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NY’s Broadway, Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Corridor to require vaccines

If you want to attend a live performance in New York, prepare to show proof that you received your Covid shots.

The Broadway League announced Friday that the owners and operators of all 41 Broadway theaters in New York City will require viewers, performers, backstage crew and theater staff to be fully vaccinated by October.

Young children or people with medical conditions or religious beliefs that prevent vaccinations can still attend shows if they have a negative Covid-19 test. You will need a PCR test within 72 hours of the start of the performance or a negative antigen test that will be performed within 6 hours of the start of the performance in order to be admitted.

“A uniform policy in all New York Broadway theaters makes it easy for our audiences and should give our guests even more confidence how seriously Broadway takes the safety of the audience,” said Charlotte St. Martin, President of the Broadway League.

An exterior view of the Palace Theater at the premiere of “West Side Story” on Broadway at the Palace Theater on March 19, 2009 in New York City.

Neilson Barnard | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Audiences in the theater must also wear masks, except when eating or drinking in designated areas.

In September, the league will review these guidelines for November performances.

The Metropolitan Opera also requires guests, performers, orchestras, choirs, and staff to provide proof of vaccination, but face masks are optional. The opera will prohibit children under 12 from attending performances.

“The Met policy states that masks will be optional, this could change depending on prevailing health conditions. Also, unlike Broadway, we will have absolutely no exceptions to the vaccination-only policy, ”a Metropolitan Opera spokeswoman said in an email.

Guests must present proof of vaccination upon entering the theater and be fully vaccinated with an FDA or WHO approved vaccine. This means that guests have to wait at least two weeks after their last recordings to attend a performance.

Carnegie Hall will also require proof of vaccination from all guests, artists, staff and visitors and will ban children under the age of 12 from attending performances, a statement said.

Younger children are not yet entitled to the Covid vaccine.

The new requirements result from the rapid spread of the Delta variant across the country, especially in areas with low vaccination rates. On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines urging people to return to wearing masks, even if they were vaccinated, in areas of the country where cases have increased. This was a reversal of the Agency’s previous policy.

The CDC warns that the Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and could make people sicker than the original Covid.

Broadway will begin reopening its doors to the public at full capacity on September 14th, having closed since March 2020. New York City lost billions in tourism dollars as live performances ceased on Broadway, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.

The industry received government support through a program called the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, which allocated $ 16.2 billion to keep the entertainment industry alive across the country until performances could safely return to normal.

The surge in Covid cases due to the Delta variant comes at a precarious time for the industry, which has invested in reinstating artists and other workers in preparation for the resumption of performances.

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Entertainment

Radio Metropolis Music Corridor to Reopen to Maskless, Vaccinated Full Homes

In the latest sign of how fast vaccinations are changing, what New Yorkers can and can’t do, Radio City Music Hall plans to reopen next month to welcome full-capacity non-masked audiences – as long as every ticket holder has been vaccinated .

The music hall will welcome streams of vaccinated people past their neon tents and back into their gilded Art Deco auditorium for the final evening of the Tribeca festival on June 19, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Monday.

“This beautiful hall is being filled again,” said Cuomo at a press conference in the music hall. “Having Radio City back 100 percent without masks, with people enjoying New York and New York art, won’t just be symbolic and metaphorical. But I think it will go a long way in restoring that state. “

James L. Dolan, the chairman and general manager of Madison Square Garden Company, who owns the music hall, said the hall would remain open beyond June 19, but only to vaccinated people. When asked how the rules would be implemented – and whether ushers would follow the honor system or look for proof of vaccination – he admitted that some details were still being worked out.

“That’s a really good question, I have no idea,” said Mr Dolan. “We will work with the state and find a way to do this.”

The announcement came as the plans to reopen have changed and accelerated day by day.

Mr Dolan said his group’s venues would start booking concerts and other events for what he thought was a “blockbuster summer”.

Updated

May 17, 2021, 3:33 p.m. ET

“We didn’t think this was going to happen,” said Mr Dolan. “We really had planned a blockbuster fall.”

He said the group’s other venues, which also host sporting events, would allow a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated patrons, but would give priority to vaccinated patrons. Still, he acknowledged that planners would need to make a more detailed assessment of the venues before specific rules could be put in place.

