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, and Theater.
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 ...
Film
Again with the Shakespeare, Kenneth Branagh! This time it’s not a movie version of a work by the bard, but rather, a close encounter with him along fault lines predicting a fractious interlude. You may wince at ...
DanceSan Francisco,
“Shostakovich Trilogy” is an evening-long tour de force by Russian-born choreographer Alexei Ratmansky. It’s outstanding for its theme: the tumultuous reconciliation of a world-altering revolution and subsequent counter-revolution with the career of Dmitri Shostakovich, a composer influenced by Igor ...
DanceSan Francisco,
Diablo Ballet reaches beyond its San Francisco bedroom community setting to recruit dancers from a host of backgrounds, both personal and professional. It brings in choreographers from across oceans or just a tunnel and bridge away. It draws on ...
Film
Even given transparent formulas for box office success, it’s curious how each filmmaker’s starting point holds out an argument of its own. Ralph Fiennes, who directs and appears in “White Crow,” a film that collects around the idiosyncrasies of ...
Film
If the phrase “History is written by the victors” has become a truism, here is the film that takes the would-be victor, fascism, and transforms its own records and documents into a mirror of its perfidy. It also stands ...
DanceSan Francisco,
Few can stride across a floor, arms raised to usher in festivity, as convincingly as Val Caniparoli, San Francisco Ballet’s reigning King Without a Crown. The story ballet fixture, be it ...
DanceSan Francisco,
It’s informative to read in ODC Artistic Director Brenda Way’s program notes that motivation on her part for mounting Kate Weare’s full-length work “World’s on Fire” issues from a wish to look deeply into our heartland, to better understand ...
Film
In the novel, “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” we learn that Eskimos have more than one hundred words for what is wet, white, and falls from the sky in cold weather. The current-day Avant Garde ...
DanceSan Francisco,
A fair test of a company’s salience is how well it dances Harald Lander’s seminal work, “Etudes.” Some of the best companies don’t even make ...
