Fighting Spirit
There’s a distinct warrior theme to the evening shared by Angie Pittman and Kyle Marshall, though the two choreographers are working in very different styles and tone.
Continue ReadingWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
Jessica Lang’s “Black Wave,” her first creation as Pacific Northwest Ballet’s new resident choreographer, is an elusive allegory wrapped inside a metaphor wrapped inside a dream. Rarely have I so wanted to ask a choreographer what she intended.
This is surprising because Lang has already rather explicitly described what “Black Wave” is about. The ballet was inspired by “mental health awareness,” the program note she wrote says, and is “rooted in the philosophy” of kintsugi, the Japanese art of piecing cracked objects back together with gold lacquer, thus making beauty of the brokenness rather than hiding it. Lang’s husband, former Ailey dancer Kanji Segawa, is credited as an artistic collaborator. The spare, eerily textured, and deeply compelling music for strings and piano by New Zealand prodigy Salina Fisher begins with a composition actually titled “Kintsugi,” which Lang serendipitously discovered on the radio after already settling on the Kintsugi concept, according to an interview with Fisher published by PNB. So then, Lang is not trying to play coy about the ballet’s meanings. Still, it took me three viewings of “Black Wave” (which I watched on screen thanks to PNB’s digital season offerings) to guess what she might have been up to.
Performance
Place
Words
“Uncommonly intelligent, substantial coverage.”
Your weekly source for world-class dance reviews, interviews, articles, and more.
Already a paid subscriber? Login
There’s a distinct warrior theme to the evening shared by Angie Pittman and Kyle Marshall, though the two choreographers are working in very different styles and tone.
Continue ReadingIt’s not often these days that aspiring dancers and smaller companies can enjoy the luxury of state-of-the-art facilities to develop their practice and put on a show, especially in a capital city.
Continue ReadingToday I have the privilege of speaking with the divine Juliet Doherty. Juliet was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is slightly more Breaking Bad than “Swan Lake,” but Juliet's grandparents owned a ballet studio which passed to Juliet's mother, and so the artistic genes ran deep.
FREE ARTICLEOne of the gems of New York City’s dance landscape is the Graham Studio Series, a programming cycle that offers behind-the-scenes interaction with the work of the Graham Company in their studio space. In early January, the series presented a Graham Deconstructed event exploring Martha Graham’s modernist masterwork “Cave of the Heart.”
Continue Reading
comments