Directed by Linda Atkinson & Nick Doob • Documentary • With Carmen de Lavallade, Geoffrey Holder, Ailvin Ailey, Lester Horton, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker • 2006 • 80 minutes
Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder, two living legends in the world of American dance, are the subjects of this intimate and revealing documentary. Carmen achieved notoriety in the early 1950s, as a lead dancer of incomparable beauty and grace with Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater. Geoffrey, large in life and an elemental force on stage, found fame not only as a dancer but also as an actor (Live and Let Die), soda spokesman (“the Un-Colaaaaa...”) and theater director (The Wiz). He and Carmen met in 1954 and married a year later.
Filmed over several years in the United States, Trinidad and Paris, this exquisite documentary features candid interviews and glorious dance performances, with legends like Alvin Ailey, Herbert Ross, Lester Horton, Joe Layton, Duke Ellington and Josephine Baker, demonstrating the amazing talent and uninterrupted creativity of these icons of dance.
Directed by Denis Sneguirev • Documentary • 2019 • 52 minutes
Marius Petipa was an unlikely artistic revolutionary. A middling dancer, he bounced around European cultural centres until he finally washed up in St. Petersburg in 1847 at age 29 – hired, sight unseen, by the Imperial Ballet as a pri...
Directed by George Nierenberg • Documentary • With Lionel Hampton, Bunny Briggs, Chuck Green, Howard "Sandman" Sims • 1979 • 59 minutes
The golden age of tap dancing spanned the first half of the twentieth century, but by the 1950s, the form fell to the likes of rock 'n' roll and modern dance. I...
Directed by Nancy Buirski • Documentary • With Tanaquil Le Clercq, Jerome Robbins, George Balanchine • 2013 • 91 minutes
Buirski (The Loving Story) brings to the screen the magnificent and tragic story of Tanaquil Le Clercq. Of the great ballerinas, Le Clercq may have been the most transcendent,...
