?. I had entered the studio filled with both the despair of watching the slaughter of Black bodies and the hope of watching the response by millions that became BLM, as if life were a roller coaster plummeting between heaven and hell. That roller coaster became the core of Enough?.

The piece begins with the first in a series of projected tweet-like text passages: “I have been thinking a lot about what a dance can ‘do’.” We see the performers, Ryan and Wendy, in stillness as Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “A Change Is Gonna Come” begins, a recording that is lushly beautiful even as it calls for deep change. The dancers begin one long single phrase of sumptuous movement that matches the lushness of the music. As Aretha hits a gospel-inflected high note and bends it as only Aretha can, the text passages read “YUUUUUUMMM!!” “Did your heart jump like your toes were skipping ’cross the clouds?” The intersection of words, music and dance feels sublime. The dancers repeat the same exact phrase over and over, all the while dancing faster and faster; the swirling curves of lushness slowly transform into a jagged thrashing frenzy. At the apex of this superhuman speed the intersection of words, music and dance feels like a whirlwind of despair. Media coverage of Walter Scott being shot by law enforcement is projected into the work as the core of Enough? is revealed to be a searing indictment of the murder of African Americans. The text reads “A dance can show you how my heart feels when I see that video.” “Because that video makes my heart feel like Ryan and Wendy are dancing.” “Right now.” “A dance can tell you how quickly life moves from toes touching clouds to hearts mired in hell.” Aretha’s voice ends. The only sound is the dancer’s gasping breath as Ryan and Wendy fall to the ground exhausted. The final passages of text read, “Yep, dance can do all that.” “But when I see that video, I am left to wonder…is it enough?”

Enough? altered again my choreographic tactics towards­ creating socially engaged choreography. The text asks whether­ we can act while its deeper undercurrents—the movement—insists that we must act. The “narrator” (assumedly­ the choreographer) is less someone to identify with than a neutral voice to propel the conversation forward. Questioning the adequacy of my own response invites you to question the adequacy of your response; our viewing the news footage “together” asks whether your heart also feels like Ryan and Wendy are dancing when you view an assault on Black bodies. Enough? does not seek empathy towards a character. It seeks empathy towards a political movement; it seeks to spur you into action not because you care about the narrator, but because you care about Walter Scott, because you care about humanity.

I went to protests. I made donations. But when I was truly lost I did the one thing I could rely on: I made a dance. Was that Enough? That is for the viewer to decide. But tapping into the immense power of performance to provoke, to prod, to move, to have heartfelt conversations in a seemingly heartless time—that felt like the most important thing I could do.

Choreographer/writer/director/filmmaker David Roussève has created 14 full evening works for his company David Roussève/REALITY.

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Born January 13, 1925, Verdon was put in dance classes by her mother (a dancer herself) after suffering rickets as a toddler. She returned to dance after her first marriage dissolved, though, “If I could have typed, I would have been a secretary,” she said. Fortunately, she instead went on to become an inimitable Broadway star.

A five-year stint working with jazz choreographer Jack Cole and time in various chorus lines preceded her show-stealing, star-making turn in the Michael Kidd–choreographed Can-Can, for which she won her first Tony Award. Her second quickly followed with Damn Yankees, the show through which she met Bob Fosse. Verdon became his partner and one of the foremost interpreters of his choreography. Her third and fourth Tonys were for Fosse-choreographed musicals; she originated the iconic roles of Charity in Sweet Charity and Roxie Hart in Chicago, and, despite having separated from Fosse in 1981, she worked to preserve the choreographer’s legacy after his death in 1987.

That included serving as artistic consultant on the 1999 Broadway musical revue Fosse. “I want all dancers to be great dancers,” she said of working with the cast in the September 1998 issue of Dance Magazine. “ ‘Never be mediocre!’ I tell them. ‘Be bad! But never mediocre.’ ”

Verdon received a Dance Magazine Award in 1962 and a National Medal of Arts in 1998. She died in 2000. In recent years there’s been an increasing appreciation for Verdon­ not just as a muse, but a creative force in her own right. 

