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La Scala Theatre’s ballet season featured a programme offering a snapshot of European choreography from 25 years ago.
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World-class review of ballet and dance.
La Scala Theatre’s ballet season featured a programme offering a snapshot of European choreography from 25 years ago.
Continue ReadingMeryl Tankard is somewhat of an Aussie dance legend. A choreographer of international renown, her works have been mounted and premiered on prestigious companies ranging from Royal Ballet of Flanders and NDT III in Europe, to the Australian Ballet and Sydney Dance Company in her homeland.
Continue ReadingThe Mark Morris Dance Group, now celebrating its 45th anniversary, visited the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a quick late-March run with two topical dances that were new to New York: one heavy and one light.
Continue ReadingDo ballet trends bubble up cyclically, or did artistic directors collude to engineer this year’s “Firebird” mania? Suddenly this spring, the flaring-eyed creature immortalized in Stravinsky’s 1910 score is headlining programs at American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem, almost all at once.
Continue Reading“Empreintes” featuring two new creations by Jess & Morgs and Marcos Morau, reads as a choreographic response to Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
Continue ReadingMaurice Béjart would surely have been delighted to see La Seine Musicale’s vast Grande Salle, that striking structure seemingly floating on the river above the Île Seguin, filled for all six March performances of his company’s tour.
Continue ReadingPenn Live Arts presented Rennie Harris’s “Losing My Religion” last week as part of its America Unfinished Series, marking the country’s semiquincentennial.
Continue ReadingMotherhood has often been idealized as the ultimate fulfillment of being a woman. In fact, in many cultures, motherhood is still understood as a woman's basic mission and an inseparable part of her nature.
Continue ReadingA gifted satirist, Jane Comfort’s dance theater productions are razor sharp and wickedly indelible. Take, for instance, the evening length “Beauty” (2012), with its robotic Barbie beauty contest.
Continue ReadingOn the first weekend of spring, Japan Society presented multidisciplinary, avant-garde artist Hiroaki Umeda and his dance ensemble Somatic Field Project in an evening-length program of his latest cutting-edge dance works.
Continue ReadingAmerican Ballet Theatre typically holds court in NYC twice a year. Their Summer Season at the Metropolitan Opera House features classical narrative full-lengths, and the Fall Season at the Koch Theater showcases edgier, short-form works.
Continue ReadingUnlikeable humanity in a rapacious society, Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” hits the zeitgeist—again. Recently staged by the National Ballet of Japan, it’s a stunning testimony to the ballet’s relevance across time and space. Fifty years since its creation and set in eighteenth-century France, the production nevertheless holds a mirror to now.
Continue ReadingWatching 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,...
Continue ReadingThe 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.
Continue ReadingAfter 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.
Continue ReadingAn “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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