Earlier this week, Vanity Fair dropped a gift into our laps. The magazine released a 25-minute long YouTube video of Julie Kent reviewing ballet scenes from 60 years of feature films, spanning from 1948’s The Red Shoes to 2018’s The White Crow. While she certainly isn’t the first pro to give her take on dance […]
Whether you first watched it in a theater two decades ago or on Netflix last week, odds are you feel a deep connection to Center Stage. The cult classic, which premiered May 12, 2000, is arguably the greatest dance film ever made. (Dance obsessives might take issue with the “cult” before “classic,” not to mention […]
I have a confession. Until today, I had never seen the seminal classic Center Stage. Now that you’ve picked your jaw up off the floor, allow me to explain. It’s not that I don’t love a good dance movie—I did my time with all but the most recent flicks in the Step Up franchise, my […]
The Washington Post just ran a rather epic story about ballerinas’ intense, inherently abusive relationships with their feet. And while a lot of it is stuff that serious dancers already know—getting up on pointe requires dancers to be as strong as football players, every dancer has her own pointe shoe break-in method, etc—the piece also […]
Has there ever been any news as #TGIF-worthy as this? Earlier this morning, Season 2, Episode 1 of American Ballet Theatre principal James Whiteside’s hilarious/fascinating/straight-up genius podcast “The Stage Rightside with James Whiteside” was released! Never heard of it?! Get thee to iTunes, stat. If you’re a bunhead with a wicked, irreverent sense of humor […]
How do you sum up an evening that includes performances of stage-shaking passion; heartfelt speeches that make you laugh and then make you ugly cry; and an inescapable sense of beautiful, joyful, warm-and-fuzzy #dancerlove? You can do it the way legendary Merce Cunnigham dancer Valda Setterfield did it last night: By declaring that there’s nothing […]
Well, this is one of the best ways we can think of to celebrate International Women’s Day! The wonderful Julie Kent—former American Ballet Theatre principal and, odds are, one of your all-time ballerina idols—has just been named artistic director of The Washington Ballet. And it’s a family affair: Kent’s husband, fellow former ABT principal and […]
Julie Kent has danced with American Ballet Theatre for 30 years. That’s an impressive career in any context, but it’s especially impressive in the world of ballet, where dancers are subject to the whims of their fabulous but frequently fickle bodies. And Kent isn’t just any ballerina. For a whole generation of dancers and dance […]