Former modern dancer Debra Levine, a graduate of the City University of New York, is a Los Angeles arts writer. The Pittsburgh native has lived in New York, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tel Aviv, nurturing her arts passion in all cities. Her criticism and feature writing has been published in the Los Angeles Times, The Huffington Post, La Opinión, Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, Long Beach Press Telegram, and South China Morning Post.
In the summer of 2011, Debra was a Scholar in Residence at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. The prior year, she spoke at the Pillow about the Hollywood career of choreographer Jack Cole. In October 2010, Debra was a fellow at the NEA Classical Music & Opera Institute at Columbia University in New York. In 2009, she was a fellow at the NEA Dance Criticism Institute at the American Dance Festival at Duke University. In August 2009, she led the successful grassroots campaign to save the 40-year-running classic film program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
Debra’s special research in dance history is funded in 2011 by grants from the Cecil B. DeMille Foundation and dance patron Elizabeth Levitt Hirsch.
Debra blogs on Culture Monster, The Huffington Post, and on arts•meme.
To learn about corporate writing, please see Levine & Associates.
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Dance Heroes
I grew besotted by dance — classical ballet and modern – during the dance boom of the 1970s. A performance by New York City Ballet at Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena, when I was 15, launched my lifelong dance-going habit. Nureyev visited my home town, too, heading up the Australian Ballet’s touring production of “Don Quixote.” The year was 1971, and my grandmother made me a full-length, dark-red velvet skirt to wear to the performance. I was hooked.
As a teen, I pored over the high school library’s limited dance collection. My favorite was Balanchine’s New Complete Stories of the Great Ballets. I don’t believe anyone else touched it; it was always waiting on the shelf for me. I memorized photos like the ones at left, from Agon, in which Arthur Mitchell partners Diana Adams. There was something startling and reckless in these shapes, but so exquisitely composed. The unexpected commingling of the earthy and the ideal still draws me to Balanchine’s work.
Living in Hong Kong in the mid-1980s, I began to write about dance for the South China Morning Post. When Merce Cunningham Dance Company visited the colony in 1984, I learned that Merce had read my piece and that he liked it. He purportedly found it amusing that I called his dancers “the brainiest in New York.” It was true. I knew this because I had studied at the Cunningham school. Try remembering a dance combination by Sandra Neels.
After the Cunningham performance that night, my then boyfriend, a China-born classical pianist, and I chatted with John Cage as he knocked down his synthesizer. A wonderful memory. Here’s a piece about Merce Cunningham from 2005.
A treasured experience was interviewing Edward Villella, the former New York City Ballet star and now artistic director of Miami City Ballet. Chatting about Balanchine and Robbins with Mr. Villella — a beautiful person as well as a great dancer — was a high point of my life. Read the article.
In the realm of theatrical dance, I recently met the great dancer George Chakiris, who starred both on stage and in the film of “West Side Story,” winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance. We share a passion for the choreography of Jack Cole. My brief interview with George Chakiris here.
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