In her white top and plain black skirt, the dancer could be any office drone. But with that towering crown of feathers on her head " fluffy, cascading, Ziegfield Follies showgirl feathers " …
Behind every genius is the figure in the shadows, the lesser light whose stability and sanity lets the magic happen. This poor schlub's story is rarely told. Yet that is the surprise, the ho…
Has the sun ever risen on a busier ballet? Consider Ernest Hemingway's grim treatise on wounds of flesh and spirit, "The Sun Also Rises," with its famously arid, unembellished, plainspoken s…
So much of human culture has vanished from the world, will surely vanish still, will fall away as if it never existed. In the long view of time, our voices and our footprints are not as dura…
Isadora Duncan, believer in free love and barefoot dance, had many children. Some of them are in this room. "Bankrupt. Bolsheviks at the door. There is no money for our school," frets actres…
"If you are expecting me to change your life, forget about it," says a voice in a recording in "One With Others," a smart, witty production by Minneapolis-based artist Karen Sherman that chi…
About 500 boys have packed the auditorium at Bethesda's Landon School. They look sharp, all in blazers and clean pants (it's Monday), but by the way they're slumped in the seats, heads lolli…
In Motown songs as in Shakespeare, fidelity issues loom large. Put the two together, add some character-defining go-go dancing, and you have a great piece of theater. That is what Doug Elkin…
A man and a woman, their heads covered in white gauze, try to kiss through mouthfuls of cloth. What's the use? Still, they keep trying. And when they dance, he sweeps her rapturously into hi…
The redesign of classical ballet, the expansion of modern dance, the deepening of the Soviet symphony: Art exploded in the 1940s, and American Ballet Theatre captured that energy in a singul…
That the inner city is a hidden war zone is painfully clear in Kyle Abraham's "Pavement," a beautiful and severely honest work performed by his dance company, Abraham.In.Motion. But despite …
NEW YORK " Mikhail Baryshnikov is dancing. He is 65. And so, as a friend asked when I told him the news, what is there to see? Well. A great joyous appetite, for starters. The former ballet …
An all-Tchaikovsky ballet program: In concept, who can quarrel? But what looked good on paper proved somewhat flat in execution when the New York City Ballet opened its six-day series at the…
Why wait for fairies? The enchantments start early in the Washington Ballet's "Cinderella." Take the decor: With simple white furniture placed against a starlit night sky and slender birch t…
How conventional American modern dance will seem after the sharp theatricality of the Scandinavians in the Nordic Cool festival. Or rather, how wacko and deliciously oddball some of the danc…
In a live performance, technology typically plays the role of fairy godmother, dressing up the stage with wondrous special effects. But it's far more interesting when it plays God. When tech…
Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen seems obsessed with light and darkness, and it's no wonder. Helsinki swings between extremes of light, with its midday nightfall in winter and midnight su…
"For me, walks are the new dance," says choreographer Sharon Eyal, as quoted in the program notes to her 2011 piece "Corps de Walk." Carte Blanche, Norway's national contemporary dance compa…
Before dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko emerged as the self-confessed ringleader of the brutal acid attack on the Bolshoi Ballet's director, he starred in a fictional show of clashing testosterone …
The rambler: He's a cowboy, a drifter, a marriage-phobe. A migratory species, called to move along at regular intervals. And, as one of the acerbic women in Joe Goode's dance-theater piece "…
Midway through "Love Songs," a well-oiled display of contemporary rites of courtship by the Danish Dance Theatre, the performers retreated to chairs at the back of the Terrace Theater stage …
The Swan in Lara Stefansdottir's dance of the same name is nobody's arm-flapping patsy. We're talking about the Iceland Dance Company here, and these tall, rangy women are more Viking than v…
Forget the new hairdo. Michelle Obama's most powerful bangs come from her hips. In Friday's "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" on NBC, the first lady and the comedian teamed up in a tour-de-far…
March madness came early as the Washington Ballet whirled through George Balanchine's tribute to John Philip Sousa this weekend. "Stars and Stripes" turns the buoyancy of Sousa marches and t…
When Dana Reitz and Sara Rudner, two matriarchs of postmodern dance, brought their much-anticipated collaboration "Necessary Weather" to the Washington area last spring, they didn't appear a…