I thought I knew about Sylvia Waters’ long life on the Ailey planet, but when she spoke recently on a panel celebrating 90 years of dance at the 92nd Street Y, I heard some surprises.

Sylvia and Dante Puleio at the Library for the Performing Arts, Jonathan Blanc:NYPL

I knew she’d attended Juilliard because Sylvia and Pina Bausch received Dance Magazine Awards the same year—2008—and they reminisced a little bit about their times at Juilliard together. In fact, I quoted Sylvia when I wrote my opus on Pina Bausch at Juilliard and NYC because she had such a clear view of Pina’s talent back in 1960.

I knew that Sylvia had danced with Ailey for seven years, then led Ailey II for thirty-eight years, from 1975 to 2012.

Sylvia and Dudley Williams in Metallics by Paul Sanasardo, Ph Fred Fehl

But she had a full dance life before joining Ailey. As a teenager she was studying at the New Dance Group on scholarship, taking class with Bill Bales and others from that period. Then, one day, when she was 14, she had a substitute teacher for Horton technique—and that turned out to be Alvin Ailey. Later, at Juilliard, her Graham teachers were Helen McGehee, Mary Hinkson, Bert Ross, and Ethel Winters.

Sylvia, foreground, in Blues Suite, screen grab

When she saw Ailey’s Blues Suite during his debut at the 92s Street Y in 1958, she felt a strong connection. In this Ailey Up Close video, introduced by Robert Battle, Sylvia says, “I really had a visceral reaction to it…I was very familiar with these characters, and I was familiar with Blues music.” She admired the dignity and energy of the characters. However, she didn’t dance with Ailey until ten years later.

In 1960 Donald McKayle asked her to perform in what he called his “epic” work, They Called Her Moses, about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. It was being remounted for CBS television’s Camera Three in 1961. The star-studded cast included Arthur Mitchell, Carmen de Lavallade and Graham dancer Robert Powell. Thanks to Walter Rutledge, this bit of amazing history is posted here. Sylvia plays a poignant figure, and her energy jumps off the screen. Her part is preceded by a duet for Arthur Mitchell and Kathleen Stanford, and followed by a gorgeous duet for Donald McKayle and Carmen de Lavallade as young lovers hoping for a better life.

The first time Sylvia danced at the Y, it was with Hava Kohav, whom she undoubtedly knew from Juilliard, in 1961. Other Juilliard dancers in that group were Dudley Williams, Bill Louther, and Mabel Robinson. (Hava Kohav Beller went on to become a filmmaker.) Sylvia then went to Europe, where she worked with Maurice Béjart. In 1965, when Sylvia saw Revelations, she said to herself, “That’s where I want to be.” But it didn’t happen until 1968, when she ran into Alvin Ailey at BAM while attending a performance of Martha Graham. He asked her “What are you doing,” and that was the beginning of her forty-five years with Ailey.

As longtime leader of Ailey II, Sylvia nurtured young dancers, gave opportunities to choreographers, arranged tours, and chose the rep. When she stepped down in 2012, she said in Dance Magazine, “I believe in renewal; I believe in change.” In this article in the NY Times, Gia Kourlas says that “Ms. Waters’ track record of spotting talent is astounding.”

Alma Woolsey, Danny Strayhorn, & Sylvia in The Road of Phoebe Snow by Talley Beatty, 1969, Ph Jack Mitchell

In addition to the Dance Magazine Award, she received an honorary doctorate from the SUNY Oswego, a Legacy Award as part of the 20th Annual IABD Festival, the Syracuse University’s Women of Distinction Award, and a “Bessie” Award.

Currently, Sylvia leads The Ailey Legacy Residency for college-level students. Last year, she created Portrait of Ailey, an eight-part documentary series for PBS LearningMedia for Black History Month, a website with classroom-ready resources for pre-K-12 teachers.

I love it when one woman’s passion and integrity take her on a long path that enriches us all.

The 92nd Street Y is celebrating 90 years of dance. The ebullient Joan Finkelstein led a panel of eight illustrious dance artists at the Library for the Performing Arts on March 10. A major part of the leadership lineage at the Y, Joan gave us a jam-packed history lesson before introducing the panelists in three groups: First Janet Eilber, director of Martha Graham Dance company; Dante Puleio, director of the Limón Dance company; and Sylvia Waters, artistic director emerita of Ailey II. The second group consisted of choreographers David Dorfman, Doug Varone, and Ronald K. Brown with Arcell Cabuag (Ron’s associate artistic director). The last contingent was three young dancemakers who have been artists in residence at 92NY (as it is now called): Yue Yin, Omar Román De Jésus, and Hope Boykin.

Joan Finkelstein at right. All photos by Jonathan Blanc/NYPL

Joan, director of the Harkness Harkness Foundation for Dance, flashed a recent Dance Index, in which she explains the long lineage of dance at the YM-YWHA. (Go to Dance Index and scroll down.) Joan also reminded us that the vibrant exhibit about dance at the Y is up until August: Dance to Belong: A History of Dance at 92NY: An 150th Anniversary Exhibition.

Everyone was lively while speaking and even while listening. I jotted down a few choice words I remember (I don’t have a recording so these quotes are not exactly verbatim):

Janet Eilber

Janet Eilber: “Some of Martha Graham’s company members were young women in revolution, like Jane Dudley and Anna Sokolow, who brought their own work to the Y.”

Dante Puleio

Dante Puleio: “José gave his dancers agency, not just the steps.”

Sylvia Waters

Sylvia Waters: “The first time I danced at the Y, it was with Hava Kohav, not Alvin. But I saw Alvin’s Blues Suite in his first performance at the Y in 1958, and it was like dessert. The Y was the place to be. I learned to schmooze at the Y.”

