Holding the Threads Together: Ballet Cymru at Forty
Leila Lois spends an afternoon in Newport to witness how a fiercely local, radically inclusive company is redefining classical ballet through the lens of Welsh heritage and contemporary bodies.
Latest
Aneta Parpouli on Flora & Oizys, a Dance Performance Built From Greek Myth and Depression
Filmmaker and choreographer Aneta Parpouli discusses how an obscure figure from Hesiod's Theogony became the framework for a multimedia dance performance exploring modern mental health.
What an Auditorium Full of Pakistani Farmers Taught Me About Dance
Naween A. Mangi spent twenty years working in rural Sindh and assumed farming communities had no use for dance. A choreographer's tour through small towns proved her wrong, and changed how she thinks about what "community development" means.
The Waltz I Cannot Stop
Maria Pickart can trace the shame historically, culturally, pedagogically. She has written papers on it. And then she walks into the studio, and the imagined audience assembles before she has taken a single step.
The Hired Body: Being Mary Kate(s)
Mary Kate Sheehan is a freelance dancer trained to be versatile, to embody any aesthetic, to deliver whatever the room required. In this essay, she traces what happens when that is no longer enough, and the long search for a dancing self that belongs to no one but her.
The Wind: A Dance Film Shaped by Landscape
A dance theatre work leaves the stage and enters the landscape. In mountains, beside waterfalls, on uneven ground, the body has to negotiate the world around it. Having seen both versions, Rainy J. reviews Ning Qiang's The Wind.
Against the Grain: How Mohsin Babar is Reclaiming Pakistani Dance After Decades of Neglect
"Dance chose me long before I chose dance." Choreographer Mohsin Babar on reclaiming Pakistani performance culture after decades of systemic neglect.
Latex, Breath, and Resistance: Inside Alice Ripoll’s Adorno
Dila Yumurtaci reviews Alice Ripoll's Adorno, finding that beneath a striking mass of balloons lies a brilliant, vulnerable study on how our ordinary choices reconstruct who we are.
'Nonstop Bodies': Against Isolated Geniuses
Rennie McDougall’s Nonstop Bodies strips the history of dance in New York away from the canon and hands it back to the streets. Next on our reading list.
Variations in Second Position, Sitting Down
In the Jardim da Estrela in Lisbon, transdisciplinary artist Myrna Renaud films her shadow as she moves through rehabilitation exercises on a park bench; second position reduced to what a broken wrist allows. The video and this text are the same work.
Rose Barbantan on What It Takes to Live in New York as a Dancer
What seven years in New York looks like, and what it asks of you
Gods, Monsters, and The Limits of Mastery at Melbourne's Dance Biennale
Leila Lois speaks to the artists of Melbourne's RISING Dance Biennale and reveals a programme that feels urgent, uncomfortably alive, and may have saved an important contemporary dance festival.
Opinion
Tutus Bring Joy to Nigeria While Dubai Swallows a Dance School in Senegal
What headlines reveal about institutional decolonization
Perspectives
Watch Me
By Loïc Magliano — A Pole Dancer on Cabaret, Theft, and the French-American Gaze
Features
Decipher
By Madison Vomastek — Madison traces her discovery of flow through two unlikely parallel, the hip-hop cipher and Forsythe's Improvisational Technologies, and finds the same thing at the heart of both: community, witnessing, and the freedom to be seen.
Reviews
Akram Khan’s Giselle: Ten Years Later, a Different Ballet That Has Grown Into Itself
By Will McGregor — The 19th-century village is gone. In its place: a concrete wall, factory light, and bodies that already know their place. Ten years on, Akram Khan's Giselle has grown into its own weight.
Essays
Memory in Motion: Oral History, Dance, and the Practice of Holding Space
By Carol Pierre — A relationship with a choreographer reveals oral history as embodied practice. Like dance, research arranges testimonies, holds space, moves through memory with narrators, and performs stories that transform audiences into witnesses of alternative realities.
Interviews
The Spectre and the Shih Tzu: Conversation with Gabriel Semerene
On dance floors lost and found, queer Palestine, languages that carry whole worlds, the slow burn of academia, and Mei, a blind Shih Tzu who knows more about love than most of us ever will.
Interviews
From Minuets to Algorithms: Conversation with Katja Vaghi
The Swiss-Italian dance scholar on Baroque notation, digital bodies, and finding wabi-sabi in a hectic life.
Reviews
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.
Reviews
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.
Short Reads
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.
Interviews
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.
Profiles
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."