Toby Kassell

I would like to tell a story that changed the way I perceived myself in tights forever. When I was 24 years old one of my childhood friends tragically died of AIDS. I received a phone call late at night and was grief stricken. The next morning I decided to try go to work as usual and I was doing very well until my hand touched the barre and I became aware of something that I had never noticed before.

I was standing in a large, empty room, surrounded by 30 or 40 adult men and women, all wearing tights and leotards of various colours, clutching a wooden bar with furrowed brows, bending and stretching their knees like their lives depended on it.
Before I knew it, they had rolled the wooden bars away and after painfully balancing on one leg with the other lifted as high in the air as physically possible, proceeded to attempt to turn around and around on one leg as many times as possible. When this was not achieved satisfactorily, men and women would bare their teeth and stamp their feet!
I was close to tears. At this moment I also noticed that while executing all of this bizarre physical activity, this large group of people had their eyes constantly fixed on an enormous mirror that ...

Weiterlesen mit dem digitalen Monats-Abo

Sie sind bereits Abonnent von tanz? Loggen Sie sich hier ein
  • Alle tanz-Artikel online lesen
  • Zugang zum ePaper
  • Lesegenuss auf allen Endgeräten
  • Zugang zum Onlinearchiv von tanz

Sie können alle Vorteile des Abos
sofort nutzen

Digital-Abo testen

Tanz Januar 2006
Rubrik: Was denkt..., Seite 76
von

Vergriffen
Weitere Beiträge
Raffaella Giordano: «Tu non mi perderai mai»

“Tu non mi perderai mai“ – “You‘ll never lose me“ is the title of the new solo by Raffaella Giordano/Sosta Palmizi, created with the intention of translating with movements “in space [...] the words which resound in time,“ particularly the ones contained in the biblical “Song of Songs.“ One would never suspect this inspiring sub-text if Giordano herself didn‘t...

Ballets Russes

The documentary film Ballets Russes sets out to explore the two Ballets Russes, Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo and the Original Ballet Russe, both created after the Diaghilev era, who died in 1929. The San Francisco Bay Area based filmmakers Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller interviewed many dancers who were involved, including Alicia Markova, Frederic Franklin, Maria...

Carolyn Carlson: «Inanna»

Erleichterung schon vor der Aufführung. «Das Pub-likum ist zurück», freut sich ein Kenner des Hauses, der die schwierige Wandlung von Maryse Delentes Ballet du Nord in Carolyn Carlsons CCN mitgemacht hat, samt Auflösungsängsten. Und das Publikum dürfte bleiben. Es hat die Neue auf Anhieb ins Herz geschlossen, wenn auch der Jubel nicht darüber hinwegtäuscht, dass...