Doug Varone

Doug Varone: “Joan introduced the Y to an entirely new generation. When I was in residence there, it felt utopian.”

David Dorfman

David Dorfman: “The Y let you grow. Lucas Hoving taught us how to make a whole dance in a weekend.”

Ronald K. Brown talked about his mentor Mary Anthony, performing at the Y. Arcell Cabuag about rehearsing at the Y: “You’d back up to let the queens pass — Judith Jamison or Sylvia Waters.”

Arcell Cabuag has the mic

Yue Yin: “The Y helped me shape a fast-evolving thing into a technique called FoCo. It’s a blend of contemporary and Chinese, and now two dancers are certified to teach it.

Yue Yin

Omar Román De Jésus

Omar Román De Jésus: “You didn’t always have to do new work. You could look at old work and ask, What makes a work timeless? What makes you want to come back and see it again?”

Hope Boykin

Hope Boykin: “When you have a residency at the Y, you can pay dancers and show them you value them. You are allowed to fail, and they’ll still ask you back because you’re a good risk.”

Joan took that idea of good risk and applied it to the whole 90 years. Then, to wrap up, she asked for “popcorn” answers to the question of what words come to mind that relate to dance at the Y. Among the words that came up were courage, home, and inspiration. David Dorfman, hesitated and then said, “The Y helped me feel my Jewishness.” Thus bringing it back to the beginning, 90 years ago, when William Kolodney, a German Jewish immigrant, believed he could give young people culture and community through the 92nd Street Y.

The whole panel while Yue Yin speaks

General gratitude to the Y chair of the board, Jody Arnhold, and author Naomi Jackson, who wrote the essential book Converging Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y. 

I loved Carolyn Brown’s book so much when it came out in 2007 that I gushed about it on dancemagazine.com. Now that she has passed away, I’m feeling a great loss and am re-posting it here.

Carolyn Brown and Merce Cunningham rehearsing Suite, 1972, with John Cage at the piano, photo James Klosty

Ashley Bouder and Gilbert Bolden in Firebird, Bouder’s Farewell, ph: Erin Baiano

With the farewell of Ashley Bouder last month, I realize that she is the last of a cluster of brilliant ballerinas I admired at NYCB some years ago. I happened to come upon this review that I wrote of the Winter Season in the May, 2007 issue of Dance Magazine. As I look back, I see that all the principals I describe here have gone on to leadership positions, and the soloists I named at that time have stepped up to be NYCB royalty.

Winter Season, NYCB, Jan. 3–Feb. 25, 2007
Dance Magazine, May 2007

Janie Taylor and Craig Hall in Afternoon of a Faun. This and subsequent photos by Paul Kolnik.

In a season of 38 ballets, the dancing of NYCB’s women came to the fore. In both familiar and new roles, the female principals blossomed into their full ballerina glory. Janie Taylor gave Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun an outsize sensuality that was mesmerizing…

Ashley Bouder, every inch a creature of impulse, put the fire back in Firebird. She exuded power, she shimmered and shattered the demons. And yet at the end she revealed a certain sadness…

Jenifer Ringer and Philip Neal in Sleeping Beauty

Jenifer Ringer was a burst of innocent joy as Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, and oozed glamour as the woman in black in Balanchine’s Vienna Waltzes …

Wendy Whelan in
Mozartiana

Wendy Whelan, slow as a floating cloud, light as air, imbued Balanchine’s Mozartiana with a celestial  presence…Jennie  Somogyi, jazzy and juicy, had a thrilling physicality in the master’s Symphony in Three Movements. Her Lilac Fairy ruled Sleeping Beauty with such expansive benevolence that I wished she could come and bless my household too…And there was something inexorable about the swooping and soaring of Sofiane Sylve, as dazzling as her crown in Balanchine’s Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2.

Among the men, Damian Woetzel was superb, more than superb, in A Suite of Dances, the solo Robbins made for Baryshnikov in 1994. He graciously communed with Ann Kim, the onstage cellist playing Bach. Mischievous and nonchalant, he slipped slyly from earthy folk steps into whizzing multiple turns. He was a welcoming host, virtuoso technician, and wise-guy adolescent all at once.

The soloists, who danced lead roles as often as the principals, were less dependable. We saw a lot of Teresa Reichlen, Sterling Hyltin, Abi Stafford, and Tiler Peck. Hyltin tends to overdo and is weak in her center but was fun and flirty in Martins’ Jeu de Cartes and elegant in Feld’s Intermezzo No 1. Stafford tends to have more determination than flow; however she loosened up in Walpurgisnacht Ballet. In Mauro Bigonzetti’s In Vento, Peck was gutsy in a brazen broken-limb solo and duet, but in Martins’ Friandises, she was a bit brassy. Reichlen’s lovely gentleness and fluidity graced many roles, but she could have used more crispness in the Agon clicking solo and more authority as the Lilac Fairy.

The sprightly Daniel Ulbricht and the full-bodied  Sara Mearns were the most consistent soloists. One of the best technicians in the company, Ulbricht bounded with unforced eagerness in all his roles. Mearns had warmth and allure in all of hers.

And some corps members stood out. Wide-eyed Tyler Angle breathed fresh air into classical roles with his ease, smoothness, and line. Stephanie Zungre teased and snapped her paws with expert comic timing as the White Cat in Beauty. Sean Suozzi boldly extended into space with strength and assurance, exemplifying the drama of black and white in Agon. And Kathryn Morgan was achingly lovely as the ingenue in Wheeldon’s Carousel (A Dance).

