Rachel Straus - Dance Writer

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Juilliard Dance

 
Published: August 23, 2012
Category: history

Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival: A Dance Heritage Coalition Essay

by Rachel Straus

The Ted Shawn Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Photo by Nancy Tutko from the archives of Jacob’s Pillow

The dance of America will be as seemingly formless as the poetry of Walt Whitman, and yet like Leaves of Grass it will be so big that it will encompass all […]

Published: December 1, 2011
Category: history

Isadora Duncan: Mother of modern dance

Isadora Duncan

By Rachel Straus

The moment when Isadora Duncan throws her head back in ecstasy as she dances at the Theatre of Dionysus in Greece (preserved in the 1903 photograph above) captures Duncan’s archetypal performance qualities: supple, improvisatory, transcendent. Arguably the most important American-born dance artist of the early 20th century, Duncan forged her […]

Published: September 1, 2007
Category: profile

Margaret Tracey: School Administrator

By Rachel Straus

Margaret Tracey’s rise from New York City Ballet corps dancer to principal came in five swift years. In the ensuing 11, the Colorado-born redhead performed some 30 Balanchine ballets, earning a reputation as a technical artist of inspired effortlessness. In 2002, at age 34, she retired from the stage to devote […]

Published: August 1, 2007
Category: technique

Teacher's Wisdom: Luigi

By Rachel Straus

Luigi: “Even when you strike a pose, the movement goes on through the fingertips.”

Eugene Louis Facciuto’s first career as a lead dancer in Hollywood was destroyed at age 21 by a near-fatal car accident. His doctors predicted that the former child star wouldn’t emerge from his coma, let alone rise […]