Flashback: Brush Up Your Theater Lingo!
Though dance is ancient: older than speech, it is a playground for both the young and elderly. Adorning cave walls ahead of words, dance is an art both decorative and communicative–a secret code between slaves, a prayer to the gods for rain, a story played out on stage. Like any art, dance is a…
"Dance Foyer at the Opera," Degas
Flashback: Emma Livry, 1862
Ballet loves a tragic ingenue: Odette, Giselle, the girl in the red shoes–but the storied lives of its early dancers upstaged the roles they played. It’s hard not to romanticize the 19th century Paris Opera–Degas sketching the feathery dancers from his box above the flickering footlights–but offstage, the lives of his…