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Hines’ prolific career began with semiprofessional performances with his brother (under the moniker “The Hines Kids”) at the age of 5 and blossomed to encompass television, films and Broadway, earning him Tony, Emmy and Drama Desk awards. His mainstream popularity, coupled with a dogged commitment to pushing the boundaries of rhythm tap improvisation while honoring the form’s masters and roots in Black dance, made him one of tap’s most visible—and effective—ambassadors. At a tap conference in 1986, he said (as was quoted in our September 1988 issue), “Stop talking about a tap revival! That doesn’t make it live in a contemporary sense. We’re not bringing anything back. Tap is here. Now.” Hines passed away in 2003 at age 57, but his legacy has been carried on by his students and mentees, including Glover and Dianne “Lady Di” Walker.

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His first performance was opposite Heather Watts in Balanchine’s Agon in the groundbreaking role originated by DTH artistic director Arthur Mitchell. Tomlinson, the only Black dancer at NYCB at the time of his joining and the first Black man to inherit Mitchell’s role at NYCB, had previously danced the part at DTH; he was the only dancer to learn it directly from both Balanchine and Mitchell.

Tomlinson left NYCB in 1987 and went on to join the faculty of his alma mater, North Carolina School of the Arts, and perform with Boston Ballet. At the latter, he was a master teacher for the company’s Citydance program, which offered free ballet lessons to Boston-area public school students. In the August 1992 issue of Dance Magazine, he said, “Kids learn by example. I always tell them that they have to walk down the street with the posture and pride of an artist, of a good person…. Some of them will become beautiful dancers or beautiful models. Others will be beautiful moms or dads. We’re building dancers, but we’re also building audiences. Once they learn something here, nobody can ever take it away from them. It’s theirs forever.”

Prior to his death in 2019, in addition to teaching dance he worked as a phlebotomist, gave Baptist church services in American Sign Language (he held a doctorate in theology) and occa­sionally performed as a guest artist.

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Released in the U.S. in September 1936, the musical film was the sixth in which Astaire appeared opposite Ginger Rogers, and is widely considered one of the strongest (if not the strongest) of their partnership—at least in terms of the dancing. But it also includes the number “Bojangles in Harlem,” an ostensible tribute to tap legend Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in which Astaire, jarringly, appears in blackface.

This tension between movie magic and an ugly reality was echoed in the gap between Astaire’s public facade and private self. After Astaire’s death in June 1987, John Mueller wrote in a tribute for Dance Magazine that he was “not only one of the greatest choreographers of all time, but also one of history’s master illusionists. Astaire’s screen persona convincingly suggested that he was carefree, easygoing, unruffled, resourceful, effortlessly successful, supremely confident.

“In reality, Astaire was consumed by doubt and insecurity…. he often flew into violent rages in a quest for perfection that was relentless, obsessive, and, by his standards, futile: At the end of his musical career, he complained, ‘I’ve never yet got anything one hundred percent right.’… Because his performances are often so contagiously joyous, Astaire also generated the illusion that he enjoyed what he was doing. But it is not clear he ever really liked performing…. For him, an advantage of film work is that it had so little sense of theater—it’s more like rehearsing than performing, he observed, and ‘you don’t have to go to your own opening night.’…

“The real Fred Astaire is gone now, but the illusory one will always be there on film to astonish and to delight: an elegant legacy from a man who never liked to think about the past or to concern himself with posterity.”

The post TBT: Swing Time and Fred Astaire's Complicated Legacy appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Gradually I added in contemporary, Pilates, Gyrokinesis and a sprinkling of yoga.

It looked like the equivalent of the food pyramid for dance, which is reflected in the curriculums of most performing arts high schools and college dance programs. Up until fairly recently, the hierarchy remained firm: ballet, modern, then everything else (that is, if you could find an adjunct to teach hip hop, African or classical Indian dance).

While I was maintaining this Eurocentric line of study, I was also deeply immersed in the work of La Meri, the first American to travel extensively to learn dances from all over the world and perform those dances back to the world. La Meri was looking right at me when she said, “Ballet is just another form of dance,” in documentary video footage I recently viewed at the Jacob’s Pillow Archives.

