NEW YORK — “Yo, Herman,” Twyla Tharp calls out across a large, crowded studio. Rehearsal is about to begin, and dancers are milling around, chatting and stretching. But not Herman Cornejo. He’s in a corner, sketching out small movements as he runs through a sequence of steps in his mind. Seeing him lost in thought, Tharp walks over, placing a hand on his shoulder. The two confer quietly, like confidants.
A body in motion tends to stay in motion, so summer can present a challenge for dancers. For those who work at ballet companies, the period after July 4 usually means a layoff of at least a few weeks. But free time doesn’t necessarily mean sloth. (Although, like all of us, dancers crave rest.) Summer is festival season. With events like the Vail Dance Festival or the Fire Island Dance Festival, the summer months can offer opportunities to try on new roles or different styles, to choreograph o...
NEW YORK — On a memorable night a few years ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the classical Indian dancers Bijayini Satpathy and Surupa Sen performed a duet in front of the great sandstone Temple of Dendur. Time stood still, every detail of their partnering so seamless that they appeared almost as one body, moving in harmony with the music.
On any given day, you can walk into the dance division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and request to see the ballet slippers of the early-20th-century ballerina Anna Pavlova, or a silk flower garland that adorned the modern-dance pioneer Isadora Duncan, or countless other items in a vast repository of materials on dance.
Marcia Dale Weary, a dance teacher whose school in rural Pennsylvania trained a number of prominent ballet dancers and helped populate the ranks of many major companies, died Monday in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, just outside Harrisburg. She was 82.
NEW YORK — Deborah Zall, a dancer and choreographer who studied with Martha Graham and went on to make her own mark with solo works depicting extraordinary women, died on Dec. 11 in Manhattan. She was 84.
Raven Wilkinson, one of the first African-American dancers to perform with a major ballet company, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, died Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 83.
The film is scratchy and a bit jumpy, but perfectly legible. A man — actually a drawing of a man — in a striped costume executes quick, rhythmic steps while holding what looks like a Hula Hoop overhead. He does a big split in the air and, upon landing, sways side to side on the beat.
NEW YORK — On a recent afternoon, choreographer Alexei Ratmansky stood at the front of a large studio at American Ballet Theatre, preparing to run through, “The Seasons,” his latest ballet for the company.
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