A Faun Reawakens It’s hard to imagine a city-wide scandal erupting from the tale of a faun and a woodland nymph. But when Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun, his first choreographic experiment for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, premiered in 1912, it sent shockwaves across Paris. With its premise of sexual awakening and its two-dimensional movement—which flattened […]
Balletic and delicate from the waist up, crisp and quick through her legs and feet, Maya Guice seems like a tap throwback to the era when hoofing and Hollywood were still in sync. When Jazz Tap Ensemble performed at New York’s Joyce Theater last September, the program paid homage to big-screen greats from Bill […]
Ballet Nouveau Colorado The new leadership team at Ballet Nouveau Colorado is taking the suburban Denver company’s name seriously, bringing new, often technologically savvy approaches to everything from programming to marketing. Exhibit A is its innovative 21st Century Choreography Competition, in which entries are posted on YouTube and voted on by the public. Operating in […]
It takes a certain kind of person to be a plate spinner. You know, one of those people who starts spinning one plate on a tall pole, then a second and a third before coming back to the first to make sure it’s still going while spinning a fifth and a sixth. It requires an […]
Tap dancers don’t even stop dancing when they accept their awards. That was evident on Tuesday night at Symphony Space when Tony Waag and Constance Valis Hill presented a Hoofer award to Tina Pratt. She just kept floating around the stage, tapping in her easy gentle style, even when she said her Thank Yous. She […]
National Tap Dance Day is May 25th, and there are two great (and inexpensive) ways for New York City hoofers to celebrate. On May 23rd, The Kitchen and The Studio Museum in Harlem present a collaborative performance by tap dancer Jason Samuels Smith, DJ Reborn, and film artist Rashaad Newsome as part of their quarterly […]
Psychologists looking for signs of sibling rivalry in tap dancers Joseph and Josette Wiggan will be decidedly disappointed. The brother and sister phenoms, now 19 and 22, began tapping 10 years ago and have been, for most of their performing lives, metaphorically joined at the hip. The two spent seven years dancing with Los Angeles-based […]
Young dancers might dream of dancing Juliet to their lover’s Romeo or traipsing the world together on tour. But what happens when that fantasy becomes reality? Seven couples—some in long-term pairings and some in the early throes of passion, some who dance together and some who don’t— describe what it’s like to juggle the professional […]
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