Dance Magazine

Ava Wagner’s dance career seems almost predestined. “My grandma was stretching my feet the minute I was born,” she says. Her family’s connection to dance spans generations: her great-grandmother, Shirley Larkin, founded Larkin Dance Studio in Minnesota, where Wagner trained until she was 18; her grandmother, Michele Larkin-Wagner, currently co-owns the studio.

After...

The July 1946 issue of Dance Magazine included this cartoon, titled “One Ballerina’s Day,” credited to none other than Mary Ellen Moylan, who at 21 was already well into her professiona­l career. An early student at School of American Ballet, as a teenager she had begun performing principal roles with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, where George Balanchine was resid...

Austin McCormick loves traditional dance forms: He trained at the HARID Conservatory and the Conservatory of Baroque Dance Theater before earning a BFA from The Juilliard School. But he’s also captivated by burlesque, circus arts, magic, and bacchanalian revelry. There’s no preexisting career lane for an artist as eclectic as that, so he created his own—Company XIV, an immers...

The dance industry is rife with competitive events where performers face off in hopes of winning coveted trophies and potentially life-changing scholarships. But judging dance is a daunting task. Though athletic, dance is an art, not a sport. And because every competition’s scoring rubric is slightly different, dancers may not always understand why they received a certain sco...

Dance Magazine has been both a resource for and a reflection of the dance community since publishing its first issue (then titled The American Dancer) in 1927. As the magazine’s centennial approaches, we’re examining how the publication has grown and changed over each decade, highlighting some of our