The cover of the August 1951 issue of Dance Magazine featured Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron in an image from the feature film An American in Paris, which premiered in London that month. In an essay penned for the issue, Kelly described their approach to making the film’s 18-minute central ballet with the cinema in […]

Seventy one years ago today, a new movie hit theaters: The Red Shoes. For a certain generation of dancers, this was the movie—the one that initially inspired them to step inside the studio. For others, it was the first film they ever saw that finally “got” them. When Moira Shearer’s character Victoria Page answers the […]

American choreographer and filmmaker Stanley Donen died of heart failure in New York City on February 21, 2019. He was 94. Donen is best known for co-directing Singin’ in the Rain (1953) with Gene Kelly, propelling the classic MGM movie musical to international fame. On the Town (1949), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and […]

When I’m dancing, I feel so alive, like every single part of me that makes me who I am is participating in moving my body. When I was little, I wouldn’t stop dancing if I could help it. One of my favorite things to do was to pretend to be Gene Kelly in the backyard […]

I have always been extremely dramatic. I think “extremely” might even be an understatement. As a child, I was constantly in costume. Never clothes. Always a costume. When I was 8 we moved into a new house, and took a home video to send to my dad’s family. My siblings were performing a song for […]

I first got hooked on Broadway musicals as a preteen at Gypsy, with its tapping moppets, gyrating burlesque queens and Tulsa, the dancing heartthrob. I’ve been going ever since, but Dance Magazine has been at it even longer. The 1926-27 Broadway season was just ending when DM began publication, and of its 200-plus shows, dozens […]