#TBT: How West Side Story Created a Broadway Revolution

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 […]

Op-Ed: Is It Time to Retire Fancy Free?

A woman passes three men in the street. The men pursue her. They thrust their pelvises at her. They continue to pursue her after she slaps one’s hand and walks away. They surround her. She glances around at them in alarm. One snatches her purse (to review the Freudian significance of purses, click here) and […]

What It Takes to Radically Reimagine "West Side Story"

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is celebrated across the dance world for her stripped-down, stubbornly abstract choreography; Ivo van Hove across the theater world for his stark, stubbornly tech-heavy reconstructions of plays and movie scripts. But after this week, the two Belgians are likely to be famed, for good or ill, as the pair who kicked […]

The Most Magical Dancing in New York City Last Week Was in a Public Library

Libraries, rightly or not, are frequently designated in the public consciousness as places that are silent, stuffy and still. This has never really been the case when it comes to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Last Wednesday, as dance world luminaries and patrons alike gathered […]