In his remarks, Mr. Cuomo emphasized that people who are not vaccinated would not be allowed into the music hall and stated in his PowerPoint: “Vaccinations have advantages!”

Although the number of new coronavirus cases in New York state is declining, the average averaged 1,864 coronavirus cases per day, according to the New York Times on Monday. Around 43 percent of the state’s residents are vaccinated, and more than half have received at least one dose of the vaccine.

The organizers of the Tribeca Festival have already announced that they will open the festivities with the premiere of “In the Heights”, the film from the Lin Manuel Miranda musical. Mr Cuomo said Monday that Pier 76 Park on the Hudson will host one of the opening screenings on June 9th.

Monday’s announcement of the revered hall’s return is the last in a series of reopenings officials have planned for the coming weeks and months. As more New Yorkers became vaccinated against the virus and federal health officials relaxed their guidelines on how to wear masks, indoor arts venues have slowly begun welcoming visitors back while adhering to capacity limits and other safety requirements.

Perhaps most notably, Broadway shows have started selling tickets for full capacity shows, some of which will begin as early as mid-September.

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Health

Eula Corridor, One-Lady Reduction Company in Appalachia, Dies at 93

She ended up working in a canning and ammunition factory outside of Rochester, NY. But she found the conditions unsafe and unfair, and organized some of the workers on strike without realizing the pointlessness of making demands of the federal government in wartime.

She was arrested and charged with instigating a riot. But the booking agent realized she was younger than claimed and sent her back to Kentucky instead of locking her up. It was a test run to tell the truth to the Force, which it would do all of its life.

At home she found work as a domestic servant, cooked, cleaned and looked after children, all without electricity, water or cooling.

“Eula found consolation in helping neighbors in difficult times,” wrote Bhatraju.

She married her first husband, McKinley Hall, a miner in 1944. He was a heavy drinker who was more interested in making moonshine than mining coal, and he physically abused her, according to her bio. Her neighbors took care of them and she took care of them. She gradually became the local fixer for people in trouble.

This included that a very pregnant neighbor was taken to several hospitals, which the woman refused because she did not have a family doctor and could not pay. At the last hospital, Mrs. Hall yelled at the admission nurse and threatened to call the local newspaper if the staff didn’t help. They did, the birth went well, and Mrs. Hall took the woman’s plight to a meeting of hospital officials where it caused a shame on her for making people suffer.

She read two influential books that enhanced her courage to speak: “Night Comes in the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Territory” (1963) by Harry Caudill and “The Other America” ​​(1962) by Michael Harrington. Both books inspired President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty – and Mrs. Hall.

She took part in miners’ strikes across the region. She was elected president of the Kentucky Black Lung Association and organized frequent bus trips to Washington, where she campaigned for better miners and widow benefits. She was often the only woman at the table.

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Entertainment

A Choreographer in Quarantine (the Sort With a Guard within the Corridor)

The last time I was at Kennedy Airport was a year ago, almost to the day. My dance company was performing our “Four Quartets” in Los Angeles — our last show for a live audience before the pandemic shut everything down. Now, it’s Feb. 15, I’m heading for Sydney to work with the Australian Ballet.

My calendar for spring 2020 was a color-coded puzzle. I’d wanted to take advantage of every opportunity that came our way, knowing it wouldn’t be like this forever. I didn’t know it would all be over so suddenly.

Traveling reminds me of my dad, who died in 2018. If he were alive, we would have talked all week about what time I was leaving for the airport. I can hear him now saying “leave earlier … it could take an hour just to get across town” in his Brooklyn accent. He was early to all of my performances. He would show up, opening the theater doors: “Pammy, can you believe I got a parking spot?” Or he’d tell me how he took the express bus from the Bronx all the way down to the East Village. It drove me CRAZY; I was getting ready for the show … but I should have savored it.

At J.F.K., I talk to David Hallberg, the artistic director of the Australian Ballet and an old friend. He tells me things are normal there. I’ve been in New York since lockdown started last March, experimenting with how to make dance, collaborate with artists and keep the art form alive while not going stir crazy. I’m scared for dance; I’m scared for the arts and I’m scared for New York. The city is wounded.

