PhillyTablet Inquirer Daily News
Mobile
Home Delivery
philly.com
email
font size
options
 
Friday, September 9, 2011

My annual Frinjury

Dance injuries are not unusual, but how about dance-critic injuries?

I have sustained at least one injury at Live Arts/Fringe every year for the past several years. I've been poked, bruised, and scratched. But most often, perhaps as an homage to dance, my feet have suffered.

Most memorably, four or five years ago, a dancer with boundless, unharnessed energy, performing in close quarters beside the audience, stomped on my foot hard enough for me to consider getting an X-ray.

This year's Frinjury (I hope it's the only one) came tonight while going into the Wilma Theater to review John Jasperse's Canyon. A man opened the door for the woman in front of me. She wasn't expecting it, and stepped backward to accommodate his gesture - clomping hard on my foot.

I never needed special gear to perform my craft, but now I am considering steel-toed boots for all future reviews.

Or, perhaps pointe shoes, with their hard toe box, would be more appropriate.
Posted by Ellen Dunkel @ 10:52 PM  Permalink | Post a comment
Comments   


0 comments
About Philly Stage
Howard Shapiro reviews and writes about theater for The Inquirer, and has been on staff since 1970. He's had many posts at the newspaper, including cultural arts editor and editor of the Weekend section. He's twice been the editor of the Travel section, for which he writes frequently. He began writing theater criticism a decade ago, and has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, an Internews fellow in Greece, and a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts' Journalism Institutue in Theater and Musical Theater, where Robert Brustein was among his mentors. He teaches arts criticism and travel writing at Temple University, and is Broadway critic for the NPR-affliated stations of the Classical Network.


Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.


Wendy Rosenfield has been writing freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She also writes the ArtsJournal blog Drama Queen. She was 2009 and 2010 Guest Critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute, a 2008 NEA Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop. A graduate of Bennington College, she is inching toward a Master's degree in Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and a Brownie Girl Scout troop leader.

Advertise Here