302 stories by "Sarah Kaufman"
Jordan Matter is selling dreams in his book. And he's channeled Jerome Robbins to do it. It's not just the high-kicking legs in heels that bring Broadway to mind in the photo book "Dancers A…
During the second presidential debate Tuesday night, the round red-carpeted floor at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., resembled a boxing ring more than a stage. And frequently, substan…
With one look at the stage before Alexei Ratmansky's "Cinderella" began Tuesday night, you knew you weren't in for a fairy-tale treatment. The drop curtain shows a crowded, crudely painted c…
The recession-choked early 1990s were no picnic for the arts. But there was a bright spot in Washington: the work of Eric Hampton. The dances he created for his company, Eric Hampton Dance, …
"I wanted to slip into the skin of a diva," said Nadia Beugre, a dancer-choreographer from the Cote d'Ivoire, in a question-and-answer session after her performance Thursday at the Kennedy C…
The numbness that would take his life started in his pinky toe. Facing his 50th birthday, the Washington ballet teacher and smart, discerning choreographer Eric Hampton was making a piece ca…
John Tiffany is agitated. His hands are waving around. He's sputtering about something and you can't yet make out what it is, but one thing is clear: This man who's just come off a flight fr…
A high-pitched wail marks the beginning of "Rantau Berbisik," translated as "Whisperings of Exile." It's the sound of pain, but it's also a clear, ringing one-note aria. This was pain throug…
Twenty years after his dance company's debut at George Washington University's Dorothy Betts Marvin Theatre, Dana Tai Soon Burgess on Friday was exactly where he started " working himself in…
Going by the directive written in purple marker and taped to a wall, one rule governs this basement room in Northwest: NO BAD WORDS IN DANCE STUDIO.
Yet it's laughable to think that swearing…
A performance by the Paul Taylor Dance Company is a terrific way to start the fall. I can't think of a better one, in fact. The Taylor company has everything you want in a beginning: youth, …
When Indian classical dancer Manjari Chaturvedi makes her American debut on Sept. 22, she will not be wearing the bright, ornately embroidered costume that is typical of kathak dancers.
"I d…
John Cage could play on cowbells, rice bowls, car parts and temple gongs, smashing a wine bottle where an ordinary percussionist might strike his cymbals. But the one thing this musician who…
Last October, when Emily Oleson first unveiled "Vaudevival," using tap, hip-hop and other dance forms to address race and culture-stealing, she was a University of Maryland graduate student …
In his long career, Bill T. Jones has gone from experimental downtown artist to two-time Tony winner. Bridging such different worlds makes for an uncomfortable perch, from which he must cont…
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 …
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 wo…
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 …
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 another…
We 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 chimps and…
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" …
"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 thinking, 'Ne…
"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 these wo…
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 strap…
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 genre…
