Archives for November 2008

If you've been reading Foot this week, you know I was dismayed to find that the "Dance" that "Reading Dance" offered wasn't as comprehensive or as timely as an anthology of this size--1,300-odd pages--would warrant. But on second thought (says our lady of second thoughts), if you just disregard the title and reorganize the contents, there turns out to be a good book inside the dubious … [Read more...]

What a bright soul. I didn't know Clive Barnes, but we smiled--he with his lovely wife, Valerie--whenever we encountered each other on the aisle, and I always read his reviews in the New York Post and his columns in Dance Magazine with delight. He was old without ever being an old fart. Curious, never immune to enthusiasm, but no pollyanna either, he gave me faith that even a review of a couple … [Read more...]

It was a labor of love: there would be no other reason to spend a decade sifting through thousands of pages of previously published work for this massive "gathering of memoirs, reportage, criticism, profiles, interviews, and some uncategorizable extras," as the subtitle puts it, in charming 18th century fashion. I was excited to discover the 1360-page tome in the slush pile at the women's magazine … [Read more...]

In dance, and even moreso in the subset of ballet, we don't possess such a supply of geniuses that we can afford to demote any of them to the merely good, or even to era-specific genius. So between the video testimonies that Baryshnikov, Agnes de Mille, and director Kevin McKenzie proffered to the soothsaying powers of Antony Tudor at American Ballet Theatre's celebration in his honor a couple of … [Read more...]

I just didn't believe it could happen--this,  our new First Family. I'd been calculating and recalculating the electoral votes since the beginning of October--you know, switching a NH for a CO, a Michigan for a Pennsylvania, etc., etc.,--and maybe by Monday, I'd arrived at a glimmer of hope: perhaps he could pull off 280 electoral votes. (Please, please.) But after the election of Bush for a … [Read more...]