Mindy Aloff

Mindy Aloff's latest book is Why Dance Matters (Yale University Press, 2023). Some of her nonfiction on a range of cultural topics is archived on nytimes.com and newyorker.com

Motion Picture

“Edges of Ailey” edited by Adrienne Edwards

Whitney Museum of American Art, September 2024, 388 pp. If you’ve seen any photographs of the choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931–89), it is quite likely that one of them was by Jack Mitchell, whose archive of Ailey photography (now at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture) includes

VOLUME 3: ISSUE 2
WINTER 2025

Crit

Étonne-moi: Alexey Brodovitch at the Barnes Museum

Alexey Brodovitch. The Sylphs (Les Sylphides), 1935–37. Art Institute of Chicago. Purchased with funds provided by Karen and Jim Frank. Image courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY. In the go-go 1980s, the last decade when print magazines in the US rode high, the last decade before

VOLUME 3: ISSUE 1
SUMMER 2024

The Perfectionists’ Wing

‘Martha Graham, A Life: When Dance Became Modern’ By Neil Baldwin & ‘Errand into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham’ By Deborah Jowitt

Graham and Ted Shawn in Shawn’s duet, Malagueña, 1921. Photograph by Albert Witzel. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, the New York Public Library. Martha Graham (1894–1991), whose dances—and the evolving technique for how to perform them—dramatically upended what audiences expected from theatrical dancing, did not identify as a choreographer. She was

VOLUME 2: ISSUE 4
WINTER 2024

The Nijinska Tang

‘La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern’ by Lynn Garafola

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, APRIL 2022, 688 PP.Bronislava Nijinska and Valslav Nijinsky in L’Après-midi d’un faune, 1912. BRONISLAVA NIJINSKA (1891-1972) first made her mark as the kid sister and muse of the famous dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. Nijinsky, the “God of Dance,” was a troubled genius⎯his original works include some

VOLUME 1: ISSUE 3
JULY/AUGUST 2022