19 stories by "Joan Acocella"
Joan Acocella reviews the Broadway revival of "Carousel," at the Imperial Theatre, directed by Jack O'Brien and starring Renée Fleming, Jessie Mueller, Lindsay Mendez, Amar Ramasar, and Jos…
New York City Ballet and New York Theatre Ballet honor the choreographer's centenary.
"Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia" remembers the killing fields and the culture of the country through film, music, movement, and poetry.
For centuries, Joan of Arc has been used for political purposes, and that makes sense. Born in 1412, in the middle of the Hundred Years' War, Joan saw her country overrun"fields scorched, ca…
Of the choreographer Agnes de Mille it has been said that she was a better writer than she was a choreographer. That's not the way she planned it. She made twenty-one ballets and the dances …
Michael Flatley is retiring! This is terrible news. But you can see why he'd want to go home. He started Irish step dancing when he was eleven, as he was growing up on Chicago's South Side, …
Last month, as Mark Morris readied himself to bring the version of "The Rite of Spring" that he premièred in Berkeley in 2013 to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Times sent Marina Harss t…
Savion Glover is the greatest tap virtuoso of our time, perhaps of all time.
In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, all the greatest ballet choreographers of England and America died: George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins. Since then, ever…
On Friday, at the 92nd Street Y, Edward Henkel, the associate director of its Harkness Dance Center, will oversee a panel on the role of dance in opera—a tortured and exciting subject.…
Rennie Harris has said that he never really liked most of the work that he choreographed. That is a minority view. Harris, age fifty, is the most respected—and, to my knowledge, the mo…
Russia was ground zero of the revolution in theatre in the early twentieth century. Meyerhold, Tairov, Stanislavski, Nemirovich-Danchenko: they shot off rockets year after year. Under the U.…
At the turn of the century, both troupes faced the disaster that eventually comes to any modern dance company. The founder, the maker of the repertory, the creator of the technique, dies. Gr…
paragraph class="noindent">“If it is possible for a life to change at one given moment,” Agnes de Mille wrote, “then my hour struck at 9:40, October 16, 1942. Chewing gum, …
Merce Cunningham, incontestably the grand master of modern dance—and the man by whom it was converted, belatedly, to modernism—died two and a half years ago, at the age of ninety…
Austin McCormick, the director of Company XIV, says he takes his inspiration from the spectacles staged at the court of Louis XIV, but there may be some Aubrey Beardsley in there, too. The t…
paragraph class="noindent">The movie “West Side Story,” which turns fifty this year, is not primarily about Tony and Maria. It’s about the city and immigration and gang war…
When Mikhail Baryshnikov became the director of American Ballet Theatre, in 1980, one of his dearest hopes was to add modernist works, that rarity in his homeland, to the company’s rat…
New York City Ballet is running a deficit of about five million dollars, on an operating budget of sixty million, and, as young people brought up on YouTube and Facebook come to rely less on…
