When the entire world seemingly shut down in early 2020, dance schools were thrown into a precarious limbo. Many summer intensive acceptance letters had already been sent out while programs faced the question: Could they still hold their sessions during a pandemic? If so, how to safely? Program directors landed on many creative solutions. And […]

Each time Pacific Northwest Ballet artistic director Peter Boal called choreographer Jessica Lang last year, he worried that she would slam down the phone. If Lang had chosen to abandon her commission to create an onstage ballet during the pandemic, he says, he wouldn’t have blamed her. Every call came with a new COVID-19–related restriction: […]

When Christine Flores resumed in-studio rehearsals with Pam Tanowitz in November 2020, after months of Zoom training inside her apartment, she kept being told to broaden her stance. “During quarantine it was all about how big you could make a movement look in a small space, so that usually meant that my torso was moving […]

When asked to describe the energy at this month’s Youth America Grand Prix Finals, judge Sascha Radetsky had one word: “Stratospheric.” More than 800 dancers from around the United States—selected from 10,000 who’d taken part in regional events—competed onstage at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts in Tampa, Florida, for the competition’s season Finals […]

I remember the first time I watched Courtney Celeste Spears perform. It was 2012 and she was a freshman in the Ailey/Fordham BFA program. Her solo in Hope Boykin’s RE…Porter was the type of performance that made you think “Wow. This girl has something special.” I was working at The Ailey School at the time […]

At the start of the pandemic, many artists felt as though a rug—one that was awfully thin to begin with—was pulled from underneath them. Performances were rescheduled, and then, in many cases, canceled altogether. Freelancers and independent artists, who often invest significant personal funds in their own work, were hit particularly hard. Several artists went […]

When Madelyn Ho joined the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 2015, she was smack in the middle of medical school at Harvard. Instead of quitting, she simultaneously juggled school and company demands until graduating in May 2018. But she held off on pursuing a residency until after her dance career, and hadn’t had a chance […]

I currently have 500-plus unread emails in my inbox. It looks like the opening credits of a Star Wars movie: like a scrolling galaxy far, far away. Never mind that 50 percent are composed of mindless politician mailing lists, weird Groupon-esque “deals,” and subscriptions to things drenched in the best of intentions—I still have a […]