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At 12, Toumanova was spotted by George Balanchine when he came to observe her class and, at his urging, she was hired to dance lead roles for the debut season of Colonel de Basil and René Blum’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, becoming one of the troupe’s famed “baby ballerinas.” Dubbed “the black pearl of the Russian ballet,” she quickly became an international star, enjoying a globe-trotting career that also saw her perform on Broadway and appear in a number of Hollywood films (including Invitation to the Dance, directed by Gene Kelly, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain).

In the March 1966 issue of Dance Magazine, she said, “One cannot take away the glamor that is ballet’s natural heritage. Elegance and clarity, sparkle and illusion—these are a part of ballet. In certain ways, the ballet is like a crystal chandelier. Through its beautiful forms may shine many exquisite and eloquent qualities.” She passed away in 1996, at age 77.

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Courtesy DM Archives

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The ballerina made international headlines in September 1970 when she defected from the Soviet Union while on tour with the Kirov Ballet in London. That December, she made her American Ballet Theatre debut, an association that altered the company’s trajectory.

“In ballet, stardom doesn’t come overnight as it does in Hollywood,” she told Dance Magazine in the August 1985 issue, “…because we work every single day of our lives to improve ourselves…So if a dancer becomes a star, that stardom has been won through the sweat of our brows.”

Makarova found success outside of ballet as well, winning Tony and Olivier awards for her performances in the musical On Your Toes. She continues to coach at ABT.

The post Celebrate Natalia Makarova’s 80th Birthday With These Rarely Seen Archival Photos appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Brit-Chardé Sellers,
a freelance triple threat, said she wants to see room for more BIPOC performers. “People of color should not be competing against each other for the one spot for a performer of color,” she said. “Open the stage up to celebrate all of us.”

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After a decade as a soloist with Denishawn, her growing disillusionment with its management and artistic principles led her to leave the company with Charles Weidman and Pauline Lawrence. In a series of letters to her parents penned in 1928, excerpted in the February 1976 issue of Dance Magazine, Humphrey wrote, “I’ve worried over [Ruth St. Denis] till I’m sick—and decided to quit and concentrate on things that are right, or wrong ones that are within my power…I’ll probably change my mind about being an idealist—but I’m set on it now.”

The Humphrey-Weidman company found great success presenting works on contemporary American social concerns. Though arthritis forced Humphrey to stop dancing in 1945, she continued to teach and choreograph, and served as artistic director of her student José Limón’s company, until her death in 1958.

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Having a lighter dance schedule these days means more time to dive into your dance history— including the broader social and political issues that have influenced dancemakers past and present. Katiti King, a faculty member at Barnard College and Gibney in New York City, shares her list of who and what to read and watch right now.

The post What to Read and Watch During Quarantine: Recommendations from Master Teacher Katiti King appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The two had met shortly after Nureyev’s 1961 defection and were romantically involved off and on until Bruhn’s death in 1986 at age 57. As part of a tribute to Bruhn published in the June 1986 issue of Dance Magazine, John Gruen shared quotes from interviews he’d conducted for the late dancer’s biography. Of Nureyev, Bruhn said, “With all my acclaim of being the West’s leading male dancer, I had reached a dead end. Seeing Rudik move was an enormous inspiration. It was through watching him that I could free myself and try to discover that looseness of his.”

The post #TBT: The Summer Rudolf Nureyev and Erik Bruhn Shared a Stage appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Uprooted: The Journey of Jazz Dance, which premieres at the Dance on Camera Festival on Sunday, July 19, aims to change that. Directed by Khadifa Wong and produced by Lisa Donmall-Reeve, the feature-length documentary is a fascinating deep dive into the complex history and evolution of jazz dance. It features mesmerizing footage and boasts interviews from renowned experts like Chita Rivera, Debbie Allen and Andy Blankenbuehler.

In advance of the premiere, Wong took us through seven key takeaways from the film that may surprise you:

The post This Documentary Will Make You Fall in Love With Jazz Dance All Over Again appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Meanwhile, Halprin continued teaching, developing “happenings” and applying her dancemaking approach to social-justice issues through her San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop.