I’m traveling halfway across the planet to walk into a studio of unmasked dancers to create a dance for a real live audience. It’s incredible — heartbreaking — and I will not let this moment pass unsavored.

When I get to Sydney I’ll have to quarantine for 14 days in a hotel. Real quarantine. Lockdown. No going out for a walk or to pick up a few groceries. Maybe this will help me with the new dance. Limitations and boundaries have always focused me. I like rules, but also like to break them — and quarantine is a rule I can’t break.

Sometimes I set limitations for myself on purpose. I purged walking out of all my dances for five years when I realized I was relying on it too much. I had to re-earn my right to walk in my dances. I also banned entrances and exits for a while. What will I ban after quarantine?

Credit…Pam Tanowitz

I have no structure for my day. To keep focused, I’ll make a schedule, and start following it tomorrow.

I FaceTime with my daughter, Gemma, at college. I miss her. I’m still wearing my Pink Floyd T-shirt and sweats that I put on last night … yesterday … two days ago … in New York.

The reality that I just traveled 24 hours and can’t leave my room hasn’t hit me yet. There is a guy posted in the hallway, making sure no one leaves. The Australian Department of Health is also going to call every day to ask after my health — both Covid-related and mental.

Before I left, I ran around trying to remember everything. I forgot a notebook, which had notes I took while talking to Caroline Shaw about her score for the ballet I’m making, “Watermark.” Darn.

The beginning of making a dance is my favorite part — the research. While in quarantine, I’m going to start drawing the dance, scoring the space first. (It looks something like football plays — birds-eye views of the stage space.) Separately, I keep track of movement and rhythmic ideas.

The more organized I am, the more I can go “off book” when I actually get in the room with dancers. Then process becomes part of the dance. I love watching dancers warm up and am always on lookout for “mistakes” they make. I like incorporating these into the design of the dance — little glimpses of humanity within the abstractness of the choreography.

I’m making two dances at once — one for Australian Ballet and one for Singapore Dance Theater. The Singapore dance will be made on Zoom and the one for Australian Ballet in person! Both dances will be performed for a live audience!

I’m jet-lagged and thinking in fragments. So much to figure out, including what time of day it is and whether I should be awake or asleep.

I’m up at 3:30 a.m. to teach my choreography class at Rutgers on Zoom, 4:30-7:30 a.m. (That’s 12:30-3:30 p.m. in New Jersey.) I’ve showered and put on a shirt and a little makeup, so I don’t scare my students. They’re making dance films and rehearsing on Zoom, so I’m talking to them about using limited resources as an advantage — inspiration from limitation — just like I’m dealing with now.

I give them problem-solving movement exercises, and I try to give them hope. The trajectory of dance in America is forever changed after these months of isolation, cancellation and reconsideration. I believe dance is — and will have to continue — reinventing itself for the post-Covid world. The students will be entering a much-changed creative environment than the one I entered after college. I grapple with how to prepare them when I have no idea what’s coming.

I try to do a few different kinds of exercise a day. Something aerobic, something for arms. I brought my own weights.

Credit…Pam Tanowitz

The novelty is already wearing off and it’s only Day 3. I still haven’t made a schedule, but the time gets filled with the routine calls and door knocks of quarantine.

The nurses call every day to ask if I have any Covid symptoms and if I need to talk to a doctor about anything. Today, the nurse asked me where I had traveled from, and it turned into a 25-minute conversation about how he loves dance, how he used to dance, and his trip to Africa. It was nice to chat. I loved hearing his Australian accent even though I only understood half of what he said.

I had my Covid test. I had to stand against my opened door in profile while they swabbed my throat and nose. Brain tickle.

Food delivery, a.k.a. “Knock and Drop”: They deliver meals to me twice a day — no ordering or choosing. (I’ve opted out of breakfast since they bring hazarai, bready junk food.) I don’t know who “they” are; they knock on the door and leave.

It’s nice not to have to order. Choreography is a series of choices I have to make so to get a break from that is OK.

The food has been a mixed bag. Today’s lunch: a “New York beef sourdough sandwich” and a banana.

