It is July 16th in the middle of the afternoon, and I am standing on a concrete island in a sea of asphalt outside the Delta terminal at La Guardia. The breeze is doing exactly nothing to avert the blistering heat, and I am wondering where the heck my hired car has gone; with envy I watch a few well-heeled travelers climb into [...]
Dear Diary,
I went to New York to learn, plain and simple.
I was not sure where I would fall along the continuum of teachers attending the National Training Curriculum intensives at ABT, although I feared it would be dangerously close to zero. In fact, I think I barely squeaked past the admissions committee because of my training credentials, which are respectable at least. [...]
Dear Diary,
Before I left for New York, lots of people asked me where I was planning to eat and shop, what shows I was going to see, which museums—that sort of thing. My answer was simply, I don’t know. This was mainly because I had no idea how much free time I would have, if [...]
American Ballet Theatre superstar Angel Corella announced last year his plans to found a new ballet company in his native Spain, Corella Ballet. It was his hope that—given the absence of a professional classical ballet company in Spain—his new company would afford professional opportunities for Spanish nationals, who until now have had to seek work [...]
WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SELF-INDULGENT BALLET DRIVEL.
Dancers are obsessed with bodies, especially their own. And even though I have not been a dancer dancer for some time now, I still dance in front of my young students in their ballet classes (and wall-to-wall mirrors) five and sometimes six days a week; I am keenly aware [...]
A couple of seasons back Louisville Ballet gave its audiences a taste of choreographer Mark Godden in the guise of his version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (which he first created for Canada’s Royal Winnepeg Ballet), where Tamino—here a TV junkie in a smoking jacket—enters not from stage right or left, but is dropped from [...]
I love hosting guest artists at Knoxville Ballet School. I get a chance to cross my own threshold in civilian clothing, for a change, and watch young dancers respond to somebody else standing at the front of the room. This experience usually shakes me to my core, as I witness a fresh take on classical [...]
February 3rd marks Felix Mendelssohn’s bicentennial. Yesterday’s NY Times ran an interesting piece speculating on reasons this occasion has not inspired the usual torrent of new CD releases surrounding famous composers’ birthday celebrations; you can read it and see related articles here. Quiet birthday notwithstanding, I have seized upon this milestone to expose my [...]
There is no real excuse for the neglect I’ve shown my blog these last weeks. At first I decided I must be uninspired—a disconcerting notion, as I usually have not one, but several ideas for posts banging around in my head when I sit down to write. But then I decided I might just be [...]
Primarily because husband prefers other gift wrap media: aluminum foil and paper sacks. But mostly aluminum foil, which he insists serves the additional purpose of shielding our brains from alien invaders. He’s no Grinch, that husband. I wanted to share a couple of particularly delectable aluminum-wrapped items he handed me on Christmas morning. Firstly:
These are [...]