While many dancers dream of leading roles with a great ballet company, for most, the climb to the top is a gradual one that begins in the corps de ballet. In May, Pointe magazine advisory board member and master teacher Nancy Bielski spoke with three dancers in the midst of their first year as corps […]
Sixteen-year-old Daisy Long takes the stage during the quarter-finals at Switzerland’s Prix de Lausanne, dancing the contemporary variation she’s selected—Jirí Kylián’s One of a Kind, a somber solo, set to a melancholy cello, in which she wears all black. Although Long is number 15, she’s the eighth girl to dance this piece in front of […]
For many ballet students living in suburban areas of America, being a bunhead can be an isolated life, with infrequent opportunities to see professional ballets performed live and little access to students outside their own schools. For these dancers, Regional Dance America, or “festival” as participants call it, is a way to share their passion […]
Gillian Murphy is on the threshold of something big. A principal at American Ballet Theatre, she’s already reached the top. But now she’s about to be catapulted into the spotlight even more. You may already know Murphy from her pointe shoe ads, as one of the odalisques in ABT’s 1999 video of Le Corsaire or […]
The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago recently hired nine new dancers—and they’re a notably diverse group, hailing from Cuba, Venezuela and Brazil, as well as the U.S. “I want the company to reflect Chicago’s diversity, and I was conscious of the Joffrey’s past, when dancers like Chilean Maximiliano Zomosa were part of the troupe,” says Artistic […]
Isabella Boylston recently joined a rather elite club at ABT—“The Princesses,” fellow corps de ballet member Blaine Hoven’s nickname for the nine current ABT dancers who have won Princess Grace Awards. “It was such an honor just to win,” says Boylston, “and then to realize that I’m a part of that group”—which includes Hoven, David […]
Kiara Howe, 14, lives in Olympia, Washington, about a two-hour drive each way from her ballet classes at Oregon Ballet Theatre. She believes her dreams of dancing for American Ballet Theatre would be even further away if she had to fit in her commute around a regular school day. Instead, Kiara learns reading, writing and […]
When I was at an ABT summer intensive years ago, one of my teachers told our class that the most thrilling pirouettes aren’t the tazmanian devilishly fast spins, but they are the slow, smooth turns that look like they’re effortlessly in control. This made a huge impact on me because up until that moment, I […]