302 stories by "Sarah Kaufman"
The Suzanne Farrell Ballet has become enormously adept at successive approximations. What other ballet company routinely approaches this one's ability to almost get it, to come quite close, …
"Play/Pause" isn't just the title of Susan Marshall's new work for six dancers; it also neatly sums up the structure. Casually dressed in leggings and T-shirts, the dancers play " poking one…
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago's program began with a gasp. The lights had just dimmed Thursday evening at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater when one of the dancers sprinted down the ais…
The enchanting exhibit "Dancing the Dream" at the National Portrait Gallery begins with a magnificent art nouveau poster of Loie Fuller in all her silk-swirling, Folies Bergère radiance. It…
By what alchemy does an artist take excerpts from 40 years of work and dovetail them into a compelling whole, with an emotional drive and visual rhythm of its own? This was the mystery and p…
It's with a sinking feeling that I read program notes about "conscience methodology" and "social-psychological restrictions." When there's also a strained, rambling poem on the page, written…
Astad Deboo's dream began in the cargo hold of a boat bound for Iran with a load of goats and sheep. Armed with an economics degree, a backpack and a taste for Western dance, Deboo left his…
David Hallberg, the American ballet star, wasn't in Moscow in January when an assailanthurled acid on his boss, Bolshoi director Sergei Filin. The attack all but blinded Filin and horrified …
It's a cruel task to pick a single favorite in a season that offers so many temptations. There is the Mariinsky Ballet's definitive "Swan Lake," for starters, though this production won't ca…
NEW YORK " Decades before John Updike wrote of flat-stomach nymphs parading in bikinis, and well before Slim Aarons focused his camera on the tanned and toned at St. Tropez, Reginald Marsh w…
Of Alfred Hitchcock's cinematic obsessions, the moving body is one of the most remarkable. He lingered on bodies in motion with a choreographer's eye to show us panic, passion and the fragil…
Wolf Trap is presenting only one evening of concert dance this summer (not counting "Ballroom With a Twist's" raft of reality-TV entertainers), so it had to pick carefully. Judging from Tue…
Wolf Trap is presenting only one evening of concert dance this summer (not counting "Ballroom With a Twist's" raft of reality-TV entertainers), so it had to pick carefully. Judging from Tue…
This is a country of mystery, a sweet land of irony. What unites our states but declining incomes and anxiety? We haven't even got a royal baby of our own to distract us as our cities go ban…
Peninsula Flight 2549 is in trouble, forced to whirl above the clouds as it awaits a control-tower cue to crash land. So the flight attendants aboard it in Pedro Almodóvar's new film, "I'…
NEW YORK " "I don't like modern dance," says Annie-B Parson, who creates dances that you'd easily call modern. "I'm not interested in it. I don't know how to do it. I don't like modern dance…
Thank goodness neither the French nor Nijinsky had the last word on "The Rite of Spring." "Shut up!" shouted the audience at the 1913 premiere in Paris of Stravinsky's music and Nijinsky's …
Author's post-first world war novel of love, pain and alcohol gets an unlikely reworking via the medium of danceHas the sun ever risen on a busier ballet? Consider Ernest Hemingway's grim tr…
You'll never guess what I saw at the Kennedy Center on Friday night: a new ballet that actually took ballet as its subject and didn't blow it to pieces. Here were tutus and tiaras and the w…
Things were out of whack Thursday night at the Kennedy Center. Was this really June? An unseasonably cool rain fell outside. Inside the Opera House, snow fell not once, but twice. The first …
I've been flipping through a January 1970 issue of Seventeen magazine recently, a gift from a friend. It got me wondering: Miss Teenage America, with your Wella Care hair, your hips-forward …
The dead can't dance, said Prokofiev, voicing doubts about the ending of his ballet "Romeo and Juliet." But clearly, he had no idea what he was talking about. The dead not only danced at the…
It was standing-room only for Shen Wei Dance Arts at the Kennedy Center on Thursday night. Except for the dancers, who were lying on the floor. Sometimes they'd sit up on one hip or lean on …
Before the curtain rises on the Washington Ballet's "Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises," you get a taste of the ruin, decay and vague comfort that the war-scarred writer etched into his book. Th…
Midnight in Paris. (A real one.) It's May 1922. There's a dazzling soiree going on at the Hotel Majestic: Picasso is there, and so is Stravinsky. Serge Diaghilev, head of the Ballets Russes,…
