On pointe | Dance news | August 10

News and tidbits from the dance world this week:

• I'm a news junkie, so it was with sadness and shock that I stumbled upon a post on Dance Magazine’s website about the recent death of composer Marvin Hamlisch, many days late. Khara Hanlon pays brief tribute to Hamlisch and the impact of A Chorus Line.

• Also from Dance Magazine: A “growing list of active women choreographers.” Anyone you think belongs on the list? Feel free to send them your thoughts, or comment below. 

• A rogue email from a 13-year-old dance fan gave New York Times contributor and former New York City Ballet dancer Toni Bentley nostalgic pause. The young girl from Tibilisi, Georgia cut together a tribute video of Bentley’s one-time ballet master George Balanchine. The teen, as Bentley found out, happens to be a distant relative of the late-great choreographer.  

• Sex and the City fans are well aware of Baryshnikov’s acting chops, but my first introduction to the dancer–turned–thespian was before HBO fame, in a small theater on Manhattan’s Lower West Side. The icon was much older at that point, but I still expected to see the technically immaculate jumps and pirouettes that turned heads during his tenure at ABT. What I didn’t expect was to see him actually, well, acting. A pleasant surprise, indeed. He’s kept it up, as The New Yorker’s Alec Wilkinson writes.

• Apparently, Jack Dorsey learned something from ballet, and vice versa. Judith Mackrell of The Guardian chronicles how Twitter changed the way dancers communicate, and the lessons Dorsey took away from his one-time partner and San Francisco Ballet dancer Sofiane Sylve.