I had the worst dream last night. I was trying to move my body but couldn’t — stuck in one place. My daughter was with me, running ahead of me and I couldn’t catch up.

I’m still jet lagged, I still have no schedule, still get confused by the time difference, still need to choreograph two dances. And I should call my mom.

I brought “Swann’s Way” with me. I’ve tried reading this maybe 10 times. I thought I could try again in quarantine. I want to be a person who can read Proust but I guess I’M JUST NOT. A writer friend suggested that I open the book and read a sentence or two randomly. That is the only way to do it, like a John Cage/Merce Cunningham “chance procedure.”

Today, I made four phrases of “ballet” steps using chance as a starting point for the structure. I want to go deeper with the dancers when I see them. That’s the collaborative part and most satisfying part of making dance — doing it in the moment, relying on my intuition.

I had my first Zoom rehearsal tonight with Singapore Dance Theater. Melissa Toogood, a good friend and the longest collaborator in my company, came from New York to be my assistant. She helps out from her room on Zoom. I’m excited to start, though I’m not sure yet how I’m going pull this off.

Credit…Pam Tanowitz

I woke up later today — 6 a.m.!

And a major change: I moved my computer location from the desk facing the wall to the table facing the windows.

The thing about making two dances at once is if you get stuck on one you can change to the other and still feel productive. I have two new notebooks bought from Amazon Australia. Each dance gets its own notebook for ideas and stage drawings.

I know it’s a little corny, but I like having quotes from artists I admire with me. It’s spiritual company, making me less lonely and giving me something to aspire to. I write this Robert Creeley quote on the first page:

“Content is never more than an extension of form and form is never more than an extension of content.”

As concepts, movement ideas and structures form first. These then inform the dance, so I never have to “decide” what movement goes into which dance if I’m working on two at the same time — the dance tells me.

While on a FaceTime call today with Gemma, she tells me about her writing class. Her assignments deal with a strict form. This is fascinating to me, so I question her more on the specifics and ask her to send me the writing prompt. It sounds so similar to what I do — making similar prompts for myself and creating movement within its structure.

It’s 2021, it’s a pandemic, and I’m in Australia. I’m not “well-traveled” but making dances has given me the opportunity. My first time to Europe was for my honeymoon in Paris. I was 28. It was 1998 — we made our hotel reservations by fax. After that, not much else, only little trips.

The first 25 years of my dances were made and performed in New York City. In 1992, my first show was at CBGB’s gallery. We danced barefoot, so I would go around before the show pulling nails out of the floor with a hammer. We were treated like a band and we got a cut of the door.

Now I’m 51, getting hot flashes and still making dances.

The halfway mark! And a day off.

Watched Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series (“The 400 Blows,” “Antoine and Colette,” “Stolen Kisses,” “Bed and Board,” “Love on the Run”).

It’s 5:45. I’m waiting for the knock. I wonder what’s for dinner?!

Credit…Pam Tanowitz

I did not work on any projects yesterday. I feel guilty. My first therapist used to say, “Pam, you wear guilt like a sweater.” Guilt is a cozy place for me, and it’s not productive.

Today I’m more productive. I took a shower.

We had a good rehearsal with Singapore. Translation and articulation of movement is tough and tedious on Zoom, but the dancers are picking up the steps quickly.

I’m still trying to capture a “real life in the studio” feeling. When the dancers created an amazing tableau — all were looking at the camera to hear what I was saying — I had to include it in the dance.

It’s a busy day in quarantine: two rehearsals; a costume fitting on Zoom; and an interview about the new ballet. I’ve never been so busy without leaving a room. I’m also going to do two Glo yoga workouts, cardio and a 20-minute arm sculpt. I read that middle-aged women need to lift weights and do strength training, so I try to do this every day.

My rehearsal with Australian Ballet, the first, goes well on Zoom. I started plotting it out with 14 men and three women — 17 altogether — my homage to Balanchine’s “Serenade” (minus the principal roles). My dance will be sandwiched between two Balanchine ballets on the program and I’m trying hard not to think about this.

I explained a little about my work to the dancers, but I could hear the reverb of my nasal American/New York/Jewish accent. I hope it didn’t scare them. Melissa and I got through one phrase during the hour. It’s good prep work for when I see them in person next week.

