Feathers Flying
In a world where Tchaikovsky meets Hans Christian Andersen, circus meets dance, ducks transform and hook-up with swans, and of course a different outcome emerges.
Continue Reading
World-class review of ballet and dance.
In a world where Tchaikovsky meets Hans Christian Andersen, circus meets dance, ducks transform and hook-up with swans, and of course a different outcome emerges.
Continue ReadingMao Zedong’s famous statement that women hold up half the sky may sound poetic and even liberating.
Continue ReadingThe men are already on stage when the audience filters into the theater. Some stand stretching at the ballet barres, aligned in neat rows, and others move around, jumping, swinging their legs, lunging.
Continue ReadingThe questions that the choreographic duo known as Baye & Asa set out to answer in their in-progress work, “At the Altar” may or may not be rhetorical: Who or what do we worship? How do we worship? Who are the righteous? Who are the blasphemous?
Continue ReadingOn the rear wall of New York Live Arts’ black box theater, two grids of a dozen headlamps each resemble the glaring light towers of a sports arena.
Continue ReadingTwo productions in one, “World Tales in Dance,” was a charming, crowd-pleasing afternoon of dance theatre.
Continue ReadingIn Jo Warren’s “All Mouth,” five dancers perform what could be an action scene from a movie with the playback speed slowed down and sound turned off.
Continue ReadingThe Pioneers Go East Collective's Out-Front! Festival highlights “radical queer art + dance,” making it a perfect resident festival for the historic Judson Memorial Church.
Continue Reading“Profanations,” created by choreographer Faustin Linyekula and music artist Franck Moka, is not a “just” dance piece: it’s a live concert, a cinematic séance.
Continue ReadingMarie Antoinette is not an entirely sympathetic character. Her penchant for luxury and extravagance—and the degree to which she was out of touch with the lives of the majority— made her a symbol of the wealth disparity that prompted the French Revolution.
Continue ReadingAscending the Guggenheim Museum's rings through Rashid Johnson's retrospective, “A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” is a dance in of itself.
Continue ReadingA lone musician stands at the corner of the darkened stage. His shakuhachi (bamboo flute) echoes, melancholy, as the sound of an ominous wind rises.
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.
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading