My latest two features for the Times touched upon two different worlds: the world of the dance accompanist, and that of the movie choreographer.

The first was a musing on the secret life of dance pianists. I spoke with Cameron Grant of New York City Ballet and Michael Scales of New York Theatre Ballet, as well as countless others, to find out how they train, what the challenges are, and what keeps them inspired. Here’s that piece.

Cameron Grant, Sterling Hyltin and Tyler Angle. Credit Krista Schlueter for The New York Times
Cameron Grant, Sterling Hyltin and Tyler Angle. Credit Krista Schlueter for The New York Times

And the other was on Jack Cole, known in some corners as the “Father of Jazz Dance”. The dance writer Debra Levine recently organized a retrospective of Cole’s movies at the Museum of Modern Art. Which led me to watch  a good number of these films… That piece is here.

Here’s a favorite clip:

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s