My Pink Floyd T-shirt is still in heavy rotation.

Melissa is leaving quarantine. I will miss her! Even though I never actually saw her, knowing she was here helped. Reid Bartelme (costume designer) is here now, so I call him on the landline. He says, “Pam, we have cellphones,” but I like the land line.

I just signed into Zoom for my noon rehearsal but no one is there. Ah, noon Singapore time, 3 p.m. for me … oy! Working in three different time zones, I’m surprised this hasn’t happened before now.

Feeling unfocused today.

Another beef pie for lunch … bummer.

I try to say hi to the guard in the hall. That’s me, trying to connect. One thing my dances are “about” is disconnection — missed connections and making that disconnection work.

After being isolated like this, I’m curious about how being confined to this space will (or will not) affect my work.

See ANY day, 1 through 11. It’s all the same.

“The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” (Gaston Bachelard)

I can hide here in quarantine.

At 9 a.m., I open my door to two police, two border force guys and a hotel guard. I say, “Wow, I need five guards to check out?” And they laugh and say, “We heard you were trouble.”

I’ve realized in this room that when I meet the Australian Ballet dancers I will have no rules. I will make a dance. Freedom.

Pam Tanowitz is a choreographer and the founder of Pam Tanowitz Dance.

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Entertainment

Jay-Z and Foo Fighters Are Nominated for the Rock Corridor of Fame

Foo Fighters, Jay-Z, Mary J. Blige, Iron Maiden and Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti are first-time nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s 36th Annual Induction Ceremony, announced on Wednesday.

They lead a group of 16 nominees, including several who have received nods at least twice before: Devo, LL Cool J, New York Dolls, Rage Against the Machine, and Todd Rundgren.

After many complaints that the hundreds of candidates in the hall over the years have been predominantly white and male, this year’s ballot is the most diverse to date. Seven of the 16 nominees are female acts and nine are performing artists of color.

The women on the ballot include the Go-Go’s and Dionne Warwick – both of whom receive their first nods – as well as Kate Bush, Carole King, Chaka Khan and Tina Turner.

This year’s induction ceremony is slated for fall in Cleveland, home to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and museum.

To some extent, the latest nominee number expands a pattern that has prevailed for the past half a decade or so, with a handful of alt-rock heroes and rap gods as near-guaranteed safe-things; Foo Fighters and Jay-Z have just passed the hall’s approval threshold of 25 years since their first commercial recordings were released. Dave Grohl, the leader of Foo Fighters, is already in the Pantheon as a member of the 2014 Nirvana class.

A few recycled names from previous years’ ballot papers give an idea of ​​the advocacy projects on the Hall of Fame’s secret nomination committee. Rundgren, the versatile singer-songwriter and producer, whose solo career dates back to the early 1970s, has been nominated for each of the last three years. Rage Against the Machine, the agitprop rap metal band whose planned reunion tour was interrupted by the pandemic last year, has been nominated three times in the last four cycles. LL Cool J has now received a total of six nods.

Iron Maiden, whose lightning-fast guitar riffs and demonic images helped shape heavy metal in the 1980s, has been approved since 2005.

This year’s nominations also contain some surprises. Kuti, the Nigerian band leader and activist who fused James Brown’s funk with African sounds to create the Afrobeat genre – and was introduced to many Americans through the 2009 Broadway musical “Fela!” – would be the first West African award winner. (Trevor Rabin, a member of Yes, who joined in 2017, is from South Africa.)

And the hall’s nomination committee – a group of journalists, broadcasters, and industry insiders – clearly made an effort to highlight some of pop music’s many deserving women. The pressure to do this has been increasing for years. In 2019, critic and academic Evelyn McDonnell counted the 888 people enrolled to date and found that only 7.7 percent were women.

When Janet Jackson and Stevie Nicks gave acceptance speeches earlier this year, they urged the institution to diversify its ranks. “What I do is open the door to other women like, ‘Hey man, I can do it,'” said Nicks.

If elected, King and Turner Nicks would join as the only artists to be included twice. King was recorded with her songwriting partner Gerry Goffin in 1990, and Ike and Tina Turner joined in 1991.

