| Rita
Felciano
Born
in Switzerland and educated there and at UC Berkeley,
Rita Felciano has been the Dance Critic for the San
Francisco Bay Guardian since 1988. She also is Bay Area
correspondent for DanceView and Dance Magazine.
Her reviews, features and essays have been published
by such national and international publications as the
San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, the
Los Angeles Times, Ballet Review, Dance Now and
Dance International.
She
has served as panelist for local and national arts funding
agencies and has hosted a monthly half-hour show, "Dance
Bay Area: Keep it Moving" on radio station KUSF.
In1994 she co-directed "Crossed Stars", a
conference on artistic sources and social conflict in
ballets of Romeo and Juliet.
In
1998 she was awarded an Isadora Duncan Award for sustained
achievement in dance writing. For the last four years
she has been a consultant to Dance Advance in Philadelphia,
a program initiative funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Alison
Garcia
Alison
Garcia grew up in the Bay Area, where she now lives
and writes. She has written about dance and film
for DanceView magazine.
Rachel
Howard
Rachel
Howard is the former dance critic of the San Francisco
Examiner. She has served as a staff arts writer
at the Santa Barbara Independent and the Orange County
Register, and contributed to the Village Voice,
SF Weekly, Dance Magazine, and the San Francisco
Chronicle, among other publications. She is currently
finishing a memoir about her father's unsolved murder,
to be published by Dutton in fall 2004.
Ann
Murphy
When
she was four, Ann watched a ballet class in a studio
somewhere around Carnegie Hall, and between the music
and the dance she suddenly found something that has
continued to express the almost inexpressible center
of things. She has been writing about the art since
1983, when she launched the monthly publication, In
Dance, at the SF Bay Area Dance Coalition. She
subsequently became the dance critic for the East
Bay Express, the Oakland Tribune and the
San Francisco Weekly, and has contributed to
Dance Magazine, the New York Times,
the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications.
She studied with Dorothy Hill and Diana Byer at the
Manhattan School of Dance in New York, and for ten years
with former Cunningham dancer (and Margaret Craske protégé)
Brynar Mehl in San Francisco. For several years she
was Lucas Hoving’s manager and contributed an essay
to the anthology Jose Limon: the artist Re/Viewed on
the pathbreaking nature of the partnership between Hoving
and Limon. In 2002 she was asked to start up Dance
Magazine’s new publication, Young Dancer,
which will preview in September of 03. Both her young
sons are musicians.
Paul
Parish
Former
Rhodes Scholar Paul Parish lives in Berkeley, California,
where he has written since 1988 for alternative weeklies,
including the gay press. Currently he is dance critic
for San Francisco. He was Bay Area correspondent for
Ballet Review for a dozen years (and still contributes)
and for World Ballet and Dance in London. He
also writes for Ballet International/Tanz Aktuell
in Berlin, and has written for Dance magazine,
Limn magazine, and The New Yorker.
He has taught criticism at U.C. (Berkeley and Santa
Cruz campuses) and at the Silesian Dance Theater Festival
in Bytom, Poland. He serves on the jury that selects
winners of San Francisco's Isadora Duncan Dance Awards.
He
loves to dance. He really really does. He was the best
rock-and-roll dancer in his high school and now studies
ballet with Sally Streets and Susan Weber. He has studied
Limon with Joan Lazarus, Cunningham with Ellen Cornfield,
West-African with Naomi and Zak Diouf, Gongolese with
the late Malonga Casquelourd, contact improv with Robert
Funk and Sharon Tomsky, Sevillanas with Raquel Lopez,
Lindy hop with Paul and Sharon and Belinda Ricklefs.
He performed in Dance Brigade's Revolutionary Nutcracker
Sweetie for ten years, and is very proud to have
danced in Remy Charlip's A Moveable Feast in
the SF Gay and Lesbian Dance Festival of 2001.
He
started writing about dance in letters home in 1969—while
he was a grad student at Oxford, a friend took him to
a Saturday matinee at the Royal Ballet, Covent Garden—the
show was La Fille mal Gardee, it was Leslie
Collier's debut in a major role, the company was still
under Ashton's direction, and the whole thing was a
miracle of intelligibility and energy. I was stunned—mind
if I drop the 3rd-person fiction? How could anything
with no word spoken be so profoundly understandable?
I'd find in letters that I'd say I went to the ballet
last night and three pages later I'd still be writing
about it —especially after I saw Swan Lake (which
I saw over and over, with Sibley and Dowell, Mason and
Nureyev) and Dancers at Gathering, which fielded
an unbelievable cast—Seymour, Mason, Dowell Sibley,
Nureyev, David Wall.
When
I returned to the U.S. I worked on a PhD in Shakespeare
at Berkeley, but gave it up since there were no job
openings in academe for the foreseeable future; everybody
else was going to law school or such. I started taking
ballet classes and took a class on Balanchine from the
ballet critic Robert Garis, who sent a paper I wrote
for him to Francis Mason, editor of Ballet Review,
who accepted it and invited me to write for the magazine.
Encouraged by that, I looked up the alternative papers
in Berkeley and started wrting for them.
Alexandra
Tomalonis (Editor)
Alexandra
Tomalonis is founder-editor of DanceView (a
quarterly review of dance founded in 1979 as Washington
DanceView) and Ballet Alert! (a bimonthly
newsletter devoted to classical and neoclassical ballet
founded in 1996). She has reviewed dance for the Washington
Post since 1979 and is currently Washington correspondent
for Dance Magazine. Her reviews and features
have appeared in Dance Now, Dance International,
Ballet Review, Teater Et, The Guardian, Politiken,
and other publications.
She
received an MALS degree from Georgetown University's
Liberal Studies program and has taught dance history
and aesthetics at George Washington and George Mason
Universities. She is the author of Henning Kronstam;
Portrait of a Danish Dancer (University Press of
Florida, 2002).
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