From Minuets to Algorithms: A Conversation with Katja Vaghi
The Swiss-Italian dance scholar on Baroque notation, digital bodies, and finding wabi-sabi in a hectic life.
Latest
NYCB Winter Season Opens with Balanchine's Radiant Serenade and Sensual Prodigal Son
By Leila Lois — NYCB's opening night offered everything: the pure joy of Serenade, the frank sensuality of a rarely staged Prodigal Son, and the athletic brilliance of Paquita. Leila Lois travels from the Southern Hemisphere to see performances that honor ballet's full emotional spectrum.
Tango Finds Its Theatre at RSA House
By Will McGregor — David Chartoriski and Yelena Odintsova navigate tango's essential paradox: a dance born in intimate embrace that becomes magnetic when performed. At Sofar Sounds' RSA House, they made the case for both.
Flesh and Origami by Michael O’Connor
Michael O'Connor discovers that paper folding reveals that human bodies work as archives of evolutionary folds where dancing, writing, and speech cross over each other. Through experiments with nine artists, he shows that the body isn't metaphorically like origami. It is origami.
Continual Becoming: Alina Belyagina on Performativity, Collapse, and Feminist Dramaturgy
From West Siberia to Munich, Alina Belyagina has turned periphery into method. Her new work fuses vogue and Slavic folk dance to explore how bodies migrate between traditions and carry memories that discourse hasn't yet mapped.
Choreographing the Page: Lilia Di Bella on Structure, Flow, and the Reader's Experience
"‘I approached a Dance Mag's visual direction as a foundation, not a constraint,’ designer Lilia Di Bella said. In our conversation, she explains how she drew from her dance background to let shapes and colors flow through the pages, creating a space where "meaning is made together with the reader."
Can Photography Capture the Invisible Energies Moving Within Us?
Photographer Jennifer Lee Delić and dancer-fighter Rasmus Branders push against the limits of the camera. Using flowing fabrics and contrasts of light, their collaboration seeks to give form to the internal dance of masculine and feminine energy we all embody.
Dancing Beyond the Self by Tejaswini Loundo
Tejaswini Loundo moves through flow, ego-death, and the cosmic rhythm of Naṭarāja to ask what it truly means to dance beyond the self.
Bodies of Evidence: Sasha Portyannikova's Political Dance
In a country where protest is a crime, the dancing body itself becomes a site of resistance. Choreographer and researcher Sasha Portyannikova documents how artists under impossible conditions continue to create despite all risks.
Haunted Bodies & Minds by Vinícius Portella
The choreography of repression: a history of policing dance, from medieval plagues to Brazilian funk. An essay by Vinícius Portella.
Kalakeli: A Jungle Sanctuary of Movement and Play
Nestled in Goa’s jungles, Kala Keli is a dance retreat where movement becomes meditation. By day: contemporary, martial arts, and yoga in open-air studios. By night: bonfire circles and ecstatic beach dances. Here, rigor meets play and bodies remember their wild, joyful language.
The Rhythm of a Heartbeat: Karla Grotting on Choreographing Joy and Isolation in Whoville
Through the whimsy of Whoville, the choreographer reflects on jazz’s communal roots, the choreography of belonging, and what it means to dance joy into constraint.
Features
Zoë Bastin’s Dance with the Ocean’s Force in "The Break"
By Leila Lois — On Williamstown Beach, Zoe Bastin stages a choreography of defiance and endurance, where the waves echo the body’s refusal to be contained.
Features
A Match Made in Heaven: Conversation with Benjamin Hurley and Scott Elstermann
By Leila Lois — Mirror worlds, celestial themes, and tongue-in-cheek queerness collide as two dance artists create, Scenarios, their most ambitious collaboration yet.
Perspectives
When the Floor Kisses Back: Notes from a Life in Motion
By Melissa Jones — What happens when the body becomes both translator and translated? A mover's meditation on the sacred geography of studios, where flesh learns its own language through repetition, the ancient dialogue between effort and release.
Perspectives
The Choreography Wants: Learning to Listen in the Creative Process
By Sabrina Castillo Gallusser — Guatemala-based choreographer explores the shift from scientific planning to collaborative discovery in thirty years of dance-making.
Perspectives
The Physics of Letting Go
By Suzanne Fischer — On witnessing a paper performance at Munich's Brandhorst Museum.
Features
Gyung Moo Kim's Journey from Seoul Streets to Berlin Stages
From Seoul's hip-hop battles to Berlin's avant-garde stages, Korean dancer Gyung Moo Kim has built a career on embracing constraint and listening to what his body demand. His latest work emerges from a "retrocausal collaboration" that stretches across continents, and art forms.
Reviews
The Dance of Another: Dancing into oblivion in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018)
By Danica van de Velde — Luca Guadagnino's 2018 Suspiria weaponizes dance itself—where Argento's original used daggers, Guadagnino's pirouettes become instruments of destruction. Through Damien Jalet's visceral choreography, every movement embodies both creative force and annihilation.
Perspectives
A Guide to Becoming a Dancer in a Conservative Society
By Nerda Khara — In a country where dance is often misunderstood or discouraged, Nerda carves a path of quiet resistance—merging dance, ritual, research, and teaching to claim movement as a way of life in Pakistan.
Perspectives
Neapolitan Delight: Dancing Tammuriate Under Vesuvius
By Sonja Kieser — Under the shadow of Vesuvius, a golden-voiced goldsmith hosts a feast where tradition and trance collide. As drums pulse, strangers become one in the hypnotic rhythm of the Tammuriata—a dance where leading and following blur, and modern Italy rediscovers its ancient soul.
Features
Kartellet: The Norwegian Cartel Redefining Male Intimacy Through Dance
In a world where men rarely dance together—let alone hug—a Norwegian troupe is turning masculinity inside out. Meet The Cartel: where folk dance becomes wrestling, audiences become collaborators, and trust is the most daring move of all.
Features
In Touch with the Dead: In Pursuit of Tatsumi Hijikata
Choy Ka Fai's extraordinary journey from Singapore to rural Japan to the gates of the underworld in pursuit of an artistic collaboration that transcends death itself.
Perspectives
The Art of Being Touched by the Untouchable
By Sandra Aguado Mucientes — A cultural misstep in Scotland opens her eyes to the many ways we connect—from the physical closeness of Mediterranean culture to the soul-deep touching that happens through art and genuine human encounters.