Rachel Straus - Dance Writer

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Juilliard Dance

 
Published: August 20, 2013
Category: profile

Kyle Abraham at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival

PillowNotes

by Rachel Straus

The PillowNotes series comprises essays commissioned from our Scholars-in-Residence and others to provide audiences with a broader context for viewing dance.

Like the cinematically abrupt scene changes in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Kyle Abraham’s shifting dance portals in Pavement foster a dreamlike landscape. In his newest work, Abraham employs paradoxical moods […]

Published: August 7, 2013
Category: profile

Jessica Lang Dance at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival

PillowNotes

by Rachel Straus

The PillowNotes series comprises essays commissioned from our Scholars-in-Residence and others to provide audiences with a broader context for viewing dance.

When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound/A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,/It seemed that a dragon of air/Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round/Or hurried them off on […]

Published: August 3, 2012
Category: history

Royal Winnipeg Ballet at Jacob's Pillow

By Rachel Straus

Like the history of Jacob’s Pillow, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s evolution reads like a pioneer’s tale. Becket, Massachusetts and Winnipeg, Canada are not obvious places to build internationally hailed dance institutions. Yet in 1939, Gweneth Lloyd and her former pupil Betty Farrally formed the Winnipeg Ballet Club. A few years earlier, Ted […]

Published: July 26, 2012
Category: profile

Jessica Lang Dance at Jacob's Pillow

by Rachel Straus

“A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.” ~Emily Dickinson

In 2002 Jessica Lang opened a mysterious letter that was discovered in the office of Benjamin Harkarvy, the recently deceased artistic director of The Juilliard School’s dance division. The letter was five years […]

Published: August 24, 2011
Category: organization

Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival:

By Rachel Straus

The PillowNotes series comprises essays commissioned from our Scholars-in-Residence to provide audience with a broader context for viewing dance.

By the thousand slow revolutions of his body, he gives the appearance of a magician busy at obliterating the traces of his handiwork.— Jacques Rivière, “Le Sacre du Printemps”

The best magicians, and […]

Published: September 2, 2010
Category: history

Introduction to Lucinda Childs'

By Rachel Straus

When Dance by Lucinda Childs, Philip Glass, and Sol LeWitt premiered in Amsterdam in 1979, it drew immediate controversy. Glass heard one disgruntled audience member say, “This is not dance!” Others just hissed and booed. Given conventional expectations about dance performances in high art theaters, these responses weren’t surprising. It wasn’t the […]

Published: August 15, 2010
Category: profile

Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival: Kyle Abraham

PILLOWNOTES

by Rachel Straus

The PillowNotes series comprises essays commissioned from our Scholars-in-Residence to provide audiences with a broader context for viewing dance.

For someone so attuned to others’ inner lives, it was surprising to hear Kyle Abraham say, in a recent interview, “I don’t like to show my emotions on a social level.” But […]