#traditional-dance

#traditional-dance

The ballroom design features impractical elements like a stairway to nowhere and fake windows, emphasizing a focus on flashiness over functionality.

There's something powerful that happens when students step onto a stage and the entire community shows up for them. Events like this bring families, staff, and students together in a way that builds pride, connection, and a real sense of belonging.

Eshu's proverb tells both a story of reparation and of ancestrality by joyfully bending spacetime conventions and accessing subjects from the past with present actions.

All this to say that Alexander Whitley can harness the technology that so fascinates him, and equally importantly, that he fully understands, to enhance his primary vocation as a dance maker and produce bewitching work. Unfortunately, Mirror, and its companion piece The Rite of Spring, in the brand new double bill currently at Sadler's Wells East, proved major disappointments.

When I came to America I tried a lot of classes and 90% of them, even if a class was for beginner level, were really difficult. I was thinking, if I were a grown woman who just decided to start, I'm going to get trauma, it's so hard, it's so competitive, and I [said], I need to create something dedicated to women, without this pressure, without this judgmental vibe.

In Siegfried, the third part of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Richard Wagner shifts the focus away from the troubled world of the gods towards the energy of youth on earth. This is storytelling through opera, where the theatre is crucial and the music sublime.

President Trump overhauled the Kennedy Center's board last year, got himself elected chairman, and installed ally Ric Grenell as president. Then, in December, his handpicked board renamed the venue "The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts" - slapping his name ahead of JFK's on one of the country's most storied arts institutions.

First performed in 1910 by Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and adapted by George Balachine for New York City Ballet in 1949, Firebird was inspired by a Russian folk tale. The ballet tells the story of Prince Ivan, who captures the firebird, a creature who is part bird, part woman, and then lets her go.

With 'Dance Reflections,' the idea was to give back concretely to another discipline that still gives us a lot. It's the reason why 'Dance Reflections' is a sponsorship program, but also a curatorial program; that's quite rare for a brand to have.

I've been coming to the Art Series since 2022. The after-party is one of the most fun to go to, and tickets are a lower price than usual for ballets. A friend introduced me to it, and that's what I'm doing now-bringing a friend who's never seen the ballet before.

But instead, they find their way to a small studio, where they join 27 others in strapping on a pair of high heels and throwing themselves into two hours of dance moves. This is the beginners heels class at Vibe Dance Studio, which was started by Izzy Gonzales and her dad Ed four years ago. It's a place where people can show up exhausted, but end up with so much energy they don't want to go home.

Michelle Paulin dances while instructing youth at the Dulce Tricolor Venezolano dance group at the Ariel Dance Studio in Campbell on Jan. 25, 2026. Dulce Tricolor, a Bay Area Venezuelan dance group founded in 2019, teaches children traditional folk dances while preserving culture, building community and offering a sense of home amid Venezuela's ongoing political and economic crisis. (Josie Lepe for KQED)

This is an absolute beginners course on the foundations of classical ballet and, a single catastrophic line dance lesson aside, it is also the first dance class I have ever attended. I am in the minority. As we take the barre, it quickly becomes apparent that not being able to tell my left from my right will be a significant deficit over the next 16 weeks. This, however, is a tertiary concern.

It's typical for the Joffrey Ballet to seat a mixed-repertory concert near the beginning of the year. But the 2026 edition of such an evening (a series of loosely connected shorter works packaged together), breaks at least one habit. There's nothing new in "American Icons," running two weekends at the Lyric Opera House. Instead, the Joffrey has dug up a range of works showcasing mid-20th century innovation and the porous kinship between ballet and modern dance during that time.

As the women built a thrumming rhythm from their drums and began to chant while others danced, the Hula Halau O Nalua and Ote'a Api School of Polynesian Dance seemed to teleport from the interior of an industrial park in Fremont to a Hawaiian island. It was a Wednesday evening, and a class of about 25 students had gathered in this halau, or hula school, to practice their dances.

Being called the best assumes lightning will strike twice, on schedule, and then strike again. I think that's life at the San Francisco Ballet. I heard about many bests recently at its 93rd opening gala. Everywhere I looked, people chattered in polite gossip, and a new room waited for me to find reasons to linger, from macarons and photo stations; or I was catching up with my favorite performer while waiting in line for cocktails.

Dominique McDougal and Carro Sharkey's three-part performance, 'Did4luv'-a tragicomic dance solo performed by each of the dancers, alternating every night-debuted this month at the dual 30th anniversary of Sophiensaele's inauguration as a theater and its renowned dance festival, Tanztage. This year's Tanztage invites its audience to consider the (im)material conditions of artistic production: the body and self as sources for capitalist exchange, the extractive nature of our systems of work and its resulting consequences for marginalized bodies.

Created for the company in 2016, Kahn's Giselle is imbued with inventiveness (this is a daring, dystopian dance-drama like no other), integrity (in the way themes are transposed from the nineteenth-century Romantic-era classic to this reimagining) and impressiveness (the level of commitment from the dancers, whose embodiment makes the work a formidable entity, is outstanding). You can't just watch it. You exist inside it, breathe it in, let it get under your skin.