Tag: juilliard

How Jean Freebury Challenges Students to Trust Their Ideas About Rhythm

During the 11 years that Jean Freebury danced for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, she discovered the value of being specific not just with your movement but also with your rhythm. “Merce had metered phrases, and also unmetered phrases where the rhythm would come out of the movement itself,” she says. Sometimes, there were even […]

How Alicia Graf Mack Cultivates Curiosity and Creativity in Her Juilliard Students

School administration may not seem like an obvious path to exploring creative practices and processes, but the approaches that academic leaders take will either spark or extinguish their students’ engagement. Alicia Graf Mack, the dean and director of The Juilliard School’s dance division since 2018, utilizes a service-oriented approach to bolstering young dancers’ artistry. Building […]

MOVE|NYC| Helped This Dancer Matriculate to Juilliard

Waverly Fredericks was on the verge of quitting dance when Chanel DaSilva invited the LaGuardia Performing Arts High School freshman to audition for the inaugural cohort of Young Professionals. Standing 6-foot-2, he’d been told that he looked too awkward and was “too big” to be a dancer. “I didn’t like having long limbs that stretched […]

Choreographing on Your Friends? Follow These 5 Rules to Avoid Disaster

Once Adriana Pierce caught the choreography bug as a teenager, dancemaking came naturally. More difficult was navigating the tricky situations that would arise when choreographing on classmates and friends. “If a rehearsal didn’t go well, I’d worry that people didn’t respect me or didn’t like my work,” says Pierce, who went on to participate in […]

“Like Making an Omelet” Is How Espen Giljane Describes This Classic Ballet Movement

When Espen Giljane teaches rond de jambe en dehors, the accent is always in second position, not to the front—and it’s the same for en dedans. For the double rond de jambe on count 4, he describes the movement as two half-size circles around second position. “It’s like whisking an egg with your leg,” he […]