Join dancer and Temple University professor of Dance Laura Katz and Department Head for Performing Arts at Drexel University Dr. Miriam Giguere in conversation with Philadelphia Ballet’s Krouse Family Principal Dancer Yuka Iseda after the March 11 matinee performance of The Sleeping Beauty. The discussion will focus on the history of The Sleeping Beauty and take place in the Academy of Music Ballroom.
Free for performance attendees
Laura Katz
Laura Katz Rizzo holds a Ph.D. in dance Women’s Studies, an Ed. M. in Dance and a B.A. in History and English. She has performed with several classical and contemporary dance companies including: the Joffrey Ballet, New York City Ballet, Ballet South, the Russian Ballet Theatre of Delaware, the Santa Fe Opera Company, and the Ballet Theatre of New Mexico, Dance Theatre X, and Sprezzatura Dance Ensemble. Dr. Katz trained in archival and oral history work through the Legacy Oral History Project and has written for dance publications as diverse as Dance Chronicle, Playbill Magazine, WRTI Radio, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Critical Correspondence, The Journal of Performance as Research, and Dance Research Journal. She is the author of Dancing the Fairy Tale: Producing and Performing “The Sleeping Beauty” (TU Press, 2015), among other articles and book chapters. Katz has shown her choreography widely, at independent venues around the United States, and her dances for film have been selected and screened at festivals around the world. Currently an associate professor and Bachelor of Fine Arts Program coordinator of Dance at Temple University, Katz has also taught at Mount Holyoke College, Bryn Mawr College, and Drexel University, among other institutions.
Yuka Iseda
Yuka Iseda began ballet studies at age five. She received training at Ecole de Ballet “PUCK”, in Tokyo, and Palucca Schule Dresden. Yuka joined Philadelphia Ballet for our 2016/2017 Season as a member of the corps de ballet, was promoted to Soloist for the 2018/2019 Season, and then to First Soloist for the 2019/2020 Season. Following the December 16, 2021 performance of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker®, Yuka was promoted onstage to Principal Dancer by Angel Corella. She has danced principal roles in George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker® (Sugarplum Fairy), Angel Corella’s Le Corsaire (Medora), Swan Lake (Odette/Odile), Giselle (Giselle), Don Quixote (Kitri) and La Bayadère (Nikiya). Yuka has also performed in the world premieres of Juliano Nunes’s Connection and Garrett Smith’s Reverberance, as well as Novice in Jerome Robbins’s The Cage.
Prior to Philadelphia Ballet, Yuka danced at Dresden Semperoper Ballet (Ballett Sächsische Staatsoper), followed by the Dutch National Ballet, Norwegian National Ballet, Tulsa Ballet, Angel Corella’s Barcelona Ballet, and Ballet Carmen Roche in Madrid. Some of her featured roles with those companies include Cinderella in Cinderella, Juliet in Romeo & Juliet, Hermia and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Clara in The Nutcracker, Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, and Odette/Odile (with Angel Corella) and Pas de Trois in Swan Lake.
Miriam Giguere
Miriam Giguere holds a BA in psychology and an MS in Education from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in dance from Temple University. Dr. Giguere is a full professor and the Department Head for Performing Arts at Drexel University, where she directed the dance program from 1992-2015. She is the founding President of the Pennsylvania Dance Education Organization and the associate editor of the journal Dance Education in Practice. She has presented at numerous conferences of the National Dance Education Organization and dance and the Child international, among others. She is author of the textbook, Beginning Modern Dance, as well as numerous book chapters including the recently published dance history text Milestones of Dance in the USA.