Slice to Sharp, with DeLuz in front

Choreographically, the highpoint of the season was Jorma Elo’s Slice to Sharp. One of four ballets repeated from last spring’s Diamond Project, it takes NYCB’s non-narrative tradition and rockets it into the future. With its sheer momentum, veneer of anarchism, and a semaphoric code language that lent a touch of mystery, it blows away the orderly lines of both Petipa and Balanchine. Using centrifugal force, it sends the dancers spinning and hurtling through space off-kilter. There are daredevil slides along the floor, windmilling arms, jutting pelvises, big wheeling lifts, a lot of “open sesame” hand moves—the whole piece is a magic carpet ride. The motif of touch-reaction—or rather near-touch-guess-the-reaction—makes it seem like invisible strings tie one action to another. A man touches a woman’s waist and her knees knock inward. A woman whips her leg and just misses the chest of a man in a backbend. Facing upstage with her hand behind her neck, Maria Kowroski slithers her head sideways and back into place behind her hand. It’s a bit of fun voguing, one of many small surprises that spill out and make you keep your eyes peeled. The men dance to the hilt, especially Edwaard Liang and Joaquin De Luz, who dive into their partnering and crazy pirouettes.

The one premiere, Christopher d’Amboise’s Tribute, in honor of Lincoln Kirstein, has clear structures, a gentle humor, and old-time chivalry (lots of bowing and curtsying). Embedded in it are quotes from famed Balanchine ballets, like the sudden opening into first position of Serenade, and the bent-knee jump the men do on the first notes of Agon. It ends with a beautifully spooling pas de deux for Bouder and Tyler Angle. She dances with delicacy and authority, and he really seems to care about her. Twice, she leaps and he assists her mid-leap before taking her for a big lift. You can hear a collective sigh from the audience when they go whirling off.

The major revival was Robbins’ Dybbuk (1974), which seems to be about a wronged couple facing society—or at least a posse of rabbis. (A dybbuk, in Jewish folklore, is a lost soul, a spirit of the dead whose voice enters the body of a living person.) Seven men in black with caps could be cousins of  the bottle dancers in Fiddler on the Roof. However, the hieroglyph-like backdrop by Rouben Ter-Arutunian gives it a mystical tinge. The Bernstein score, with its vocal sections à la Stravinsky’s Les Noces, emphasizes community and ritual. The high-point is an entwining duet for Ringer and Benjamin Millepied, as though to get under each other’s skin. But never does the ballet have the power of the original play, The Dybbuk, by S. Ansky, in which the  voice of Leah’s dead lover possesses her—two tormented souls in one body.

Russian Seasons with Albert Evans, Rebecca Krohn, John Stafford, and Rachel Rutherford, ph John Ross

Another popular holdover from the Diamond Project was Alexei Ratmansky’s Russian Seasons. With long, bright-colored dresses, it has a folksy charm. There is a wonderful twisty solo for Albert Evans (it’s good to see him move), and for Sean Suozzi a fine solo with sudden jumps. There are funny touches, as when two crouching men, their shirts riding up in back, pull their shirts down in unison. Jenifer Ringer has a nice playful solo and a poignant scene where she walks on a path in the air made by the men’s hands. But some moments are hokey, like dancing  in a line-up that looks like a bunny hop. It has the quaint feel of a work from long ago, like, say,  Sophie Maslow’s The Village I Knew (1949). More intriguing was Ratmansky’s Middle Duet, performed only once, on opening night. In that brief sketch, with haunting music by Yury Khanon, Maria Kowroski’s elegant attention to simple tendues was somehow transporting.

Mostly, the Balanchine ballets provided the perfect setting for the dancers to shine. But a few of them, for example, Monumentum pro Gesualdo, Duo Concertant, and Stravinsky Violin Concerto, may be losing some of their appeal. There are those who argue that these ballets are no longer performed well by City Ballet. However, I feel that choreographically they represent a time gone by, a time of orderliness and politeness. Ballets that slice through that remoteness (other than Slice to Sharp) are the atmospheric ones: Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun, Martins’ staging of Sleeping Beauty,  Wheeldon’s darkly glamorous Klavier, the Balanchine/Robbins Firebird, Bigonzetti’s In Vento, and Balanchine’s Vienna Waltzes. These ballets pull you into a different world and make you care about the characters. When they are over, you feel nourished by the art, sated with the fullness of people dancing.

Some updates, as of March 1, 2025: Wendy Whelan is Associate Artistic Director of NYCB; Janie Taylor is Artistic Director of Colburn Dance Academy in L.A; Jenifer Ringer (the previous director of Colburn), now teaches at SAB; Maria Kowroski is at the helm of New Jersey Ballet; Edwaard Liang is Artistic Director of The Washington Ballet; Joaquín De Luz stepped down after five years as Artistic Director of Compañía Nacional de Danza. Benjamin Millepied is founder/director of L.A. Dance Project. Jennie Somogyi runs the Jennie Somogyi Ballet Academy in Pennsylvania. Sofiane Sylve leads Ballet San Antonio. Damian Woetzel is President of Juilliard. All this makes me wonder where Ashley Bouder will land in the near future.

This list is subjective; it reflects my taste as well as that of the writers represented here. It is not in any particular order. Please feel free to comment below or suggest your favorite dance book of the year. Btw, sometimes a books is released too late in the season for me to catch up, in which case I try to consider it the following year…. Enjoy.

Edges of Ailey (exhibition catalog)
Edited by Adrienne Edwards; contributions by Horace D. Ballard, Harmony Bench, Kate Elswit, Aimee Meredith Cox, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Malik Gaines, Jasmine Johnson, Joshua Lubin-Levy, Uri McMillan, Ariel Osterweis, J. Wortham, CJ Salapare, Kyle Abraham, Claire Bishop, Masazumi Chaya, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Jennifer Homans, Judith Jamison, Sylvia Waters, Jamila Wignot, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.
Whitney Museum of American Art, distributed by Yale University Press
Reviewed by Robert Johnson

Though it threatens to up-end the coffee table, the catalog of the Edges of Ailey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art is a handsome volume that every fan of the late choreographer and his Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will be proud to own. Looking gold-plated in its foil dust jacket, this tome also contains a plethora of gorgeous illustrations. It supplements the checklist of the exhibition with exciting dance images not displayed at the Whitney, with commissioned essays, a list of Ailey’s own choreographies, an annotated chronology (up to 2014), and a rollcall of company dancers through 1989.

