Dancers

NEW YORK — Mikhail Baryshnikov is dancing. He is 65. And so, as a friend asked when I told him the news, what is there to see? Well. A great joyous appetite, for starters. The former ballet star's delight in performing — skipping, clowning around, showing off his still-beautiful arabesque — hits you like sunlight at Wednesday's opening of the Mark Morris Dance Group's two-week season in Brooklyn. The group is performing four works, two of them world premieres, in a 150-seat theater in its home building.

NEW YORK — When Robert Battle first arrived at New York's Lincoln Center years ago, he was a dance student with a scholarship to Juilliard. On his first day, he walked up to the building he thought was the school. It turned out to be the Metropolitan Opera House. This past week, Battle arrived at Lincoln Center in a far different capacity — as artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, one of the most-loved dance companies in the world. He was bringing the company...

A beautiful dancer, all long legs and sparkle, enters a ballet competition and lands a job. She came in a student, leaves a professional. In the gamble that is serious dance lust, she hit the jackpot. Right? A year and a half later, she quit. Burned out. This was the experience of Rebecca Houseknecht, whose arc from Odenton to the spotlight in New York at age 17 is chronicled in the new documentary "First Position. " Gorgeously re.ndered with heart and wit, the film follows a half-dozen ballet hopefuls as they...

MIAMI — They practice in the back of a dance studio next to a Wendy's restaurant in a strip mall in Miami. Six ballet dancers leap across the floor, hidden from view from the mothers watching their daughters in pink leotards in a front room. The dancers move in sets of two, their pointed toes and outstretched hands a hint of the grand stages where they have performed. In the background plays a recording of "La Bayadare," the French choreographed ballet they are practicing. These...

The Washington Ballet was reeling yesterday from the death of one of its Studio Company members, who was hit by a car on Friday after a performance at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Md. Mary Saludares, 20, "was one of the most joyful and positive people I've ever met," said Washington Ballet Artistic Director Septime Webre, who heads the small Studio Company, a pre-professional trainee program for young dancers. Less than two weeks ago, local audiences had seen Saludares dance in the corps of the Washington Ballet's performances of "La...

On a recent trip to the Middle East, choreographer Paul Gordon Emerson listened to dozens of Iraqi refugees share their harrowing experiences of torture and displacement. "Sometimes it felt like holding a soda bottle in your hand and shaking it up," said the CityDance Ensemble artistic director. "Life just exploded out of it. " Emerson and company member Kathryn Pilkington have taken those refugees' stories and woven them into "Wishes of the Sailor," a piece that will have its premiere this weekend at the Music Center at...

Regarding the outrage over the dancing at the Jefferson Memorial and the dancers' cries that our "freedoms" are being impinged upon, I ask, what are we "expressing" by dancing at the Jefferson Memorial? Some claim that by dancing they are "expressing respect" — that Jefferson himself liked music and dancing. How does this follow when it is rude and distracting to the other tourists who have come to pay their respects? It is, in the words of Petula Dvorak [" When interpreting freedom, reason sometimes takes a back...

For more than 50 years, hundreds of young dancers made their way to the Jones-Haywood School of Dance at Georgia Avenue and Delafield Place NW for the opportunity to be molded and trained under the discerning eyes of Doris Jones. After Jones's death two years ago, former and current students wondered about the fate of a place many considered a second home. When a funeral home offered to buy the property from Jones's estate, the school's creative director, Sandra Fortune-Green, looked inward and relied on the discipline instilled by her...

A group of dancers at Baltimore's Inner Harbor will join others across the planet dancing to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" to attempt setting a world record. At 8:30 p.m. Saturday, Thrill the World with Dance Baltimore will perform at the Harborplace Amphitheatre. Organizations around the world will be dancing in hopes of setting a Guinness World Record by having the most people perform the same dance at the same time. The current record is the "hokey pokey. "

Footworks, a locally based veteran troupe of cloggers, tappers and Irish dancers, put on two hometown shows this weekend at Dance Place. Saturday night's crowd was sparse, but that didn't stop the dancers and musicians from whoopin' and hollerin' as if they were at a barn dance in Tennessee. Eileen Carson Schatz, the group's founder and artistic director, did most of the vocalizing. Even during a sequence of traditional Canadian dances, she was backstage letting loose the rebel yell.

