World-class review of ballet and dance.
For novelists Eliza Knight, Barbara Quick, and Cathy Marie Buchanan, historical fiction became a window into these subtleties, allowing them to use both research and imagination to depict some of the dance world’s most iconic figures.
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Ilter Ibrahimof is the cofounder and artistic director of Toronto’s Fall for Dance North festival. Held annually since 2014, FFDN is a Canadian offshoot of the beloved New York City Center series.
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For thirteen years, from 2011 until this summer of 2023, Virginia Johnson was Dance Theatre of Harlem’s artistic director.
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When Mark Morris Dance Group comes to the Joyce Theater August 1-12, the two-week engagement will be one for the dance history books.
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A few years ago, I had the pleasure of catching a perfectly shaped, humorous dance vignette of two dancers with two chairs, set to the first movement of Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor.
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From the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago and Ballet Hispánico, to the Royal Ballet of Flanders and Danza Contemporanea de Cuba, choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa has covered the terpsichorean waterfront.
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“That was beautiful, but I didn’t get it,” was a refrain Brett Ishida got used to hearing in the audience at dance performances.
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Talk about a radical retelling of a classic story! In Benjamin Millepied’s “Romeo & Juliet Suite,” performed by members of LA Dance Project, the troupe he founded in 2012, there are three casts playing the title roles: a traditional heterosexual couple, two men, and two women. And, as if that weren’t a major departure from your standard issue “R & J,” this evening-length rendering has much of the action captured through projections from a Steadicam while the cast navigates myriad areas of the theater.
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Kenneth MacMillan created the short expressionist ballet “Sea of Troubles” in the late 1980s. The work draws on Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, and its central theme is Hamlet’s mental state following the suspected murder of his father, the King. As in many of MacMillan’s creations, an exploration of darker aspects of the human psyche underpins the ballet, whose nine scenes chart Hamlet’s journey as he becomes consumed with the desire for revenge and questions about guilt, morality, death, and what is true and false.
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As a choreographer and dancer who conceives and directs experimental performance, Dominican-born, Florida-raised Ligia Lewis is not shy about expressing her opinions, whether in an interview, on stage, or in real life. Indeed, with her most recent work, “A Plot/A Scandal,” which has its U.S. premiere in Los Angeles at the Geffen Contemporary at Museum of Contemporary Art, May 5-6, Lewis once again pulls no punches as she weaves together historical, anecdotal, political, and mythical narratives as only she can.
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Northern Ballet's critically-acclaimed adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” now in its tenth year, is back on May 16th at Sadler's Wells. With superb choreography from David Nixon CBE, audiences are sure to be dazzled by their highly visual, pulse-raising production, which promises to go deep into the scandals, decadence, wild parties and heart-rending tragedies. Above all, the piece will explore the huge moral ambiguity at the heart of the classic Jazz Age drama.
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In 2014, five years before writer Toni Morrison passed away, Princeton University acquired a collection of the luminary’s personal papers, letters, and manuscripts. The goal behind the collection (known as the Toni Morrison Papers) is to inspire original creations across genres; a more forward-thinking approach than simply cultivating research on Morrison and her work.
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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