Editor and curator Adrienne Edwards and a team of researchers have plunged into the company’s archives and have retrieved amazing documents that illuminate the choreographer’s dreams, his personal struggles, and his success. Yet the magnitude of Ailey’s achievement becomes apparent, when we realize that this scholarship still falls short. Neither the exhibition nor the catalog provides a comprehensive account of the AAADT’s repertoire. While complaining that dance critics have not always recognized this repertory’s worth, the curators themselves slight the dances at the heart of this enterprise. Strangely, the catalog also fails to acknowledge the AAADT’s achievements after the founder’s death. Do not search the chronology for subsequent milestones like the opening of the company’s state-of-the-art home, or the premiere of Ronald K. Brown’s Grace.

Edges of Ailey also illustrates the curious position of American artists and intellectuals in a democratic culture that prioritizes material success. Our intellectuals and the public regard each other with mutual disdain. In his foreword to the catalog, Whitney Museum director Scott Rothkopf acknowledges that AAADT’s “broad popular appeal” delayed the troupe’s recognition by high-brow institutions like the Whitney. Does this elitism explain why the current exhibition sidesteps the dances?

Status anxiety erupts spectacularly in the catalog’s use of language. While the exhibition’s text panels address the public lucidly in English and Spanish, readers will find most of the catalog essays written in the hieratic style of a caste of scholar-priests. Don’t forget to bring your Phd decoder ring! Among the best of these essayists, Ariel Osterweis analyzes Ulysses Dove’s ballet Episodes. Intensity underscores the value of each passing moment in Episodes, where the dancers’ virtuosity suggests bravado and defiance in the midst of AIDS. In an affecting memoir, dancer Aimee Meredith Cox describes her personal growth, finding her identity in the abstraction of Ailey’s Streams.

Evidently, the Great Man theory of history is out of fashion; so, Edges of Ailey portrays the choreographer through the filter of Black and Queer society. Yet Ailey’s colleagues recall him as a hero. Pursuing what he described in his notes as a “romantic vision,” and cannily attuned to the taste of the American public, this exceptional artist embraced a life of risk and sacrifice to bring Black bodies and Black culture into the mainstream. He carried hundreds of his fellow artists on his broad shoulders. Now the museum crowd wants to hitch a ride, he’ll carry them, too. Mr. Ailey can carry them all.

Jill Johnston in Motion: Dance, Writing, and Lesbian Life
By Clare Croft
Duke University Press

The Essential Jill Johnston Reader
By Jill Johnston, edited by Clare Croft
Duke University Press

Reviewed by Elizabeth Zimmer

These are just such good books; I am boggled by them.

Born in 1929, Jill Johnston was the oldest of the phalanx of female dance writers who turned the field into a matriarchy beginning in the 1960s. Clare Croft, a professor at the University of Michigan, has clearly fallen in love with both Johnston and what she meant to the feminism of the period. Her two recent books document the story of a transformation, of an era Johnston spent in a “bewilderness,” recording and communicating the ripest work of the “dance boom” now behind us, and strategies for living as an “out” lesbian.

As a youngster Johnston, born out of wedlock as a result of an affair her mother had at sea, was sequestered in Queens with her grandmother while her embarrassed mom worked as a nurse in Manhattan. She began dancing in college and came to New York City to study with José Limón, but a broken foot diverted her into writing, first for Martha Graham’s collaborator Louis Horst and then originating dance coverage at the city’s fledgling alternative weekly, the Village Voice.

I basically owe Johnston my career; she carved a niche for dance at the Voice that Deborah Jowitt filled when Johnston moved on to writing about her own life and the political moment. I inherited the editorship of Jowitt and other Voice dance writers at the death of Burt Supree. Johnston’s observation in a 1970 Voice column, quoted on page 35 of The Essential Jill Johnston Reader, shaped my decision to enter the field: “…I never actually realized that dancing is the only organized cultural institution in which women are preeminent; nor that the reason for this is rooted in attitudes toward the dance as a frivolous entertainment in which a lady is encouraged to exhibit her charms, her grace and deportment, her bodily attributes, her seductive powers, in the formally sanctioned theatre of a man’s license for approved general voyeurism.” This sentence comes at the top of a column that occupies more than three entire pages in the Reader, and consists of one paragraph.

Johnston was as enraptured with contemporary art and artists (and poetry: a whole section of Jill Johnston in Motion is devoted to her identification with the work of surrealist Guillaume Apollinaire) as she was with dance. Croft compares her place in American culture with that of Susan Sontag, who was much more circumspect about her sexuality than Johnston.

Anyone who dances, thinks about dance, or writes about dance should read Croft’s book, and simultaneously take to bed the Reader, a collection of Johnston’s legendary pieces. As well as containing in full most of the work that Croft can only reference in JJinM, it has a 31-page appendix listing everything Johnston published from 1957 until 2007, including eleven books and hundreds of articles in places like Louis Horst’s Dance Observer, ARTnews (as many as 18 reviews a month!), Art in America, and the American Poetry Review. Johnston wrote during the golden age of print journalism, when it was possible to earn a decent living with your pen. A literary star who once described herself as “an asteroid,” she was also a political pioneer, a feminist annealed in the ferment of the ’60s and ’70s. Her prose, like her body, was in constant motion; she paid attention to the size and shape of sentences and paragraphs, and her ideas galloped down the page. She’d visit you and hang from the rafters in your loft, interrupt a boring speech by jumping into your pool. At every level, she made news.

