Tag: Dance

Shadow-Dancing with Zadie Smith

There is a scene in Swing Time, the 1936 George Stevens musical that gives Zadie Smith her new novel’s title, in which Fred Astaire, through a series of comic mishaps, enrolls in a dance lesson with ...

Dancing on a Crowded Planet

Thirty dancers are barely enough to fill the shadow of the life-sized blue whale that hangs, mid-dive, in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Yet on ...

Harlem Flights

After all this time, we still have Harlem on our minds. Close to a century after the first waves of mass migration from the American South into uptown Manhattan, movements to, from, and around Harlem ...

Mysteryland

This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. “I have come here to lose the smog,” Joni Mitchell sings in her trademark falsetto, “and ...

Forgotten Woman

When we think of the ’30s film musical, we tend to picture Fred and Ginger gliding through the polished worlds of Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), and Shall We Dance (1937). Earlier in the ...

Translating The Magic Flute

When I got a call last year about translating a new Magic Flute libretto for an English-language production at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. The Magic Flute had ...