Maria Kowrowski and Amar Ramasar in Herman Schmerman, photo by Paul Kolnik When tickets go on sale for New York City Center’s annual Fall for Dance Festival on September 14, you might want to cancel your plans for the day—getting through to the box office can take hours, and before you know it, the shows […]
This story originally appeared in the August/September 2014 issue of Pointe. Growing up together, first as students at the School of American Ballet and then as young dancers on the rise at New York City Ballet, Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild dated off and on. With their lives on the same track for nearly a […]
This is Pointe’s August/September 2014 Cover Story. A few months ago, Tiler Peck turned 25. It’s an age when most ballet dancers are earning their first breakout roles, gradually discovering who they are onstage. Not Peck. She followed an uncommonly accelerated path to the spotlight, joining New York City Ballet as an apprentice in 2004 […]
One evening in November, after a long day of Nutcracker rehearsals, I turned on the news to images of Typhoon Haiyan, which had just struck the Philippines. I found myself extremely upset by the devastation—the sight of the wreckage was heartbreaking. I wondered how many of my Filipino friends were missing family members and asked […]
At 5′ 4″, New York City Ballet corps member Lauren Lovette could be easily overlooked at the end of a long line of corps women. Once she begins to dance, however, she captures your attention. Her head is held high atop an eloquent neck. Her body is a textbook example of classical proportions with its […]
Terrified doesn’t quite express how Boston Ballet’s Kathleen Breen Combes felt when choreographer Helen Pickett chose her to dance the opening solo for Pickett’s new ballet, Etesian: One and a half minutes of pure improvisation. In deafening silence. Ninety seconds suddenly seemed like an eternity. “It was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever […]
There are moments when a dancer and a role match up in a way that sends a shiver through the audience. During Chase Finlay’s first performances of George Balanchine’s Apollo last year, the similarities between the New York City Ballet dancer and the young god were arresting: Both were beautiful but rough-hewn, testing the limits […]
New York’s New Preprofessional Companies New York’s Joffrey Ballet School recently launched a preprofessional company for its “Joffrey Ballet” program, and plans to start two more companies for its other two divisions (which include “Classical Ballet,” led by Gelsey Kirkland and Michael Chernov, and “Jazz and Contemporary Dance”). Each of the three companies will be […]