Errand Into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham
By Deborah Jowitt
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Reviewed by Ellen Graff

In this exciting and evocative new biography, Deborah Jowitt takes us into the maze of Martha Graham’s world. She begins with the earliest influences of family and continues through her experiences with Denishawn, performances in the Greenwich Village Follies, early experiments at the Eastman School, and her first independent choreography. She chronicles the arc of Graham’s choreography, beginning with works inspired by American themes such as American Document and Appalachian Spring, the turn towards literary themes with Deaths and Entrances and Letter to the World, the Greek cycle with dances such as Night Journey, Cave of the Heart, and the epic Clytemnestra, and finally her own role as a creator in the playful Maple Leaf Rag.

Her descriptions reveal a deep understanding of the richness of Graham’s movement, in its force, in its evocation of feeling, and its connections to memory. Describing Letter to the World, she writes, it was “the first dance in which Graham tried to portray in a group work the inner landscape of her protagonist, the first time her heroine relived events or sensations in memory.” With Letter to the World, she continues, “Graham experimented with mingling past and present, the real and the imagined, and [Emily] Dickinson and herself as dedicated artists.” Jowitt has time for humor, too, as she recounts Graham playing Miss Hush on the radio show “Truth and Consequences” and being lampooned in an illustration for a 1934 issue of Vanity Fair.

Errand into the Maze takes the reader on a journey through the cultural landscape of the twentieth century as Graham explored the depths of her own creativity. Through Jowitt’s clear and insightful writing, we come to understand Graham as a force within a wider cultural world, influenced by changing constructs at the same time that she is instrumental in creating change.

Note: Ellen Graff, a former Graham dancer and author of Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928-1942, once danced with Deborah Jowitt in a work by Pearl Lang. In the 1980s, Graff was a student of Jowitt’s in NYU’s Department of Performance Studies.

The Swans of Harlem
By Karen Valby
Pantheon Books
Reviewed by djassi daCosta johnson

In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s novel about the ways that racism has colored the Black experience, he writes “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” The new book, The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History, is one of the many recent attempts to make visible the unsung accomplishments of Black artists within American culture.

In 2020, writer Karen Valby became privy to a gathering of five Black women in Harlem who began meeting weekly as the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council. Prompted by the pandemic and the Great Uprisings following the killing of George Floyd, they gathered to remember, share, and celebrate their lives as unsung pioneers in the ballet world.

The women— Lydia Abarca, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Marcia Sells, and Karlya Shelton-Benjamin—were founding members of the Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH), the groundbreaking company co-founded by Arthur Mitchell in 1969 as a haven for Black ballet dancers. Grateful for the roads they paved but frustrated by the labeling of Misty Copeland as the “first Black principal ballerina,” they came together to resurrect their stories and ensure that future internet searches for Black ballet dancers would include their accomplishments.

These women have collectively accomplished an epic number of firsts. Abarca, who shone in Balanchine’s Bugaku and Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun, was the first Black ballerina to grace the cover of Dance Magazine. Sells was the youngest founding member in the company at 15; after DTH she earned her BA at Barnard, obtained a law degree, and was recently the first chief diversity officer for the Metropolitan Opera. At the age of 17, Shelton-Benjamin was the first Black dancer to represent the United States in the Prix de Lausanne. McKinney-Griffith, an admired lead in Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco and Louis Johnson’s Forces of Rhythm, became the first ballet mistress for DTH. (Sadly, she passed away a few months before the book was published.) Rohan was a mother of three when she was accepted into the company, a fact she kept secret from Arthur Mitchell for a whole year before he found out, telling her, “If I’d known you had mouths at home to feed, I would’ve paid you more!”

Valby respects each of the women’s achievements while uplifting their friendship and sisterhood. We get to feel their pride in being part of a movement larger than themselves, while not sugarcoating the difficulties faced, including the misogyny and verbal abuse under Mitchell that is characteristic of the patriarchal ballet tradition.

Swans lifts the veil of invisibility in a way that makes us ask, “How many more stories have gone untold and undervalued?” The author, along with the Swans, has given birth to an engaging read that brings long overdue attention to these pioneering Black ballerinas.

Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood’s Golden Age
By Brynn W. Shiovitz
Oxford University Press
Reviewed by Elizabeth Zimmer

On her book-signing tour, Brynn Shiovitz lectured on the book’s nominal subject, “a theory of covert minstrelsy.” But her actual subject is racism in American popular culture, from the earliest days of sound films until the mid-1950s. A small proportion of her material actually engages tap dancing, mostly revolving around Bill Robinson, who managed never to don blackface.

Shiovitz anatomizes the phenomenon of blackface as it migrated from the stage to the screen and from live performance to animated cartoons. She points out that the original “minstrels” were white men in blackface. Black people, often forced to “black up” by theatrical promoters, got into it to make money. She shows how blackface is associated with a kind of nostalgia that denigrates African Americans.

The author grew up tap dancing, studied at NYU and UCLA, and teaches in Southern California. She spent years screening 230 films to demonstrate the way that Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire coasted to fame, replacing the true Black masters of the Africanist esthetic. Also under her microscope are brownface, yellowface, redface, and Jewface, all strategies Hollywood used to “other” immigrant groups (as well as Native Americans). The denigrating aspects of blackface, which reduced an entire group of people to caricature, slipped under the radar of the Hayes Code of 1930, which was supposed to regulate the moral tone of popular entertainment.

The Catholic Church, the engine behind the Code, aka Motion Picture Production Code, demonized Black art forms like jazz and swing. This allowed white people to rip off the Africanist esthetic while Blacks were often deprived of credit, even when they appeared onscreen. Jazz music was painted as a slippery slide in the direction of sin. Blacks incarnated these things, were “tricksters,” and needed to be kept separate from white wives and daughters.

