Sophie Flack is a writer and former professional ballet dancer who performed with the New York City Ballet. She contributed arts and culture pieces to The Weekly Standard between 2014 and 2016, with a particular focus on the dance world and ballet. She is also the author of the novel *Bunheads*, drawing on her experiences in professional dance.
There is a myth, perpetuated in the ballet world, that ballet training prepares dancers for whatever endeavor comes next. It’s a half-truth, really. We do, of course, learn discipline, focus, determination, and hard work from an early age. But because of the all-consuming nature of the profession,…
This wonderfully perceptive memoir follows Matthew Gilbert’s transformation during his first year as a reluctant dog owner. A neurotic, death-obsessed, and socially uncomfortable television critic for the Boston Globe, Gilbert describes his evolution into a more open-hearted, playful person, thanks…
With grievance and unspecific anger the major themes of so many contemporary memoirs, Unabrow is a literary breath of fresh air. The book consists of 20 comic essays chronicling Una LaMarche’s difficulty navigating womanhood while looking back at how her awkward formative years—as a single-browed…
Last month, Benjamin Millpied’s contemporary dance collective, the L.A. Dance Project, had its New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gillman Opera House. What Millepied has accomplished in two years with LADP is extraordinary: He’s assembled private donors to fund the company,…
This was the first time in nine years that the Bolshoi Ballet had performed in New York, and rather than bring any of Alexei Ratmansky’s contemporary ballets, which helped catapult the company into the 21st century—under Ratmansky’s direction, the Critics’ Circle named the Bolshoi “Best Foreign…
At the beginning of this month, New York City Ballet principal dancer Janie Taylor, one of the most captivating dancers since George Balanchine died in 1983, took her final bow along with her husband, fellow principal Sébastian Marcovici.