Sharkbait and Jet Skis: Down the Time Tunnel with West Side Story

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MINDY ALOFF was an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Dance and, for most years, the First-Year Seminar Program at Barnard College between 2000 and 2017, where she authored courses on dance in film and the personal essay and taught dance criticism and a literature-and-ballet-history course, among others. She is now the dance editor of the University Press of Florida and an adjunct lecturer for the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College.

Notes

* Peter Gennaro's daughter, Liza Gennaro, taught for a while at Barnard College, where I also taught; she brought in films of her father's innumerable appearances and choreographies on television programs, among them Judy Garland's show, Kraft Music Hall, and, with his own group of dancers, the Ed Sullivan variety show, where he both choreographed and danced with jaw-dropping virtuosity.

1. Clive Barnes, “‘Gypsy' Bounces Back with Zest and Lilt,” New York Times, September 24, 1974; Frank Rich, “‘Gypsy' is Back on Broadway with a Vengeance,” New York Times, November 17, 1989; Ben Brantley, “New Momma Takes Charge,” New York Times, May 2, 2003.

2. Alisa Solomon, Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013).

3. Julia Foulkes, Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); To the City: Urban Photographs of the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011).

4. Julia Foulkes, http://juliafoulkes.net/ (accessed July 17, 2017).

5. Deborah Jowitt, Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 144.

6. Ibid., 38–42 passim.

7. Popular Balanchine dossiers, 1927–2004, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, *MGZMD 146, 42 boxes.

8. Jowitt, Jerome Robbins, 277.

9. Ibid., 274.