Margaret Fuhrer

During American Ballet Theatre's Metropolitan Opera House season, it's rare to see a dancer who is still a work in progress perform a leading role. The company can't afford to take risks when it needs to fill the cavernous Met every night. There's no time to test out dancers who...

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet has a repertoire full of "sock ballets," typified by the thin socks the dancers often wear to help them glide over the floor, but also by a general slipperiness. Fluid and changeable, they flatter dancers: Each beautiful position bleeds into the next one, so that mistakes...

Ballet galas can be disheartening affairs -- miscellaneous collections of orphaned pas de deux, presented with little concern for programming beyond projecting the least interesting, "ta-da" aspects of ballet to the (not actually) cheap seats in the back. But New York City Ballet tends to be more ambitious. At its...

Ivy Baldwin is a collector of steps. I imagine her gathering them the way a wine enthusiast amasses bottles, with an eye for quality and taste, storing them in the cool cellar of her mind to be retrieved and savored later. She finds them in other dances (the flattened, architectural...

A few years ago, photographer David Michalek filmed 43 dancers and choreographers with a high-definition camera. He projected the clips on giant screens at Lincoln Center. Each five-second segment was played in extreme slow motion, stretched out over 10 minutes. Collectively, they glorified the bewitching, bewildering intricacy of the dancing...

To American ballet fans younger than 35 or so, Sylvie Guillem is a mythical creature. We missed her years as the star of first the Paris Opéra Ballet and then the Royal Ballet. Later, when she stepped sideways into contemporary dance, her concerts rarely made it across the Atlantic.

Paul Taylor's greatest gift is shading -- adding a stroke of darkest charcoal to a brilliant moment, a sweep of white to a dusky one. His choreography reaches bright extremes, yet its strongest points are its murkiest ones. In Aureole, a Taylor masterpiece, four dancers skip happily through a brisk,...

"I'm interested in an irrational response to our perceived place in the universe."

So says choreographer David Neumann in his program notes for Restless Eye, which runs through April 1 at New York Live Arts. It sounds like an expression of cool scientific curiosity. But Eye isn't a polite...

The relationship between ballet and modern dance is at best uneasy. You might say they have trust issues. Ballet dancers tend to condescend to modern choreography, polishing the life out of it -- as in American Ballet Theatre's dead-on-arrival performances of Merce Cunningham's Duets last year. And many modern dancers...

Let's begin by acknowledging that Mark Morris is a genius. His best dances -- Gloria, L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato -- tug at us powerfully. He can align steps and music in a way that transports.

Like every great artist, Morris has had his share of flops. But...

New York City's Joyce Theater is a lovely venue, intimate and uncluttered. It's small enough to be a realistic option for touring regional ballet companies. But sometimes it feels as if these modest troupes are coming to the Joyce to audition for New York itself. Will they cut it in...

A chic crowd gathered at the Joyce Theater last Wednesday -- thin women in fat furs, chattering in French. It was the opening night of Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, and some of Monaco's legendary glamor seemed to have made its way across the ocean with the company.

Monaco:...

In 1982, choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones curated a project called Parallels. He asked eight black artists to make dances, hoping to explore whether the terms "black dance" and "post-modern dance" made any sense together.

Thirty years later, Houston-Jones is still exploring. Platform 2012: Parallels, the latest of Danspace Project's Platforms,...

It's never fun to be late to the party, especially a party thrown by the New York City Ballet and Christopher Wheeldon. I missed the premiere of the company's first "All Wheeldon" program, a set of three ballets -- including one new, and one new to New York -- by...

Ballet lovers (and dancers) know it well: the Nutcracker threshold, that moment in early January when another visit to the Land of Sweets might kill you. But New Yorkers are lucky: They have New York City Ballet's winter season to revive them from the sugar crash. You could sense the...