More than 1,000 artists, historians and music industry professionals will vote on the nominations. The venue will once again conduct a single “fan vote” based on votes collected from members of the public on the venue’s website, rockhall.com. The candidates will be announced in May.

In December, the Hall of Fame and Museum announced plans for a $ 100 million expansion that would add a third to their museum’s footprint.

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Entertainment

The Royal Academy of Dance: From Music Corridor to Ballet Royalty

“It is utter nonsense to say that the English temperament is unsuitable for dancing,” said Edouard Espinosa, a London dance instructor, in 1916. It was just a lack of qualified instruction that prevented the creation of “perfect dancers”. ”Espinosa spoke to a reporter from Lady’s Pictorial about an uproar he had caused in the dance world with this idea: dance teachers should adhere to standards and be screened for their work.

Four years later, in 1920, Espinosa and several others, including Danish-born Adeline Genée and Russian ballerina Tamara Karsavina, founded a teaching organization that would become the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD). Today the academy is one of the largest ballet education programs in the world. Students in 92 countries follow the curriculum and take their exams, which are regulated by the organization. And as the exhibition “On Point: Royal Academy of Dance at 100” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London shows, its history is synonymous with the history of ballet in Great Britain.

“Much of the legacy of British dance began with the RAD,” said Darcey Bussell, a former Royal Ballet ballerina who has served as the academy’s president since 2012. “It is important that dance training and instruction are closely linked to the professional world. The RAD has done this from the start.”

When the Royal Academy was founded, there was no national ballet company in Britain. But there was a lot of ballet, said Jane Pritchard, the curator of dance, theater, and performance at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She curated the exhibition with Eleanor Fitzpatrick, the archive and archive manager of the Royal Academy of Dance. “The Ballets Russes were there, Pavlova performed in London and excellent emigrant teachers came,” said Ms. Pritchard. “So the RAD was born at just the right moment, using the best of the Italian, French and Russian schools to create a British style that it then sent back to the world.”

The exhibition, which runs until September 2021, opened in May due to Covid-19 restrictions. It opened on December 2nd but closed again when the UK re-introduced restrictions in mid-December. While we wait for the museum to reopen, here’s a tour of some of the exhibition’s photographs, designs, and objects that touch on some of the most important figures in 20th century ballet history.

Adeline Genée (1878-1970), who spent much of her career in England, reigned as prima ballerina at the Empire Theater for a decade, appearing on various programs. She was both revered as a classical dancer and very popular with the public. Florence Ziegfeld called her “The World’s Greatest Dancer” when she performed in the USA in 1907. Genée became the first female president of the Royal Academy of Dance, and her royal connections and popularity with the public made her a formidable figurehead.

The photo from 1915 shows Genée in her own short ballet “A Dream of Butterflies and Roses” in a costume by Wilhelm, the resident designer at the Empire Theater and an important figure in the theater scene. “It’s a really good example of the type of costume and type of ballets that were being shown at the time,” said Ms. Fitzpatrick. “Ballet was still part of the music hall entertainment.”

This 1922 weekly vaudeville poster in the Coliseum of London shows how ballet was seen at the time the Royal Academy of Dance was founded. “It was part of a bigger picture, and it shows it visually,” said Ms. Pritchard. “Sybil Thorndike was a great British actress and would have given a brief performance of a play or monologue. Grock was a very famous clown. Most of the Colosseum’s bills had some sort of dance element, but it wasn’t always ballet. “

Jumping Joan was one of three characters that Tamara Karsavina danced in “Nursery Rhymes”, which she choreographed to music by Schubert for an evening at the Coliseum Theater in London in 1921. Unusually for ballet at the time in London, it was a standalone show rather than part of a variety program. Karsavina and her company did it twice a day for two weeks.

“People associate Karsavina with the Ballets Russes, but they also had their own group of dancers who performed regularly at the Colosseum,” Ms. Pritchard said. “She was really an independent artist in a way that we think is very modern, who works with a large company, but also has an independent existence.”