Both the visual and the sonic—and the animated as well as the “real”—were environments to be carefully monitored for implications of racial mixing. As Shiovitz notes, this rendered whites “the celebrated ventriloquists of an Africanist esthetic,” providing American audiences with a “close but safe encounter with the Other.” It also suppressed any representation of gayness (“pansy flavor”) and much female sexuality, but gave a pass to figures like Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, Jewish men who accrued fortunes and fame pretending to be Black.

Dance and film scholars and others awake to the damage of racism will find much value here. Those of us who escaped graduate school before the theory bomb exploded might find the proportion of her analysis devoted to tap dance a bit wanting, but younger readers might appreciate her deep dive into Bugs Bunny’s “techno-dialogic feats for the animated bestiary.” Animation technology, she asserts, replaces blackface in live action films of the early ’40s: “Much of what the [Hays] Code deemed unacceptable in live action film for the censors was excused when the representation was not ‘real.’” Shiovitz’s flaying of the racist content of American popular art forms in the 1930s and ’40s will change the way these works are viewed in the next millennium.

A longer version of this review appeared in 2023 here.

Simone Forti: Improvising a Life
By Ann Cooper Albright
Wesleyan University Press (discount code Q301 for 30% off)
Reviewed by Wendy Perron

This “review” is based on my endorsement blurb on the back of the book:
Simone Forti is a pioneering dance improvisor who crosses genres in ways that have opened up new possibilities. Ann Cooper Albright brings her own poetic insights to her subject in this beautifully written book, giving a deep sense of the deceptively simple, shape-shifting artist. It’s also a celebration of the kind of category-defying dance artists that abounded in the 1960s. The author has witnessed many Forti performances around the country, and she has quoted from Forti’s essential writings as well as from other sources (including my own essay). The reading experience is a contemplation that connects mind, body, and spirit. Many revelations, small and large, await the reader.

Pilobolus: A Story of Dance and Life
By Robert Pranzatelli
University Press of Florida
Reviewed by Robert Johnson

Dartmouth College, where Pilobolus debuted in 1971, was an unlikely birthplace for a dance company. Yet the unsettling spirit of the 1960s had infiltrated the Great North Woods. The radical times, as much as the place, enabled three youngsters in Alison Chase’s dance composition class—initially Moses (Robert) Pendleton, Stephen Johnson, and Jonathan Wolken—to pursue a wayward artistic vision. If Martha Graham’s dancers are the acrobats of God, then Pilobolus’ are the children of a peculiarly American Eden.

Robert Pranzatelli tells this tale well in Pilobolus: A Story of Dance and Life. At times, this author’s allegiance to the company gets in the way of objectivity, and he seems unaware of Pilobolus’ relation to the rest of the dance world. Yet he has made excellent use of unpublished material and has conducted many interviews enabling the artists to share their perspectives.

Given Pilobolus’ collective decision-making, the narrative often revolves around the dueling personalities who left their imprint on the work and left emotional bruises on each other. Yet Pranzatelli also describes those wonderful creations Alraune, Shizen, Pseudopodia, Untitled, and Day Two. A wise editor might have advised the author to cut the fan-boy passages and write more about the choreography.

Though he gamely signs up for movement workshops, Pranzatelli isn’t really a “dance person,” so it would be difficult for him to explain why Pilobolus ever felt the need to prove its pure-dance credentials with Sweet Purgatory (1991). He does not seem to appreciate that collaborating with Butoh artist Takuya Muramatsu is qualitatively different from collaborating with commercial choreographer/filmmaker Trish Sie; and Pranzatelli doesn’t see how the company’s technological experiments dovetail with larger trends. Enchanted by the company’s calendar art, he finds its essence in “wit and physical sensuality,” not in movement or design.

More happily, sparked by Pendleton’s idea that the history of Pilobolus is the history of America, Pranzatelli emphasizes the role of 1960s counterculture in shaping the company’s aesthetic. We read of free love, encounter groups, and “buttery baked soy logs.” Waving fields of marijuana plants give way to teddy bears stuffed with sacramental vegetables, and the dancers frolic naked in the rain. More could be made of the parallels between these hijinks and the tradition of American utopianism. The estrangement of the company’s founders is the fate of Hawthorne’s fictional Blithedale colony with bare asses.

What happened next is cautionary. Within a single lifetime, the America of “Alice’s Restaurant” gave way to the America of The Big Short, and Pilobolus seems to have become greedy. Techno-chic and vapid commercialism threatened to supplant the heroic, human-centered art of the early years. Yet the company’s core values were not so easy to discard. Pilobolus failed when it tried to sell out; and, since then, as executive and co-artistic director Renée Jaworski says, the troupe has been obliged to consider “where to hold onto…the quaintness of not being part of a giant, corporate entity.”

Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg
By Doug Fullington and Marian Smith
Oxford University Press
Reviewed by Mindy Aloff

Before “less is more” took hold as the mantra for art in the twentieth century, there was the goes-without-saying assumption that, as in Nature, more is more. The spectacles of nineteenth-century ballet, especially in France and Russia (whose ballet traditions were developed under strong French influences, imported by French choreographers going back to Jules Perrot, in the early 1850s) were built on this elemental basis.

In addition to actual body-to-body and brain-to-brain transmission of a ballet’s identity, the indispensable aide-memoires that made it possible for one or two individuals to transplant, say, Giselle’s medieval Germanic world onto the post-Romantic imperial theater of the tsar—and for régisseurs in ensuing decades to preserve at least enough of the work to maintain the just use of the title as new casts and crews came in—were written languages of notation. It is the contention of the authors of this astounding volume—a treasury of research, observation, and reasoning—that those languages not only can be read today in archival documents but must be for anyone who seeks to comprehend what made nineteenth-century ballet both magnetically popular and great art. This book—well-spoken, logically structured, gracious, and most experienced—will function as the sherpa for readers who even contemplate learning how to read and compare Stepanov’s notation against Justamant’s notebooks and then apply what they have learned to current productions of nineteenth-century ballets.