The hopelessness of the self-perpetuating cycle of violence that characterized the strife in Northern Ireland in the 1990s also characterizes " Shadow Dancer ," a moving if also somewhat deflated thriller set in that era. It's a mostly gripping tale with a nice twist. But the story — adapted by Tom Bradby from his 1998 novel and directed by James Marsh — is delivered with something akin to resignation. It doesn't make it slack or lazy, but it does give it the ring of ugly truth.

Edward Snowden, the government contractor who leaked documents revealing a top-secret government surveillance program, was so cautious and distant that even his girlfriend of eight years referred to him as "my man of mystery. " For a 29-year-old who made his living in the digital world, Snowden has left remarkably few online traces. But as reclusive and private as he was, his longtime girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, 28, who moved with him to Hawaii last year, was outgoing...

MOSCOW — The Bolshoi Theater won't renew the contract of Nikolai Tsiskaridze, a veteran principal dancer and teacher who for years has been in open conflict with managers at the celebrated Russian theater. The dispute intensified after the Bolshoi ballet's artistic director was attacked in January by a man who threw acid in his face. Bolshoi managers accused Tsiskaridze of inciting tensions within the theater that led to the attack, while Tsiskaridze...

I've been flipping through a January 1970 issue of Seventeen magazine recently, a gift from a friend. It got me wondering: Miss Teenage America, with your Wella Care hair, your hips-forward poses, your hello glow, where have you gone? Well, I found out Tuesday night. The '70s cover girl lives in "Symphony in Three Movements," the big, jet-age Balanchine ballet from 1972, in which Our Lady of the Frosted Lipstick and her identical, ponytailed sisters light up the stage in...

As a choreographer in her 20s, Liz Lerman did something unusual: She put residents of a senior citizens home in her productions. "In 1975, when I first started dancing with old people, it was completely weird," Lerman said. Yet, "I'm not the first person to dance with old people. Old people have been dancing for thousands of years as part of ritual. " Lerman, who has won numerous honors, including a MacArthur "genius" award in 2002, went on to create the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976, mixing older...

When the dancers of Ezibu Muntu African Dance Theatre first stepped on the stage at Dance Place on Saturday, their appearance wasn't so much an entrance as an explosion. They bounded out of the wings with consecutive high jumps, snapping their necks backward in midair and sending their piles of braids or curls into beautiful, sweeping arcs. It was a strong start to the DanceAfrica festival, an annual celebration of the dance, music and culture of Africa that ended Sunday. The rest of the...

Meisha BosmA, 34 Dancer, choreographer, founder and artistic director of BosmaDance In a city whose focus on process and over-thinking spills into so much of its art, Meisha Bosma's uninhibited, emotionally unbridled choreography feels refreshingly honest. She delves into our private mess, the feelings that overpower, the sticky and imperfect attachments. With her work marked by restless drive, it's as if Bosma is still buzzing from her first bout of dance intoxication.

For a celebration of a 69-year-old ballet, this month's Appalachian Spring Festival at the Baltimore School for the Arts marks many firsts. It's the first time Martha Graham's American classic has been performed in Charm City since 1947. It's the first time "Appalachian Spring" has ever been performed by high school students. Three of the students are donning costumes being worn for the first time since they were submerged for 10 days after Hurricane Sandy flooded the Graham company's building in lower Manhattan.

It was standing-room only for Shen Wei Dance Arts at the Kennedy Center on Thursday night. Except for the dancers, who were lying on the floor. Sometimes they'd sit up on one hip or lean on one of the plastic cubes nearby. Because the dancers were naked, except for flesh-colored underpants, it was thoughtful of Shen to devise the cubes out of clear plastic. (He created the visual design as well as the choreography.) Even when the dancers hugged the cubes or curled up behind a stack of them, their bodies were...

Some think the bassoon set them off. Others note the turned-in feet of the dancers. Whatever the spark, "The Rite of Spring" lore tells us that patrons became rioters at the Stravinsky ballet's 1913 premiere in Paris. But the myth of that night rarely includes details about what the dancers wore, how they sweated through Nicholas Roerich's wool shifts, bunched at their bellies with leather straps as belts, or how geometrical patterns on blood-orange fabric played tricks on anxious eyes in...