All – Tagged "DANCE FILM" – Page 6

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DANCE FILM | By Rachel Stone

First Impressions

In a hot spring in the Netherlands, steam rising from the water, a man begins to dance. It’s night, and the sky and water are dark. The man, rugged and fortyish, swims towards the filmmaker recording him on a mobile phone. The man unfolds his arms in mock-grace, spinning with arms raised above him in a rounded fifth position. Swimmers shout over the warm roar of the waves. Muffled classical music plays from what sounds like a gramophone. The man spins and springs out of the water belly-first—a hairy, barrel-chested merman surfacing from the sea.

DANCE FILM | By Rachel Stone

Polina, danser sa vie

In the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale The Red Shoes, a young girl is given an auspicious gift: a pair of slippers, stitched with a curse. Once she slips on the red shoes, she can’t stop dancing. The shoes carry her out into the dark forest, and into an open grave. In the fairytale, she is doomed to dance until a kind executioner cuts off her feet. In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 film by the same name, the young dancer (Moira Shearer) throws herself from an open window.

DANCE FILM | By Madison Mainwaring

Ballet Vérité

There's something about the formalisms of the ballet world that gives one an almost racy feeling when its backstage doors open up. One of the great strengths of Ballet 422, directed by Jody Lee Lipes and produced by Ellen Bar (the latter a former soloist with NYCB; the two are married): all that takes place backstage remains unadorned. There are no back-stories, no interviews, and we're left not knowing the names of some of the dancers. Then again, ballet is about "showing and not telling," Bar told me over the phone. A dance doesn't come with footnotes or appendixes attached;...

DANCE FILM | By Victoria Looseleaf

Mia, A Dancer’s Journey

“I didn’t make this film to figure out my relationship to my mother. I did it because I wanted her to know when she left this world that what she had done in her life would not just disintegrate and disappear. I also promised my mother before she died,” explained Maria Ramas, daughter of ballerina/teacher, Mia Slavenska, “that I would complete the process that she had started. Telling her story would be a coherent record and her view of her art.”

DANCE FILM | By Sara Veale

Unpathed Waters

I can still recall the intrigue I experienced when a trailer I saw at the cinema last autumn turned out to be an advertisement for a live screening of the Royal Ballet’s “The Nutcracker.” The prospect of attending the beloved Christmas production remotely—that is, viewing it from seats other than the velvety crimson ones of the Royal Opera House—was, and is, a fascinating compromise indeed. Unlike TV relays or DVD viewings, customary alternatives for catching the troupe's performances, a live screening has the distinct selling point of preserving, in real time no less, the crucial “out” portion of a night...

DANCE FILM | By

The Everything and Nothing of Frances Ha

By Charlotte St Clair Wilson

DANCE FILM | By Deborah Jones

Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance

Robert Joffrey had not long started ballet classes when he was tapped to be a supernumerary in a Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo production of “Petrushka,” touring to Joffrey’s home town of Seattle. A few weeks later he was in the audience for another performance. It wasn’t America’s seasonal, perennial favourite (and lifeboat for almost every US company), “The Nutcracker,” nor was it the war-horse “Swan Lake;” it was Kurt Jooss’s fabled anti-war ballet “The Green Table”—a heady experience for an 11-year-old.

DANCE FILM | By Gracia Haby

Move to Move

“Muscular preambles ripple beneath the skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate. Something is being decided. A breeze of emotion underlines the mouth with clouds. The orography of the face vacillates. Seismic shocks begin. Capillary wrinkles try to split the fault. A wave carries them away. Crescendo. A muscle bridles. The lip is laced with tics like a theatre curtain. Everything is movement, imbalance, crisis.”—(One of the great silent film directors) Jean Epstein (1897-1953)

Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Lorna Irvine

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,...

INTERVIEWS | Marina Harss

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.

REVIEWS | Rachel Howard

Starry Nights

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.

REVIEWS | Faye Arthurs

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.

REVIEWS | Emily May

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.