In 1961, Yvonne Rainer presented her first solo study, Three Satie Spoons. It marked the start of a prolific career, the early years of which helped to define the experimental, anything-goes sensibility that emerged from Judson Dance Theater in the mid-1960s. She penned the ” ‘No’ manifesto” (“No to spectacle. No to virtuosity…”), which has […]

The February 1956 issue of Dance Magazine marked Maria Tallchief’s fourth of six appearances on our cover. (The total increases to seven if the April 1961 cover, simply displaying the names of that year’s Dance Magazine Award recipients, is counted.) By then, her career, which had started in 1942 at the Ballet Russe de Monte […]

The world’s largest dance archive just keeps growing. Over the summer, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ Jerome Robbins Dance Division began welcoming two new collections to its illustrious archive. The legacies of Martha Graham and Trisha Brown will be safely housed at NYPL’s Lincoln Center campus, featuring rarely seen treasure troves […]

When Dame Antoinette Sibley graduated into The Royal Ballet in 1956, she was the first English dancer to have come up through both White Lodge and the Upper School. This quiet accomplishment presaged Sibley’s becoming arguably the quintessential English ballerina of her generation. Sibley danced opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov in The Turning Point. Courtesy DM Archives […]

When White Nights opened in American theaters on December 6, 1985, it was a decidedly risky proposition. Mikhail Baryshnikov was a massive ballet star, but hadn’t spent much time acting on camera. Gregory Hines was a lauded tap dancer on Broadway and in films, but had never been given a dramatic leading role. Yet director […]

November 21 marks Natalia Makarova’s 80th birthday. 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 […]

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words ring true for Americans facing two pandemics: the coronavirus and systemic racism. After the brutal killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, demonstrators nationwide took to the streets, and some danced as they marched and chanted “Black Lives Matter,” […]

Modern dance pioneer Doris Humphrey was born October 17, 1895. 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 […]