Wednesday, August 1, 2012
On the catwalk suspended a hundred feet above the arena floor at Verizon Center, where you look down on the giant scoreboard that hangs over the void, the air smells like cigarettes and the …
SOURCE: Washington Post at 06:21PMMonday, July 30, 2012
While American athletes are vying for gold medals in London, a local dancer has won a gold of his own at what has been called the Olympics of ballet. The Washington Ballet’s Brooklyn Mack …
SOURCE: Washington Post at 03:06PMThursday, July 19, 2012
As dim as the outlook for the long-stressed U.S. economy looks, and as tough as the recession has been so far, at least we can console ourselves with this: No one has reached into the fiery …
SOURCE: Washington Post at 03:13PMFriday, July 6, 2012
With its pinpoint details and intoxicating immersion in the romantic era, the Paris Opera Ballet’s “Giselle,” which opened Thursday night, seems to come to us from another world. But a…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 08:43PMWe always knew Michael Jackson’s life was a circus — eccentricity swirled around him like the paparazzi.
But he wasn’t the only pop star defined by oddness. The sex scandals, pet chim…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 02:43PMThursday, June 28, 2012
Flowers in full bloom, thunderstorms, killer heat: For Washingtonians, the gentle and not-so-gentle facets of nature loom particularly large in summer. How fitting that the ballet “Giselle…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 08:01PMFriday, June 22, 2012
“It’s no fun, creating a piece,” says Pina Bausch, her sunken eyes and careworn face, veiled in cigarette smoke, testifying to the stress she’s describing.
“For years I’ve been t…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 01:41PMSunday, June 3, 2012
“A dancer dies two deaths,” announced song-and-dance man Tommy Tune. One occurs, of course, when he stops living, but there’s another before that — when he stops dancing.
Tune spoke …
SOURCE: Washington Post at 10:48PMFriday, June 1, 2012
Washington’s summer dance calendar may be on the light side, but this is no time to resign yourself to the couch. (Reruns, really? I know you’re more adventurous than that.) Keep those s…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 01:33PMWednesday, May 30, 2012
It might seem curious that a bouncy little pixie in a bright apron and a peasant blouse is ballet’s Wonder Woman, but this is the revelation of “Coppelia,” the comic ballet that sees a…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 07:30PMFriday, May 11, 2012
What’s not to love about a noche latina? You know there will passion, guitars, feisty women in black stretch lace, flowers in their hair. . . . Have I left out any stereotypes?
Oh, ye…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 11:25PMA beautiful dancer, all long legs and sparkle, enters a ballet competition and lands a job. She came in a student, leaves a professional. In the gamble that is serious dance lust, she hit th…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 07:43PMThursday, May 10, 2012
First in an occasional series.
Great kitchens match drill-field precision with gestural art. The best cooks possess a soldier’s obedience and a dancer’s grace, transcending the dangers…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 01:45AMSunday, May 6, 2012
A local radio station goes off the air. A parent is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. These unrelated events might seem curious subjects for a dance — especially for the same dance. Consider i…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 10:33PMSunday, April 29, 2012
Few dance artists have practiced the creativity of subtraction as successfully as Anna Sokolow. The power in her works from the mid-20th century stems from a mix of space, absence, anticipat…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 10:43PMFriday, April 27, 2012
In a blast of white light after a blinding blackout, the Japanese dance group called Noism took a hard turn into surrealism.
The dancers who had displayed great skill but little personality …
SOURCE: Washington Post at 10:19PMSaturday, April 14, 2012
In “Alice (in Wonderland),” Septime Webre’s trippy, dazzling new production for the Washington Ballet, the title character is not only a kid with a fantastic imagination — she’s al…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 01:36AMFriday, April 13, 2012
In the opera that was Frank Sinatra’s life, actress and world-class beauty Ava Gardner was his Carmen. Over a few tumultuous years, the high-strung, hard-drinking pair fell in love, fought…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 08:14PMFriday, April 6, 2012
It’s one thing to teach a group of preening pink flamingos to dance. Or even the piglets, hedgehogs and an unruly hand of playing cards.
It’s quite another to tell the Jabberwocky what…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 06:24PMSunday, April 1, 2012
On the one hand, how sad it is that the jealousy and bloodthirstiness of “Snow White” still feel relevant today.
On the other, how seductive those emotions are onstage. Particularly in …
SOURCE: Washington Post at 11:59PMFriday, March 30, 2012
That body. Those legs. She was just 10, but Teresa Reichlen made an impression on her new ballet teacher before she’d even danced a step.
“I’m walking around assessing my new young stu…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 07:11PMSunday, March 25, 2012
At one point in “Necessary Weather,” dancers Dana Reitz and Sara Rudner break from their more mysterious permutations to launch into a brief novelty act. They hum “Tea for Two” and p…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 10:42PMFriday, March 23, 2012
Fashion provocateur Jean Paul Gaultier is no stranger to dressing dancers — after all, he laced Madonna into her cone bra in the most athletic phase of her career. Burlesque queen Dita Von…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 04:42PMMonday, March 5, 2012
Keigwin + Company has cornered the market on laugh-out-loud dance. Consider it LOLdance, worthy of one of those baby-talk captions reserved for cute cats: U can’t hav enuf of deez cuddlie …
SOURCE: Washington Post at 12:30AMFriday, March 2, 2012
You don’t stick it out as the director of a local dance company for 16 years without a high degree of moxie. Yet even by the going standards, Lucy Bowen McCauley has more moxie than most. …
SOURCE: Washington Post at 11:36PMTuesday, February 28, 2012
If the recession is hitting the financially precarious dance world especially hard, it is also sparking new thinking. Take Company E, a start-up troupe that gave its first local performance …
SOURCE: Washington Post at 01:20AMIn her best, loosest moments, Twyla Tharp choreographs the way Woody Allen writes — with a keen understanding of personality, idiosyncratic rhythm and the essence of the performer.
In mu…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 01:20AMFriday, February 17, 2012
We expect a lot from museums today, particularly those showcased on the Mall, the single greatest gallery of America’s treasures. Those institutions should display the most important objec…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 05:58PMThursday, February 9, 2012
New beginnings often contain built-in excitement, but there was an extra note of promise in the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s program Tuesday night at the Kennedy Center Opera House.
SOURCE: Washington Post at 12:54AMFriday, February 3, 2012
“Meeting Pina was like finding a language,” gushes one of the dancers in Wim Wenders’s extraordinary homage to the late Pina Bausch. Wenders must have felt the same way about the rever…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 12:42AMWednesday, February 1, 2012
It takes one heck of a man to overcome a tutu disaster. Luckily for ballerina Xiomara Reyes — whose skirt trailed a loop of torn tulle during a “Don Quixote” pas de deux Tuesday — he…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 10:39PM 
