I loved Judith Jameson. She was great, but her greatness wasn’t very balletic at all. But I don’t doubt that she, like many or even most dancers in genres other than ballet, had at least some ballet training.

She was a revelation in “Revelations,” like she could touch the sky.

Judith Jameson always struck me as queenly and with great clarity of movement that felt somewhat balletic to me. I’ve always felt that ballet and modern dance have a lot of overlap. Could be wrong. My few forays into modern dance were not good! It’s great fun to chat about dance here.

Thank you for reminding us of Arthur Mitchell.

What a crazy story! Someone will make a movie or TV mini-series about that!

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/09/when-doug-and-ashley-benefield-started-a-ballet-company-it-wasnt-supposed-to-end-in-death

Alvin Ailey’s dancers are not ballet dancers – although some of them have probably had some ballet training along the way. Interestingly enough, even though Ailey’s company is overwhelmingly black, they usually had a few white and/or Asian dancers in the interests of diversity. The place where there are a great many black ballet dancers is Dance Theatre of Harlem, founded in 1969 by Arthur Mitchell, the pioneering black male soloist with Balanchine. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, Dance Theatre of Harlem only has black dancers and that was always its policy.

The Princeton dancers seem to be into “dance equity.” Good luck to them.

Regarding black dancers … Alvin Ailey has produced quite a few. Judith Jamison was a magnificent dancer and is director of the company now.

I hope Princeton finds its way eventually. One of our kids went there and got a wonderful education. That was during their grade deflation era.

But what do you do with a college degree in dance? Obviously, maybe law school. But for her, it meant teaching PE in schools, and dance with her mother. When my ex wife put my daughter in dance classes, my current wife commented that that was what she hated – teaching young girls with no talent who were only there because their mothers wanted them to be there (that wasn’t my daughter’s forte – which is STEM, where she got a PhD). Besides, after college, she did what she really wanted to do – have a family.

To this day, she has problems buying shoes, and esp boots, due to her very high arch. Cowboy boots, in particular, have been a problem, esp with her ex owning a ranch in MT. In any case, the problem might stem from being put in toe shoes too early. When she was really young, she was put in braces because she was duck footed. Didn’t work. So her (dance instructor) mother threw the braces away after a year or two, and put her in toe shoes, at maybe 3-4. Much younger than is supposed to be good. That worked, or at least as far as straightening out her feet. But that may be why her arch is still, 60 years later, so high.

And from TR’s “arena” quote: The credit belongs to the [wo]man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly…

I recall seeing some kind of Russian dance where the male dancers’ version of en pointe involved having the toes curled under. If I recall the discussion, the step was called something which sounded like “Kazatke” and was referred to as “bone crushing”.

I can’t dance, due to an injury whose characteristics vary by audience: Jump school, football, and for more upscale applications, lacrosse. Worked for fifty years. But from time to time a conversation follows in which somebody says that serious dance is worse for the body than football. I can see gymnastics, almost certainly. But dance?