Toba Singer, author of “Fernando Alonso, the Father of Cuban Ballet” (University Press of Florida 2013), and “First Position: a Century of Ballet Artists” (Praeger 2007), writes for international dance journals and websites, and has served as an advisor to the San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design. She was the University Press of Florida author representative at the 2013 Miami International Book Fair. “Fernando Alonso, the Father of Cuban Ballet” was nominated for the Latin American Student Association Bryce Award, the de la Torre Research and Dance Scholars Award, and the Commonwealth Club California Book Award.
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Writes in: Art & Architecture, Books & CDs, Dance, Etc, Features, Film, Music, Television, and Theater.
DanceBerkeley,
Whether it’s the Teutonic Giselle peasant girl or the Indian sub-continent’s Nikia temple dancer, the plight of the village virgin has held audiences in its thrall for nearly three centuries. That’s impressive when one takes into account the number ...
Etc
Salvador’s torso bears a vertical scar. We come upon him (Antonio Banderas) sequestering himself, holding his shallow breath while his body is entirely submerged in a swimming pool. Yet, an underwater camera finds him. It reveals the thoracic surgical ...
DanceSan Francisco,
Jess Curtis is an award-winning dancemaker and performer who has created and performed multidisciplinary works in the U.S and Europe. In 2000, he founded, Jess Curtis/Gravity. He holds an MFA in Choreography and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the ...
DanceSan Francisco,
Too many seasons have slipped by without my having caught up with Smuin Contemporary Ballet. It was heartening to see how seasoned the small but surefooted company, treasured in the San Francisco Bay Area for its showmanship, has become ...
Books & CDs
If you have a nose for power, drawing a deep inspirational breath from the approachable majesty of nature, the long view of history, and intriguing vagaries of human expression, can be a tricky business. Nonetheless, ...
Art & Architecture
The Tijuana [Mexico] Cultural Center merits a far more titillating acronym than CECUT! It stands out as one of my two favorite Tijuana institutions (the other being the Dance Conservatory of Mexico/Conservatorio de Danza de Mexico-CDM). Built in 1982, ...
DanceSan Francisco,
Even if your beat is strictly limited to ballet, you can’t write about dance in the San Francisco Bay Area without running into the classical dances of India. In the case of Drive East, Indian Classical Dance--to exploit the ...
DanceSan Francisco,
The pieces chosen for the opener and closer of this year’s Stern Grove San Francisco Ballet program proved the best fit for the venerable if quirky raked stage with brown panel backdrop, like you’ve seen on TV in the ...
DanceSan Francisco,
The idea was to review SFDanceworks Season 4, but as I left the Cowell Theater that sits on the dock of the San Francisco Bay, a wave of equivocation eclipsed that plan. It was ...
Dance
Rudyard Kipling’s name is eponymous. His “White Man’s Burden” lament has served as a sanctimonious apologia for centuries of imperial rape and pillage on foreign soil. Kipling is also the author of “The Jungle Book,” a children’s cautionary tale ...
