September 20 marks Bebe Miller’s 70th birthday. The Brooklyn native got her start dancing in classes with Murray Louis, noting in the December 1989 issue of Dance Magazine, “I learned improvisation and composition before I knew how to plié.” Recalling a couple of months of ballet classes at age 13, she added, “All those little […]

Having a lighter dance schedule these days means more time to dive into your dance history— including the broader social and political issues that have influenced dancemakers past and present. Katiti King, a faculty member at Barnard College and Gibney in New York City, shares her list of who and what to read and watch […]

In the summer of 1975, the National Ballet of Canada’s extended tour stop in New York City overlapped with American Ballet Theatre’s season. Both companies took advantage of having two of ballet’s greatest male stars, Rudolf Nureyev and Erik Bruhn, at their disposal. Bruhn, however, had retired from portraying princes three years earlier and appeared […]

Even dancers who love their isolations and hip rolls might be totally unaware of where jazz dance comes from. Uprooted: The Journey of Jazz Dance, which premieres at the Dance on Camera Festival on Sunday, July 19, aims to change that. Directed by Khadifa Wong and produced by Lisa Donmall-Reeve, the feature-length documentary is a […]

July 13, 2020, marks the 100th birthday of Anna Halprin. In 1955, disillusioned with New York City’s modern dance scene, Halprin returned to her home just north of San Francisco and began experimenting. On the outdoor deck designed for her by Lawrence Halprin (her husband) and Arch Lauterer, she pioneered task-based improvisation. Among the students […]

To call Katherine Dunham a trailblazer is something of an understatement. She was the first American to present indigenous dance on the concert stage, the force behind the first self-supporting Black dance company in the U.S., an unflinching proponent of racial equality and the creator of one of modern dance’s foundational techniques. Born June 22, […]

When West Side Story landed on Broadway in 1957, it had been a long time coming. Director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, writer Arthur Laurents and composer Leonard Bernstein toyed with collaborating on a contemporary musical loosely based on Romeo and Juliet for years, picking up and putting down the project multiple times as other creative endeavors demanded […]

The technique developed by the legendary Luigi has become inextricable from jazz dance. But it was born from a career that almost never was: In 1946, at 21, the dancer was left comatose and partially paralyzed in the wake of a car accident, two months to the day after his discharge from the U.S. Navy. […]