by Hannah Foster | Aug 24, 2016 | Company Life
Jody Sawyer: “Margot Fonteyn didn’t have great feet.” Jonathan Reeves: “Well, when Margot Fonteyn was onstage, you couldn’t tear your eyes away from her.” —Center Stage (2000) YouTube wasn’t yet invented when the movie Center Stage was...
by Hannah Foster | Jun 8, 2016 | Company Life
The coda in Swan Lake’s second act can be brutal for the ballerina dancing Odette. She barely has time to catch her breath after her variation before coming back onstage to carry the act’s final dramatic minutes. Paris Opéra Ballet étoile Dorothée Gilbert...
by Hannah Foster | Feb 21, 2016 | Company Life
Whether it’s an oh-so fashionably late arrival to a ball or an endless line of impressively in-sync penchés, ballets know the power of a dramatic entrance. (Appropriate, perhaps, that the word “entrance” has a double meaning, depending on how...
by Hannah Foster | Feb 17, 2016 | Company Life
Swan Lake ‘s Black Swan pas de deux may be a chance for stars’ technique to shine, but it’s the acting—Odile’s wicked seduction of the blindly loving Siegfried—that gives me chills. In this clip from a 2004 recording of La Scala...
by Suzannah Friscia | Dec 31, 2015 | Company Life
From historic promotions to ballerina retirements to groundbreaking new work, 2015 was an incredible year for ballet. We can’t wait to see what the new year has in store, but first let’s take a moment to reflect on some of our favorite Pointe stories from...
by Amy Brandt | Jun 25, 2015 | Company Life
American Ballet Theatre soloist Misty Copeland is not the first African American woman to dance the iconic role of Odette/Odile. And some warn, rightly so, that the rich history of black ballerinas (Lauren Anderson, Debra Austin, Anne Benna Sims, Nora Kimball and...
by Amy Brandt | Apr 7, 2015 | Company Life
The Washington, DC, dance scene is abuzz this week. Not only is The Washington Ballet premiering its first-ever production of Swan Lake tonight at the Kennedy Center, but two African-American dancers—American Ballet Theatre soloist Misty Copeland and TWB’s...
by Hedy Weiss | Feb 1, 2015 | Career, News
This story originally appeared in the February/March 2015 issue of Pointe. What was the appeal of creating your own version of Swan Lake? I grew up loving The Royal Ballet’s staging of it by Anthony Dowell, and then I danced Balanchine’s version with the...