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.
Film
My father broke with the religion of his birth, Judaism, when he was 14. Three factors drove his apostasy, two practical, one philosophical. During my grandfather’s Austrian childhood, a rabbi boxed his ear for an infraction of one of a ...
Books & CDs
Dissemble: (per the OED) Conceal or disguise one's true feelings or beliefs.
Dissemble: A word I have never understood. Why not just say “lie”?
In “Jerzy,” PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist Jerome Charyn bites off more than most of us ...
DanceSan Francisco,
An argument favoring bilingual education: When a child whose first language is not yet well-established is placed in a classroom where only English is spoken, the child develops “subtractive bilingualism,” making mastery of both languages difficult. Something along these ...
FeaturesBerkeley,
In late February, I had a chance to sit down with playwright Lisa Loomer (“The Waiting Room,” “Girl Interrupted”) to discuss her play “Roe,” now at Berkeley Rep. My own experience with the political and practical history of winning and ...
DanceSan Francisco,
Stagers Bart Cook and Maria Calegari return as Balanchine Trust emissaries to transmit the particularities signaling George Balanchine’s momentous break with traditional classical ballet to another generation of dancers. In three works, “Stravinsky Violin Concerto,” “Prodigal Son,” and “Diamonds” ...
DanceSan Francisco,
Sparks flew at Friday evening’s San Francisco Ballet performance of Liam Scarlett’s “Frankentstein.” Unfortunately, they produced more light than heat. By the end of the co-commission with London’s Royal Ballet, quantity turned to quality, and Vitor Luiz’s jolie-laid rendering of ...
Film
Raoul Peck takes a unique approach to documenting the meditations of the late Harlem-born author James Baldwin, who lived as an expatriate in Paris for most of his adult life. Peck gives thirty pages of the writer’s observations over to ...
DanceSan Francisco,
Diablo Ballet presented a program of four works. Two were pas deux excerpts, short in duration. The first of these was from Christopher Wheeldon’s “Mercurial Manoeuvres,” itself a bit of a maneuver within a maneuver, given the eleventh-hour ...
Film
Using the device of a play within a movie, Asghar Farhadi (“A Separation”) this time brings us a whodunit set in Tehran. A young couple, Emad Etesami (Shahab Hosseini), and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), are actors who play Willy ...
DanceSan Francisco,
At intermission after Alexei Ratmansky’s “Seven Sonatas,” I overheard a sleekly coiffed and outfitted Gen-Xer turn to her companion and say, “That reminded me of when I was a little girl and had a jewelry box with a ballerina on ...
