A Danced Rituel
When Frank Gehry was tapped to be the architect of Walt Disney Concert Hall, home to both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, he envisioned the space to be “a living room for the city.”
Continue ReadingWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
Casting is central to the most recent revival of Pina Bausch’s “The Rite of Spring.” Touring with a new duet entitled “common ground[s],” the mixed bill was put together as an homage to Bausch. While Bausch’s 1975 masterwork features 34 extremely talented, diversely trained dancers from 14 African countries, “common ground[s]” creates an entire universe with just two captivating dancers in their seventies: Senegalese-French choreographer Germaine Acogny, founder of the international education center for traditional and contemporary African dances, Ecole des Sables, and the French dancer Malou Airaudo, who is a former member of Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. The show, co-produced by the Pina Bausch Foundation, Ecole des Sables, and Sadler’s Wells, was set to premiere in Dakar in early 2020, but the pandemic forced the newly assembled company to disband before that performance. (However, the film “Dancing at Dusk,” captures the final run through of “Rite,” on a beach, before the world went into lock downs. It is available here through Friday, January 5th.)
Performance
Place
Words
When Frank Gehry was tapped to be the architect of Walt Disney Concert Hall, home to both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, he envisioned the space to be “a living room for the city.”
Continue ReadingSan Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House is a grand, gracious theater, so it was a big deal to see the San Francisco Ballet School hold its end-of-year performances in that hall for the first time since at least 1985.
Continue ReadingAt its heart, “Sylvia” is a ballet about the resistance to love—a theme that continues to resonate deeply, as the human spirit often recoils from love, driven by fear, pride, a need for control, or the weight of duties and moral constraints.
Continue ReadingSince the 1970s, the Paris Opera Ballet has cultivated a distinctive tradition of nurturing its own dancers as emerging choreographers.
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