If you ask experts in the performance industry, they’ll tell you that one of the best ways to book work in 2022 is to post content online for casting directors and agencies to see. Even better? A dance reel that demonstrates your skill in a variety of genres. Unfortunately for me, the last legit video […]
Begin Again: Dealing With a Spoonful of Setbacks
Just for today, this column is not what I planned it to be. In an unexpected (or entirely predictable, depending on when you ask me) turn of events, I am not feeling good. How did we get here? How did we go from doing so great that I pitched a comeback story to the preeminent […]
Robert Battle at Full Throttle
When you’re enjoying the easygoing, joke-telling manner of Robert Battle as the welcoming emcee of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, you might not realize there is a ferocious choreographer underneath all that charm. To celebrate his 10 years as artistic director, at New York City Center on Tuesday night the company presented seven works […]
Op-Ed: Please Stop Weighing Dancers
On what began as an ordinary day in early fall, I and the other dancers in my pre-professional ballet program were told that we were going to be measured by the costume shop in anticipation of our upcoming Nutcracker performances with the company. We were lined up in a hallway that led to the open […]
Heels Over Head: 5 Tips to Get More Comfortable With Inversions
“Being upside down is important to me,” says Pavan Thimmaiah. After all, an image of an upside-down dancer in a freeze is the logo for his New York City–based PMT House of Dance studio. And yet, when Thimmaiah was younger, he was so unsure about being upside down that his mother, attempting to help, would […]
Begin Again: Figuring Out How to Train on a Budget
At 18 years old, when illness dragged me kicking and screaming off of the stage and into my bed, I felt as though I’d lost myself entirely. The physical pain was stunning, sure, but it was the loss of dance, of what I saw as my identity, that I struggled to cope with. Now, with […]
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Inside the Gibney Company's Radical Reinvention
The Gibney Company is not your average contemporary-dance troupe. The 12 dancers, who are helmed by three directors enacting a model of lateral leadership, go by the title “artistic associate.” As full-time employees, they make a competitive 52-week-per-year salary complete with health insurance, free on-site physical therapy, an annual artistic sabbatical and paid vacation. The […]
How Dance Experts Are Reimagining the Post-COVID World
The lurch of conflicting COVID-19 guidance has wildly shifted how we occupy space with one another. Our collective improvisation through the “coronasphere” (as scholar Kate Elswit brilliantly named it) has been subject to an onslaught of rules, reversals and regulations. As part of a shared research project with Dr. Heidi Boisvert and Melissa Painter through […]
What the Reactions to Debora Chase-Hicks’ Death Revealed About Divisions in the Dance World
On May 6, there was a tear in the universe and a void opened up when Debora Chase-Hicks died. For a large portion of the Black dance community, her name needs no qualifiers like “former star of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.” A dance giant fell, and yet, if one paid close attention to news outlets […]