She also tried to promote British artists; The costume design is by Claud Lovat Fraser, a brilliant theater designer who died in his early 30s. “I think Lovat Fraser is the British equivalent of Bakst,” said Ms. Pritchard. “His drawings are so animated and precise, and he uses color wonderfully to create a sense of character.”

In 1954 the Whip and Carrot Club, an association of high jumpers, approached the Royal Academy of Dance with an unusual request. Members had read that athletes in both Russia and America had benefited from ballet lessons, and they asked the academy to formulate lessons that would improve their height.

The result was a multi-year course with courses for high jumpers and hurdlers and later for “obstacle hunters, discus and javelin throwers”, as can be seen from a Pathé film clip that is shown in the exhibition. In 1955, a leaflet containing 13 exercises for jumping was produced, drawn by cartoonist Cyril Kenneth Bird, professionally known as Fougasse, best known for government propaganda posters (“Careless Talk Costs Lives”) made during World War II .

“I love the photo of Margot Fonteyn watching in her fur coat!” Said Mrs. Pritchard.

Karsavina, until 1955 Vice President of the Royal Academy of Dance, developed a curriculum for teacher training and other sections of the advanced exams. As a dancer, she created the title role in Mikhail Fokine’s “The Firebird” with music by Stravinsky when the Ballets Russes performed the ballet at the Paris Opera in 1910. Here she is shown coaching Margot Fonteyn when the Royal Ballet first staged the ballet in 1954, the year Fonteyn took over from Genée as President of the Royal Academy of Dance.

“Karsavina knew firsthand what the choreographer and composer wanted and is passing it on,” said Ms. Fitzpatrick. (“I was never someone who counted,” says Karsavina in a film about learning “The Firebird”. “Stravinsky was very nice.”) “It gives a wonderful feeling of passing things on from one generation to the next.”

This relaxed moment of a rehearsal from 1963 shows the ease and the relationship between Fonteyn and the young Rudolf Nureyev, who had left Russia two years earlier. They were rehearsing for the Royal Academy of Dance’s annual gala, which Fonteyn had launched to raise funds for the organization. Her fame allowed her to bring together international guests, British dancers and even contemporary dance choreographers like Paul Taylor.

“The gala was also an opportunity for Fonteyn and Nureyev to try things that they might not have danced with the Royal Ballet,” said Ms. Pritchard. “Here they were rehearsing for ‘La Sylphide’ because Nureyev was passionate about the Bournonville choreography. They really look like two dancers who are happy together. “

Stanislas Idzikowski, known to his students as Idzi, was a Polish dancer who moved to London as a teenager and danced with Anna Pavlova’s company before joining the Ballets Russes, where he inherited many roles from Vaslav Nijinsky. A close friend of Karsavina, he later became a popular teacher and worked closely with the Royal Academy of Dance. Always formally dressed in a three-piece suit with a stiff collared shirt and sleek shoes, he was “tiny, elegant and precise,” according to Fonteyn in her autobiography.

In this 1952 photo, he is teaching fifth-year girls who may have been hoping for a career. Idzikowski was also a member of the Royal Academy of Dance’s Production Club, which was founded in 1932 to allow students over the age of 14 to work with choreographers. Frederick Ashton and Robert Helpmann were among the early volunteers, and later a young John Cranko created his first job there.

This 1972 photo of young girls about to begin a sequence called “Party Polka” was taken by Fonteyn’s brother Felix, who was also filming a group of elementary school students demonstrating for Fonteyn and other teachers. The footage, which was kept in canisters labeled “Children’s Curriculum” in the archives of the Royal Academy of Dance, was recently discovered by Ms. Fitzpatrick.

The film offers a rare glimpse into Fonteyn in her offstage role at the Royal Academy of Dance, Ms. Fitzgerald said, and reflects an important change the ballerina made during her presidency. “People really think about Fonteyn as a dancer, but she has been very involved in teaching and curriculum development,” said Ms. Fitzpatrick. Previous curricula, she explained, included pantomime, drama, and history, but when a body including Fonteyn revised the program in 1968, much of it was scrapped.

“They wanted to streamline everything and make it more comfortable for the kids and just focus on movement,” said Ms. Fitzpatrick. “The party polka is a great example of having a great feel for the kids to swirl around the room and really dance.”