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Director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, writer Arthur Laurents and composer Leonard Bernstein toyed with collaborating on a contemporary musical loosely based on Romeo and Juliet for years, picking up and putting down the project multiple times as other creative endeavors demanded their attention. Along the way, they brought in a young lyricist who had never written for Broadway by the name of Stephen Sondheim, and the story morphed into one of gang violence in New York City.

Zodiac Photographers, Courtesy DM Archives

“It’s funny how insulated we are,” Robbins said of his research in the August 1957 issue of Dance Magazine. “My office is on Lexington Avenue and 74th Street, and just twenty blocks away life is entirely different. The streets are darker, the signs are in Spanish, and the people lead their lives on the sidewalks. Those kids live like pressure cookers. There’s a constant tension, a feeling of the kids having steam that they don’t know how to let off.”

The resulting musical reshaped Broadway. It garnered six Tony nominations and won two (Robbins for choreography, Oliver Smith for scenic design), launched the now-legendary Chita Rivera (who originated the role of Anita) to stardom, and proved just how effective dance could be at telling a story.

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Luigi (who was born Eugene Louis Faccuito but went by the nickname given to him by Gene Kelly while filming On the Town) spent a lifetime imparting his knowledge. “I want to know who you are as a human being,” he told us in the April 1991 issue of Dance Magazine. “I don’t sit at home and plan an artificial feeling for the class. I use the life around me at the moment—the students in the class—and whatever they present to me. What you are at the moment is important to me. There is enough life experience in me to be able to call upon what is needed.”

He received a Dance Magazine Award in 2014 and passed away the following April, just a few weeks after his 95th birthday.

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Holder was a celebrated actor, dancer, choreographer, visual artist and director who took home two Tony Awards (direction and costume design) for The Wiz. De Lavallade performed with Lester Horton, Alvin Ailey, the Metropolitan Opera and American Ballet Theatre, in addition to her work on Broadway, in film and as a choreographer, and is the recipient of a Dance Magazine Award (1967) and a Kennedy Center Honor (2017).

“God bless Geoffrey Holder,” she remarked in the same story. “He let me do what I wanted to do, and we are not in competition with each other.” Separately and together, the duo left an indelible mark on the worlds of dance and theater—and de Lavallade is still at it, continuing to perform at age 88.

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Brief stints with Balanchine’s short-lived American Ballet, on Broadway and at Radio City prefaced her joining American Ballet Theatre’s corps for its 1940 inaugural season. She caught the eye of Antony Tudor (despite leaving his first rehearsal “screaming that she would never work with that Englishman again,” according to Tudor) and became an overnight sensation after leading the premiere of his psychological Pillar of Fire in 1942.

“Tudor changed my whole life—the way I moved and the way I thought,” she said. “He told me what to think and what to read, even what to wear and what to eat. We were inseparable. Sometimes he could really make me feel miserable; he could almost be sadistic. Yet he could be wonderful, too.” Their work came to define the “Theatre” part of ABT’s name.

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We’re excited to share that a feature-length documentary titled Nureyev is slated to make its North American premiere next month. Nureyev will be shown in major U.S. cities starting April 19, giving you just enough time time to brush up on your Nureyev history before the Ralph Fiennes directed biopic, The White Crow, hits U.S. theaters on April 26.

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Okay, maybe not. But in 1912, that’s exactly what Auguste Rodin did after seeing the premiere of Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun.

And for a short time, the iconic sculptor’s depiction of Nijinsky, as well as his cast plaster for the piece, are on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as part of a Rodin exhibition.

Several days after Afternoon of a Faun scandalized audiences at its premiere, Rodin, who loved the work, invited Nijinsky to come pose for him. The resulting sculpture, not cast in bronze until 1959, captures the jaggedness and angularity of the choreographer’s signature style, as well as a sense of motion. Nijinsky looks ready to explode into a leap, his captivating expressiveness clear in the detailed torsion of his upper body. Rodin’s skillful depiction of movement is no accident: The artist spent years studying dancers and creating many meticulous sculptures of various steps and positions.

