Search results for: older dancers

For almost as long as he can remember, Bill Evans has been a teacher. As a preteen, he taught tap and ballet, and at 17 he founded the Bill Evans School of Dance in Utah, which grew to have three locations and more than 200 students. Today Evans, 66, numbers his past and present students […]

Imagine a ballet company without its corps de ballet. There would be no lines of wilis in arabesque drawn magnetically together in Giselle, nor any grand polonaise for the ensemble in Theme and Variations. The corps de ballet is to a dance troupe as the spine is to the body: It provides framework, support, context, […]

Feng-Yi Sheu Taking Up the Mantle of Martha “Go at your audience with a whip,” Louis Horst used to tell Martha Graham. When the Martha Graham Dance Company came to City Center last April, its second New York season since winning back the rights to its own repertory, the whip was in one body: Fang-Yi […]

In choreographer Laurie McLeod’s film Yes, She Said, a bride, suddenly panicked, dives into a swimming pool to hide from her wedding and is filmed underwater, gown billowing. In choreographer Pooh Kaye’s animated Sticks on the Move, a motley cast glides and skitters down a New York street on miraculously moving lumber. In Pupa, dancer/videographer […]

In the last few moments of The Washington Ballet’s Giselle, Elizabeth Gaither wraps her tinsel-thin arms around her partner and then slowly drifts away. She melts into each detail, every placement of her foot and turn of her head softer than the last. Finally she achieves an all but ethereal state as the music draws […]

It’s every gypsy’s dream: to be pulled from a Broadway chorus line to do a featured solo; to parlay that solo into bigger roles around the country; to return to Broadway as the star of a new musical. Nancy Lemenager lived that dream, and the big question is, What happens next? A leggy strawberry blonde […]

Hunched over, arms splayed and eyes glazed, a skullcap covering his head and a Coca-Cola T-shirt and basketball shorts flapping like flags in a hurricane around his wiry body, Jared Grimes is in the zone. WHACK dap da diddley dap cat cat cat. Da diddly dee DAP DAP da didly dat dat—blasting out rhythms, conversating […]

They made magic.     Memorable partnerships are the great miracles of dance. You can’t arrange them in a balletmaster’s casting dreams or a manager’s office. You can’t predict them. These relationships simply arise in the studio, rehearsal room or onstage, and when they happen, they should be treasured.   How do you know a […]