The five examples, all once choreographed in whole or in part by Marius Petipa—the Frenchman whose legacy overwhelms the story of ballet in Russia—are Giselle (on whose history Smith is considered to be an authority), Paquita, Le Corsaire, La Bayadère, and Raymonda. Fullington, mentored by Smith during his doctoral work at the University of Oregon, is a practiced reader of Stepanov notation. He and Smith collaborated with Peter Boal on Pacific Northwest’s Ballet’s historically informed production of Giselle and on PNB’s upcoming new production of The Sleeping Beauty. Fullington has also collaborated with Alexei Ratmansky on productions of the other four ballets, all recorded in Stepanov.

In the course of Five Ballets, Fullington and Smith make passionate cases for bringing back pantomime, character dancing, minor characters, faster tempos, and the tiny beaten and skimming steps those tempos once served, and, most of all, stage recreations of Nature in all its haunting and mysterious guises. Their book also acknowledges aspects of nineteenth-century productions they would prefer not to restore—racism, anti-Semitism, mocking of the aged. It’s a surprise to discover that August Bournonville—Petipa’s great contemporary in Denmark—is not even mentioned in the index, since his ballets—also spectacular and bursting with petit allegro, character dancing and so forth—appear to have evaded some of the more disagreeable aspects of ballet in the nineteenth century. The subject of another volume, perhaps?

Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study
Edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Annie-B Parsons
Wesleyan University Press
Reviewed by Morgan Griffin

They say, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” but forgive me, because before I have even unpacked this set of books I already love them: a collection of pastel booklets, with contrast colored string binding, parceled together by a thick bright turquoise rubber band. The introduction by Thomas F. DeFrantz outlines the proposal at hand, which he introduces as seemingly impossible. “After all,” he writes, “We make dances that vanish even as they materialize.” How to collectively decide what histories and stories matter most? How to write down something that is indescribable, maybe even forgotten?

In the following short stories, thirteen choreographers, dancers, movers, humans outline their versions of “dance history.” Each takes a different approach and form, yet almost all arrive at very similar conclusions. DeFranz describes a futuristic world, where dance and human connection live only via virtual platforms. Ogemdi Ude writes exclusively of her relationship with majorettes. Mayfield Brooks tells a fable about the beginning of time, and the early connections between plants, animals and humans as it relates to dance. Creating a kind of Lord of the Rings of dance, Annie-B. Parsons shares a pictorial chronicle of her dance history. Keith Hennessy’s account broke my heart and simultaneously healed it. Bebe Miller writes on personal moments in time that have shaped her, while struggling with how to “remember remembering.” I find each little book captivating, in both its writing and its form. The words and images are like choreography, and as a reader my eyes and fingers move in a dance across the pages. I find myself clutching my heart, nodding my head, exclaiming out loud…dancing.

Despite their differences, there are many ideas that recur throughout the series: dance as ritual, dance since the beginning of time, the dance of nature, the idea of memory, lists of choreographers who inspired each author (many overlapping), the importance of human contact, human gathering, community, and the passing down of dance through embodied practice. The most striking similarity perhaps is the inability to capture the history of dance at all. Maura Nguyên Donohue writes that “The struggle with writing a dance history is a struggle with time.” And there seem to be even more struggles to follow. Who decides what is important? Andros Zins-Browne rightfully claims that dance histories are inevitably more about the authors who write them, than the dances themselves. How can you write the unwritable? After seeing an influential performance, Okwui Okpokwasili writes, “I can’t find a single word for what I am witnessing or what is happening in my body.” How can you capture a history that is ever evolving? History is now. Similarly, “dancing is living.” And so the task at hand remains beautifully impossible. These small pastel books are more like love letters to dance, to our dancestors, to our dance community, to the never-ending struggle, to the magic, to the impossibilities, to the now. Dance history remains indeterminable. Memory is fleeting and fickle. Dance is extremely personal. Dance is inherently universal. Dance is impossibly indescribable. And yet dance is forever.

Books received or announced

Body Impossible: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Virtuosity
By Ariel Osterweis
Oxford University Press
Body Impossible theorizes the concept of virtuosity and queer Black masculinities in contemporary dance through a study of the career of dancer Desmond Richardson.

The Simonson Legacy
By Jeanne Donohue
BookBaby
A coffee table biography of Lynn Simonson, creator of Simonson technique, which incorporates somatic practice in the teaching of jazz dance.

Meredith Monk: Calling (exhibition catalog)
Edited by Anna Schneider, Beatrix Ruf, Peter Sciscioli, Haus der Kunst, München, Hartwig Art Foundation.
Essays about the work of national treasure Meredith Monk. Contributors include Hilton Als, Bonnie Marranca, Meredith Monk, Louise Steinman, Björk, Carla Blank, Theo Bleckmann, Ping Chong, Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Ann Hamilton, Lanny Harrison, Pico Iyer, Joan Jonas, Alex Katz, John R. Killacky, Ralph Lemon, Bobby McFerrin, Bruce Nauman, Shirin Neshat, Ishmael Reed, Alex Ross, Peter Sciscioli, Anne Waldman, and John Zorn
Hatje Cantz

Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy
By Halifu Osumare
University of Florida Press
Osumare’s earlier memoir, Dancing in Blackness, was chosen as the lead book in our Notable Dance Books of 2018. About the current book, Library Journal says this: “Osumare gives readers a deeply personal look into her world as a dancer, choreographer, scholar, professor, activist, and all-around powerhouse. . . . Part self-reflection and part love song to Dunham, this book is a triumphant look at a dancer’s second act as a scholar.”

Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from National Center for Choreography
Edited by Tony Lockyer
University of Akron Press

Core Connections: Cairo Belly Dance in the Revolution’s Aftermath
By Christine M. Sahin
Oxford University Press
“Investigates marginalized women’s corporeality as a complex site of power as it takes readers through a diverse dance landscape spanning from Nile cruising tourist boats to Pyramid Street cabarets.”

Balanchine and Me: Be Relevant, Not Reverent
By Peter Martins
Academica Press

Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria
By Shayna M. Silverstein
Wesleyan University Press
From the back of the book: “The author shows how dabke dance music embodies the fraught dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationhood in an authoritarian state.”

Kinethic California: Dancing Funk & Disco Era Kinships
By Naomi Macalalad Bragin
University of Michigan Press
From the website: “Explores the making of black social and vernacular dance in the 1970s, precursor to today’s global hip hop/streetdance culture.”

Performing the Greek Crisis: Navigating National Identity in the Age of Austerity
By Natalie Zervou
University of Michigan Press
Quoting Ann Cooper Albright: “The beginning focus on the ‘body in crisis’ is a powerful entry point into a discussion of contemporary Greek dance, a topic that warrants more exposure within an international context.”

The lavish, dreamlike vision of Shen Wei graced the David Koch Theater last weekend. Co-produced by the China Arts and Entertainment Group (CAEG) and American Dance Festival, Dongpo: Life in Poems melds Shen Wei’s swirling choreography, spectacularly multileveled sets, and otherworldly costumes into a magical experience.

All photos courtesy of CAEG

The show loosely depicts the journey of Song Dynasty poet Dongpo (1037–1101) in six acts. It’s a lifelong journey, filled with wonder and sorrow—but no wars, no famine. This was a journey of peace, of honoring nature, and of self-reflection. Like Dongpo, Shen Wei is an artist of multiple roles: choreographer, painter, playwright, director, and poet. Throughout the many changes of mood and scene, Shen Wei has sustained a visual experience of exquisite beauty.

I offer here, not a review, but notes on some of the elements that contributed to the aesthetic wonder.

The journey: It began with a sole figure, perched high up behind a scrim of a sketch of bamboo. Facing to the right, he walks slowly, setting out on a journey. We see a map that is crisscrossed many times, presumably to the places Dongpo traveled to. After many dreamlike adventures, it ends the same way, with the man having moved only a little further toward his destination.

Telling the story: Lead dancer Su Peng appears in a circle of light, also high up. With his skin painted white, he seems to absorb light as his arms and spine move in circular pathways…a lunar being calling out his story. With mesmerizing fluidity, Su Peng is telling the story and being the story at the same time.

The illusions: The dancers are sometimes lifted into the stratosphere of the stage space. At one point, nine men in three rows stage left and nine women in a circle stage right appear as glowing blue paintings floating in the air. Even when they start moving, it seems like they may be films and not people. But they are indeed alive, which is only discernible when the men step ultra-slowly across the space to infiltrate the women’s circle. This kind of illusion is, of course, accomplished by the lighting designer, Xiao Lihe, who has studied with Jennifer Tipton!

The music: The performance alternated between a recording of Western-sounding orchestral music composed by Chen Qigang, and a live Guqin player, Zhao Xiaoxia. The traditional Guqin is a seven-stringed plucked instrument that sounds a bit like a dulcimer. In one scene, an operatic voice lets loose, veering toward a Meredith Monk–style looping and ricocheting.

The 23 dancers: Members of China Oriental Performing Arts group and Meishan Song and Dance Theatre, the dancers all have a formality that enabled them to guide us on this ceremonial journey. They executed Shen Wei’s choreography of whipping circles and extended lines with great flourish while keeping a sense of being close to nature. Su Peng commanded the stage with every gesture. I learned later that these dancers have never done contemporary dance before!

The costumes. Some of the costumes had a magnificent sculptural quality. In Act IV, a series of moving sculptures trudge onto the stage…large indecipherable statues in pale pastels. Each sculpture turned out to be two entwined people wearing voluminous skirts. This was a slow march of otherworldly figures.

Another aspect of the costumes: In Act I, the men and women wore the same red unitards, and later they wore the same blue tunics over burgundy leotard and tights. Considering the highly gendered presentation of most Chinese Classical Dance—and most ballet and modern dance too—this decision was refreshing.

The humor. To break with the ceremonial quality, a series of wheeled devices crossed from stage right to stage left: first a kind of rickshaw, then a bicycle, then a scooter, and finally a skateboard. Later, one person whizzed down a skateboard ramp. A little history of wheels in two minutes!

The tangled cloud: In a clever animation, a hand quickly drew brush-strokes, first in one color ink, then another. What looked at first like Chinese letters turned into a cluster of tightly intersecting curved lines. In the next scene, this little tangle became a cloud overhead that slowly passed from stage right to stage left before disappearing.

The poetry. Shen Wei chose a few fragments of Dongpo’s thousands of poems to appear on the scrim. They seemed to be mostly about time passing and an affinity with nature. I caught these lines:
• “A new fire to brew fresh tea will set our minds at peace.”
• “Even if we met you might not know me so frayed; my face is covered with dust; my hair is grayed.”
• “May all of us far apart be blessed with longevity, So that we can forever share the moon’s beauty.”

Looking ahead: With the magnificent Dongpo: Life in Poems still in my mind’s eye, I look forward to re-seeing Shen Wei’s signature piece Map (2006), as part of Spring Dances at Juilliard. Very different from Dongpo, Map has casual costumes and all the dancing on one level. But the intricate phrases and patterns accumulate a certain force over forty-five minutes. For a special pleasure, the Juilliard orchestra will play the accompaniment, Steve Reich’s Desert Music, live.