Jiří Kylián, Discipline and Freedom
The world-renowned Czech choreographer and multimedia artist Jiří Kylián was recently honored with a retrospective festival at the Oslo opera house.
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Olga Smirnova, Leaps and Bounds
Until March 2022, Olga Smirnova was one of the top dancers at the Bolshoi, performing roles in a large swathe of the repertory, everything from Odette in “Swan Lake” to Marguerite Gauthier in John Neumeier’s “Lady of the Camellias” and Bianca in Jean-Christophe Maillot’s “Taming of the Shrew.” She was an infrequent visitor to New York, though she appeared in Natalia Makarova’s “La Bayadère” at American Ballet Theatre in 2014 and took part in the now legendary performances of George Balanchine’s “Jewels” at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2017, in which each section—”Emeralds,” “Rubies,” “Diamonds”—was taken on by dancers from...
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Welcome to Wonderland
A delightful production, served with verve: the National Ballet of Japan’s recent performance of “Alice in Wonderland” was an unabashed celebration of imagination, deftly showcasing all the wacky wonder of Christopher Wheeldon’s modern ballet classic.
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L.A. Anthem
Casual perfection. Studied grace. Spontaneous elegance. These are but a few of the words that came to mind when this writer observed nine gorgeous dancers from LA Dance Project and four students from the Trudi Zipper Dance Institute at the Colburn School, cavorting around the courtyard and grounds of the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts last Friday in Janie Taylor’s “Anthem.”
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Count Down
So, shoe me! Seriously, there have been countless iterations of the ballet “Cinderella,” all pivoting around footwear, whether pointe, glass or golden slippers. Indeed, this particular terpsichorean fairytale can be traced back to the early nineteenth century, but it wasn’t until Prokofiev finished his brooding Romantic score in 1944 that choreographers, including Frederick Ashton, Rudolf Nureyev and Alexei Ratmansky, began telling the tale of fairy godmothers, crystal coaches and a rags-to-riches heroine.
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Keeping the Faith
There’s a small moment in Rena Butler’s new “Cracks” that I think only could have become possible at Pacific Northwest Ballet, which commissioned it. At stage right, two tall dancers, both dressed like Catholic school students in pleated skirts and polo shirts, pas de bourrée and then rebound out of a sissonne into more pointe work. Both dancers have strong, well-shaped feet, compact hips, lyrically expressive torsos, and wide shoulders. Only after a few bars of music could I confirm that the dancers were Elle Macy, who is female-identifying, and Zsilas Michael Hughes, who is gender-nonbinary.
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Team Effort
This year marked the 60th anniversary of the School of American Ballet’s annual Workshop Performances. The programming was unusually democratic this year.
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Star Dust
We are all of us, beings, in a constant state of continual change. We humans are a composition of oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen.
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Words of Meaning
The title of Catherine Tharin’s latest production, “In the Wake of Yes,” is a reference to “Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy,” an inner monologue on womanhood and sexuality, from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Tharin matches the tone of this work as she picks up on an exuberant string of “yeses” from that text. Her witty series of dances explores romance and its complications. At the center of the show is a film by Lora Robertson that lifts the dancers out of the tiny East Village stage and transports them (and us) to scenes of contemporary New York City. Tharin, who danced with the...
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Character Act
Through its newly opened program, “Other Dances,” Dutch National Ballet kicks off the summer with a slate of lighthearted fare that varies in precise approach but altogether evokes an effervescent mood.
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Requiem for Humanity
Taking the historian’s long view, the message within “Last and First Men,” that “the whole duration of humanity, its evolution, and many successive species, is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos,” is, to me, ultimately a comfort.
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For the Muses
While the ghosts of, among others, Judy Garland, Jack Benny and the cast of “All in the Family” might be haunting Television City’s soundstage 33 in Los Angeles, the dancers of American Contemporary Ballet (ACB), took metaphoric flight on Thursday when they performed the world premiere of, “The Euterpides.”
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Teenage Angst and Institutions
Watching Matthew Bourne's reworked version of the “star-cross'd lovers,” I was briefly reminded of Veronica, played by Winona Ryder, in the dark 1988 comedy by Daniel Waters and Michael Lehmann, Heathers, and her line, “my teen angst bullshit has a body count.” Yes, this is the darker side of Bourne's repertoire,...
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The Me of Today
The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.
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Beneath blue California skies, manicured trees, and the occasional hum of an overhead airplane, Tamara Rojo took the Frost Amphitheater stage at Stanford University to introduce herself as the new artistic director of San Francisco Ballet.
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America, F**K Yeah
After a week of the well-balanced meal that is “Jewels”—the nutritive, potentially tedious, leafy greens of “Emeralds,” the gamy, carnivorous “Rubies,” and the decadent, shiny white mountains of meringue in “Diamonds”—the New York City Ballet continued its 75th Anniversary All-Balanchine Fall Season with rather more dyspeptic fare.
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Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup
An “Ajiaco” is a type of soup common to Colombia, Cuba, and Peru that combines a variety of different vegetables, spices, and meats.
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