Curtain Up

When I saw Sarah Van Patten
dance a slow section of Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour in 2008, I was mesmerized. The intensity of her focus made it seem like she was in a trance. And that was just one of her many moods. In “The Evolution of Sarah Van Patten,” Allan Ulrich describes her range by recalling that in a single weekend of Wheeldon’s Cinderella she played two opposite roles—the nasty stepsister and the sweet Cinderella. As Allan puts it, she traveled between “certifiable slapstick and almost mythical yearning.” Lucky for New York City, San Francisco Ballet is bringing Cinderella, along with works by Ratmansky, McGregor, Tomasson, Morris, and Possokhov, to Lincoln Center next month.

Van Patten putting her Freeds on at our photo shoot. Photo by Nathan Sayers.

For our “Fall Preview”
this year we’re emphasizing the visual. I invite you to indulge in “What’s Alluring, What’s Touring, What’s New,” to get an eyeful of the fall season’s highlights. And in “Dance Matters,” we’re introducing an occasional section called “Comings & Goings.” Although some of this information of who’s going where to do what is spread across the Internet, we wanted to gather it all in one place for you.

We all know
there is plenty wrong with the world that needs fixing. For most of us, though, our social or political consciousness is separate from our dance lives. But for Lorin Latarro, Jane Weiner, Ananya Chatterjea, and Heidi Latsky, their progressive outlook infuses their dance projects. In “Dancing for a Cause,” Lauren Kay, who actually participated in Latarro’s first flash-mob gun-violence protest, writes about Latarro diving into her “artist tool kit” to make an impact.

On the back page
you’ll find a touching “Why I Dance” from Antoine Hunter of the Bay Area. He is a dancer who is deaf, or, rather, Deaf, the spelling he prefers since it’s aligned with Deaf Culture. His essay is a reminder of how the passion to dance can break through all kinds of obstacles.