Author Archives: jsl915@aol.com

Advertising campaigns by American Ballet Theatre’s Misty Copeland and Polina Semionova  — Do they presage a renewed recognition by fashion and commerce (after keeping ballet in the doghouse for quite a while) that ballet dancers are panachefully graceful, lithe and … Continue reading →

The humanities shouldn’t have anything to prove, but these days they certainly do. You sure don’t hear Obama or the education “reform” (privatization) technocrats talk about anything but math and science and tests for  same. All the more reason to … Continue reading →

A couple of days ago I listened again to act 1 of Solti’s 1968 Der Rosenkavalier, and the extraordinarily beautiful singing of Regine Crespin as the Marschallin. Today on youtube I watched Crespin step–and I do mean step–through the rauccous nonchalance of of “C’est … Continue reading →

Cold vector limbo in the south, droughts in California that threaten water supply, flooding in England. . . The deniers may be clinically rational, but nonetheless they are not in their right minds.

The Atlanta Ballet honors its artistic director emeritus at their annual Ballet Ball February 22 at Atlanta’s St. Regis. And at Ballet Review, we do some honoring of our own: my interview with Barnett is among the enticements of the … Continue reading →

Brian Beutler at Salon analyzes the big-megaphone media’s overwhelmingly distorted coverage of the CBO’s report on the way that Obamacare will free people from wage slavery in the pursuit of health care coverage.

Remember when I wrote about the 1916 flick The Dancer’s Peril for City Arts? That silent let then-Broadway star Alice Brady do her best to make us believe she was a ballerina.  And it also gave a lot of screen … Continue reading →

Dinner with Laura Jacobs last night. Almost out of the blue, she mentioned the 1932 movie Faithless and how moving Tallulah was in it. When I wrote Tallulah! I had to do almost a wholesale act of interpretative revisionism re: … Continue reading →

in The Guardian, Suzanne Goldenberg writes about Pete Seeger’s environmental activism.

January 31-February 4, the Film Society of Lincoln Center presents its annual Dance on Camera Festival.  There’s a great deal to see,  and a wide-open as well as wide-screen take on the subject.