Love, then.

Maggie is a dancer and choreographer; she teaches at a performing arts high school. She'd known for some time one of her colleagues, a musician, was into her, but she didn't think she wanted him; he wasn't what she was looking for. Still, he just kept coming...

To answer the question What is it like for dancers? I turn to Rae. Rae is a professional modern dancer. (A disclaimer: though sensuality pervades all dance, from here on out, I'll be talking primarily about Western and Westernized concert dance, as it is mostly in these forms that dancers...

When I was fourteen I read a review of Twyla Tharp's memoir Push Comes to Shove which included this excerpt about herself and Baryshnikov after a performance:

The party was much too crowded. We became restless. Outside, the evening was clear, the air warm; the moon lit the winding streets...

When people find out I'm writing about dance and money, they whisper bold-name stories off the record. I hear about poor-playing trust fund babies, rebels with golden parachutes. A friend uses her grant to pay off debt; the granting organization frowns. When the area's biggest dance patron walks into the...

A recent NPR Marketplace Money report cited $60,000 as a starting salary for ballet dancers. Where this number came from, unless it was abroad (where dancers are better paid) or the New York City Ballet, the top company in the U.S. (and one with a 52-week contract), I...

I've come to a conclusion about dance and money: if dancers did not sometimes sleep with rich people, American dance as we know it would cease to exist.

Absurd and degrading as this conclusion is -- can you imagine the same being said of any other art form? -- the...

February. Here in this northern city it's cold. Onstage you can still see dancers running barefoot in silky rags that flutter, revealing midriff, shapely shoulder mass, acres of straining thighs. They stretch arms open, generous, vulnerable, grasping at air; they spend their fire as if they might find something in...