Theodore Bale


Theodore Bale obtained a bachelor’s degree from the Hartt School of Music, Theatre and Dance, where he majored in piano, and a master’s degree from Northeastern University, where his studies focused on classical rhetoric. From 2000 to 2008 he was dance critic and columnist at the Boston Herald. His reviews and features have appeared in many newspapers in Massachusetts and Texas and he has written extensively on dance for the worldwide web. From 2002 to 2005 he served on the board of the directors of the Dance Critics Association and was co-coordinator, with Merilyn Jackson, of the DCA twenty-ninth annual conference in 2004 in Philadelphia. Mr. Bale was a 2005 fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts arts journalism program, based at the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina. He has studied classical ballet and a variety of contemporary dance techniques, performing with the Northern Connecticut Ballet for seven years. He has served as a moderator and lecturer on dance history, aesthetics, and criticism at Boston  College, Boston University, Boston Conservatory of Music and Dance, Bates College, Duke University, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, and Emerson College.

Mr. Bale grew up in Connecticut and lived in Boston from 1986-2010. He moved to Houston, Texas in March, 2010. At present he is writing a book titled Kisses to the Earth: The New Rite of Spring, a critical study of recent choreographic interpretations of Le Sacre du Printemps. A chapter,  Dancing Out of the Whole Earth: Modalities of Globalization in The Rite of Spring,  is published in Volume 31, Number 3 of the journal Dance Chronicle.

He might have become an arts critic as the result of meeting John Cage in 1976. Or, it could have been a performance of Anna Sokolow’s Lyric Suite or George Balanchine’s Symhony in Three Movements. He’s not quite sure how it all started.

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