by Sylviane Gold | Nov 20, 2013 | Features, Inside PT, Profiles
Wendy Whelan is taking a busman’s holiday from her day job, which, many would agree, is being the preeminent ballerina at New York City Ballet (and maybe everywhere else). In a master class at Jacob’s Pillow, she’s telling 22 pre-professionals...
by Laura Jacobs | Nov 20, 2013 | Company Life
The word “ballerina,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, originated in the late 1700s and was the feminine of ballerino, Italian for “dancing master,” which descended from the Latin ballare, “to dance.” More recent...
by Gillian Murphy | Nov 20, 2013 | Company Life
In a recent editorial in The New York Times, dance critic Alastair Macaulay wrote that “the lesson of history is that ballerinadom has been continually redefined.” I believe it is time for a new definition, one that does not hold up Old World glamour or a...
by Margaret Fuhrer | Nov 20, 2013 | Company Life
Photography by Kyle Froman It’s rare to see celebrated ballet dancers outside of the grand opera houses that form their natural habitat. But Martha Clarke’s Chéri, which runs through December 22 at New York’s 294-seat Signature Theatre,...
by Zachary Whittenburg | Nov 20, 2013 | Company Life
Cory Stearns , American Ballet Theatre Why partnering couldn’t start soon enough: I had a crush on this girl at my school. Did anything happen? [Laughs] No. I had no confidence, so I never told her. She probably knew. Top mentors: My first partnering teacher,...
by Pointe Magazine | Nov 20, 2013 | Company Life
Olga Smirnova Expectations can be a heavy burden to bear for a young dancer on the fast track to stardom. Few have justified the hype like the Bolshoi Ballet’s 21-year-old Olga Smirnova. The Vaganova-trained first soloist had an international coming out party to...
by Amy Brandt | Nov 20, 2013 | Career, Everything Nutcracker, Profiles
It’s the middle of the suburbs in a drafty high school auditorium. My back is killing me from the rock-hard floors. But as my partner and I make our entrance for Nutcracker’s grand pas, a swarm of hushed children fill the wings, straining their necks to...
by Siobhan Burke | Nov 20, 2013 | Company Life
Agon. The Goldberg Variations. In the Upper Room . We hear these titles today and think, “Classics.” But at what point does a ballet achieve that status? For Peter Boal, when the ballet was Alexei Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH, almost instantly. “I...