And just like with dance, an in-person, up-close viewing is necessary to experience the full magic of Rodin’s creation. But hurry—the exhibition’s last day is February 4.

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But in the 1930s through 50s, there was a largely overlooked hot spot for black ballet dancers: Philadelphia. What was going on in that city that made it such an incubator? To answer that question, we caught up with Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet founder (and frequent Dance Magazine contributor) Theresa Ruth Howard, who yesterday released her latest project, a video series called And Still They Rose: The Legacy of Black Philadelphians in Ballet.

What was Philadelphia’s relationship to race at that time?

“It was relatively racially progressive. As far back as 1935, Philadelphia’s high schools were not completely segregated. The city at one point had the largest number of free black men in the union—it was a preferred location for black people coming up from the South.”

How did black students there get into ballet?

“In Philadelphia, the arts were abundant, and a lot of artists became school teachers for extra work. They’d start extra curricular clubs for things like voice, drama—and ballet. That’s where Joan Myers Brown and Delores Brown started dancing. Their gym teacher had been a member of the Littlefield Ballet Company, so they had access to high level training in school.

“Antony Tudor was invited by the Philadelphia Ballet Guild to teach there and in local studios. Joan Myers Brown was one of the first students to take class with him because her friend’s aunt owned a studio, so she was allowed even though she was black. The guys wouldn’t partner her in class, so Tudor partnered her.

“Black dancers couldn’t go to white schools to train, but some of those teachers were happy to come to black studios or to train black students privately. There were two main studios for black dancers: Marion Cuyjet‘s and Sydney King‘s (they originally opened a school together, but their personalities were incompatible). Marion especially was determined to create the first black ballerina.”

Where did these dancers perform?

“There were well-to-do black doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs in Philadelphia, and every year they’d have a cotillion, and Sydney and Marion’s ballet schools would put together a full-length story ballet for it. They had these huge sets provided by the freemasons; there was one year when Delores Brown entered on a horse! Judith Jamison did Giselle at the cotillion and that was her coming out. Billy Wilson choreographed a ballet for it called Blue Venus, and of course he later went on to Broadway and then Netherlands Dance Theater. There was a small circuit for black ballet in Philadelphia via churches or halls and this cotillion; that was the extent of the career that most of them could have being black as ballet dancers.”

How did this compare to what was happening in the rest of the country?

“There were dancers training in other places. In DC, Mabel Freeman had a school, and Jones Haywood School was founded in 1941. But most of those dancers were diverted to other techniques to perform on Broadway or in nightclubs, not in ballet companies. But Donna Lowe danced for the Philadelphia Grand Opera Ballet for years while passing as white. If you even go further back, George Washington Smith who danced the first Giselle in America was rumored to be Mulatto—he was also from Philadelphia.”

Why is this a story that needs to be told now?

“We’re having conversations about diversity and inclusion and equity. But I don’t know if people understand that this isn’t a new topic. We’ve been talking about it since the 30s! I think you start to understand the frustration of someone who’s 80 years old, and you tell them, ‘Well, diversity takes time.’ They’ve been watching it for decades. It’s not just history; it’s really these dancers’ lives.”

Howard will hold a live panel discussion at Philadelphia’s
The Painted Bride Center with Joan Myers Brown and Delores Brown on October 28.

The post Why Philadelphia Was an Early Hub For Black Ballerinas appeared first on Dance Magazine.

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Yes. You read that right. With Legos! Who doesn’t love Legos?

And the level of detail—from the figures’ positions to their costumes and the accompanying sets—shows a keen understanding of these iconic moments.

Browse through some of Seet Dance’s set-ups below, and put your own dance history knowledge to the test. How many do you recognize? Scroll to the bottom for the choreographer and name of each work, and links to clips of these memorable performances.

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All photos Courtesy Seet Dance

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(Get ready for a close-up, Lego men and women. So clever!)

Courtesy Seet Dance

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Courtesy Seet Dance

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