Please Release Me

Healthy knees benefit from well-toned supporting muscles. A tight iliotibial (IT) band or quadriceps will pull excessively on the knee, says Houston-based physical therapist and former dancer Jennifer Romanek. Here are two foam-roller exercises she recommends to...

Performance Planner: A Fine Kettle of Fish

This year, take your show under the sea. Preballet students make adorable octopi. Tap students can be clams. Cast older dancers as mermaids in a lyrical number, or choose some jazzy tunes for a group of starfish. You’ll find that the ocean is full of fresh...

Face to Face: Matthew Rushing

Grooming the next generation of Ailey dancers Matthew Rushing This has been a year of big transitions for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: the naming of Judith Jamison’s successor, Robert Battle, the death of Ailey School director Denise Jefferson and longtime...

High Five with Becca Moore

Rhythm Dance Center performing at JUMP   RHYTHM DANCE CENTER Marietta, GA Co-directors: Becca Moore and Dani Rosenberg In business 17 years      What’s your studio’s philosophy? We’re a competitive studio, but we’re more focused on training diverse dancers and making...

The New Détente

Valentina Kozlova is a winning envoy to the grand Russian tradition. Valentina Kozlova demonstrates from Grand Pas Classique for her student, Veronica Verterich. In a studio with garnet red walls that evoke a belle époque parlor, Valentina Kozlova coaches 16-year-old...

Border Crossings

The Kids Excel program in El Paso inspires students in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Zulema Galindo teaching at Moises Soteno Elementary School in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico The audience sitting on the gymnasium floor of Western Hills Elementary School in El Paso, Texas, fidgeted...

Editor's Note

While planning this issue, it struck me with new clarity the way teachers are constantly pulled in two directions: You take class and you give class. So will you enroll for a workshop this summer or will you teach one? The 2011 Dance Teacher Summer Study issue offers...

News: A Monumental Culmination

It was a monumental undertaking, “the biggest, most complex version we have ever done,” said Merce Cunningham at the time. The remounting of Cunningham and John Cage’s Ocean in September 2008, at the bottom of Rainbow Quarry in Waite Park, 70 minutes northwest of...

News: Cynthia Gregory Coaches in Las Vegas

Former American Ballet Theatre star Cynthia Gregory is now artistic advisor to the Nevada Ballet Theatre and its affiliated academy. Her Cynthia Gregory Center for Coaching opened in October at NBT’s Las Vegas studios, where professional dancers, pre-professionals and...

News: An Audience with the Queen

Anne Walker, founder of U.K.-based International Dance Supplies Ltd., has received the prestigious MBE (Member of Order of the British Empire) from Queen Elizabeth. Walker, who as a dance teacher started making leotards for her students 35 years ago, today heads a...