By Nadine Matthews About midway through director Jamila Wignot’s most recent film, Ailey, the eponymous subject of the documentary muses in voiceover recording about “the agony” of growing up poor, with a single mother, in Jim Crow-era Texas. Alvin Ailey explains that, as a Black man, he was made to “feel as if you were
By Jenn Edwards This year, with COVID wiping out stage performances all over the world, dance on screen has become especially relevant. The medium expands the possibilities of where and how dance can happen. It inflates, and complicates, notions of choreography, as location, cinematography and editing are as crucial to the choreographic process as the
By Sima Chowdhury The broad ethnic composition of Lai Lai Ballroom Dance studio in southern California inspired Laura Nix to spend six years making her Oscar-nominated short film Walk, Run, Cha Cha. Elena Krifuks from Belarus and her husband, Maksym Kapitanchuk from Ukraine, teach Latin dancing there to mostly middle-aged Asian students. Two of their