Victor Barbee and Tatiana Ratmansky. © Gene Schiavone Isabella Boylston. © John Grigaitis.  I saw Ratmansky’s Sleeping Beauty in Orange County, New York, and Washington D. C. Each time, I found it engaging, delightful, and beautiful. And each time, even though it is a long ballet, it seemed to end too soon. This essay (published…

I began to notice how widely Giselle had traveled in the first decades of its existence, so I decided to look for specifics. (There is no Loewenberg catalog for ballets; there should be!) Much can be learned from this exercise. Most obvious finding: Giselle never left the repertory during the period in question.

I love dance, music, bodies in motion. Here are some of my publications. — Marian Smith (photo taken at the Theater Studies Collection at Wahn Castle, University of Köln, 2019)

Published in Ballet Review in 2019, this article examines Balanchine’s tenure at the Met from 1935 to 1938. My sources include Lincoln Kirstein’s diary, the Met scrapbook, a damning letter by Paul Cravath, and interviews made in the 1970s with dancers in Balanchine’s company. I argue that the Met had one set of goals for…

This is a chapter from the volume Rethinking the Sylph, ed. Lynn Garafola (Wesleyan University Press, 1997). Here, Lisa and I argue that national dance (now known more often as ‘character dance’) played a vital role in 19th-century ballet as one of three movement styles that dancers performed regularly, the other two being mime and…