June 18, 2025 On Dance Rehearsal Scenes By Diane Mehta The New Chamber Ballet in rehearsal. Photo by Diego Guallpa. Three dispatches from the New Chamber Ballet’s poet in residence, Diane Mehta, who has observed their rehearsals nearly every week for the past year and a half. 1: The Lift In the delicate center of the action, each dancer rests her head on the other woman’s shoulder. Expectation slows, tragedy softens, the center holds. They are barely touching. The lean is superficial; they do not need each other yet. This is the prelude to the enormous tension that comes next. The lift, when it comes, originates in the deepest part of the hips and resembles the ritualistic crouch of a sumo wrestler. The lifter’s thighs look enormous, but she is slim. She plants her legs below her shoulders and extends her arms. The trick is to hold up the rear without sticking it out so that the dancer being lifted settles onto the lifter’s back without a hitch. The memory of the playful lean in the beginning returns. Read More
July 25, 2022 On Dance Odysseus’s Kinesphere By Annie-B Parson Paul is lying on the couch talking to someone on the phone and he’s telling them that he’s reading The Odyssey and it reads like a blockbuster movie, and I interrupt from the kitchen to ask which movie, but he doesn’t hear me because the radio is on. I am a choreographer by trade, and it’s an unusual profession: to make and sell dances. The material, the stuff of dance, is the body, and turning that into something transactional has always struck me as contradictory, because when people first danced, it was essentially a community in physical agreement executing poeticized, ritual actions in a circle. Read More
July 16, 2018 On Dance How Like the Mind It Is By Ellen O’Connell Whittet When Martha Graham was a child, she often visited her father’s office after work hours. One such day, she climbed on a pile of books so she could see the top of her father’s desk, where he was looking at a drop of water on a glass slide. When he asked her what she saw, she described it as “pure water.” He slipped the slide under the lens of a microscope, and she peered once more through the lens. “But there are wriggles in it,” she said in horror. “Yes, it is impure,” he replied. “Just remember this all your life, Martha. You must look for the truth—good, bad, or unsettling.” “Movement,” he taught her, “never lies.” It was a lesson she would recall years later, as she dictated her memoir, Blood Memory, at age ninety-six. “In a curious way, this was my first dance lesson,” Graham writes, “a gesture toward the truth. Each of us tells our own story even without speaking.” Read More
February 29, 2016 On Dance Where the Boyz Are By Jeff Seroy The challenges of an all-male ballet troupe. Like Oulipo fiction or gluten-free bakeries, an all-male ballet troupe draws its allure from what’s missing. You wonder: Can they really pull it off? How not bad can it be? After all, Balanchine, in oracular mode, once said that “Ballet is woman”; he later added, “You put a man and a woman on stage, already it’s a story.” So what happens when you put ten men on stage together? Last week’s Ballet Boyz run at the Joyce Theater in New York provided an answer of sorts. Read More
May 12, 2015 On Dance A Whale in Her Own Ocean By Jeff Seroy Suzanne Farrell at the New York Public Library. Farrell and Balanchine in Don Quixote, 1964. Suzanne Farrell—the ballerina who was George Balanchine’s last and arguably greatest muse—appears tonight at the New York Public Library’s Live! series, cosponsored by NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts. If you’d like to go, don’t—the event was a harder ticket than Hamilton, which the Wall Street Journal called “the buzziest show of the spring.” If you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, well, everything you need to know about Farrell, now sixty-nine, you can learn from the essays of Arlene Croce, whose own great muse was Balanchine and his New York City Ballet, and whose unassailable writings on dance appeared in the pages of The New Yorker for twenty-five years. Croce says about Farrell in Diamonds, the third act of Balanchine’s Jewels: Read More
May 1, 2015 On Dance The Death of The Dying Swan By Madison Mainwaring Ballet at the movies. A still from The Dying Swan, 1917. In the 1980s, Hellman’s launched an extensive campaign to rebrand its mayonnaise products as health conscious. Between shots of garishly pink salmon and luxuriant folds of Romaine lettuce were ballet dancers: “Without a choreographer,” the voice-over says, “there is no ballet … Without Hellman’s, there’s no salad.” (Maybe the copywriters were drawing from Yeats—“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”) Dancers are superimposed onto vegetables—one in orange twirls into a carrot—and a note in small type at the bottom says that Hellman’s “can help slimming or weight control.” The ad only makes sense in light of the “tradition of morbidity,” as the former New Yorker critic Arlene Croce once called it: a certain subtext associated with the ballerina in popular culture. Movies, in particular, have over the course of a century misrepresented, if not outright disfigured, her. She’s a delicate, overwrought creature who shuns all material desires (including dessert, sex, and probably mayonnaise, too) for her craft. If you’re trying to sell a fat-laden emulsion of oil and eggs typically eaten on a red-checkered tablecloth with the WASP-ish anemia of the upper class, you’ll find no better spokesperson than the ballerina. Read More