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REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Body was Made

It's not often I feel left a little cold by beautiful male dancers moving in a space. But the first twenty minutes of Angelin Preljocaj's “MC 14/22 (Ceci est mon corps)” feels like a series of empty gesturesand takes a while to develop, presenting as it does a ritual cleansing to one side of the stage and to the other, dancers on trolleys, packaged and contorted like meat in containers. They seem to be merely posturing, and it's a little trite- bodies are ultimately meat: yes, we know. That's well-worn territory in dance.The whispering, too, is distracting. However, by the third scene,...

REVIEWS | By Merli V. Guerra

What's Cooking?

Les 7 Doigts de la Main (or “The 7 Fingers,” as it’s referred to by its English-speaking audiences) is frequently classified as a group of circus performers. Yet after watching one of the company’s elaborate productions, it becomes clear that this categorization is hardly enough to define it alone. The men and women onstage are circus performers, yes, but they are also dancers, actors, comedians, and—perhaps most surprising of all—they are people. People with stories and appetites.

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Glitz and Glam

Glitter—this was one of the first details I noticed when I arrived at Wilderness Festival last Friday. The shimmery stuff was everywhere, winking at me from eyelashes, cheeks, t-shirts, bunting. Poking out of pockets and tumbling out of tents, glinting and gleaming in the hot August sun. By the time I’d settled into the campsite, I’d come across a fair few sequins, rhinestones and feathers too.

REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Lift Yr Skinny Fists

As the audience files in to the genteel space of the Edinburgh Playhouse on this night, ominous bells chime—a portent of something truly disquieting. This sound acts as a warning that the show will not be an easy ride. What follows is breathtaking—and divisive. Vancouver's Holy Body Tattoo, along with enigmatic post-rock band from Montreal, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, are a deadly combination, an eerie evocation of the end of days. GY!BE have always had an epic, uncompromising ethos, so this is an exceptional and inspired pairing.

REVIEWS | By Alessandra Tribotti

American Style & Crepuscular Ambivalences

A very American Paris Opera season—the first programmed by the now-former director Benjamin Millepied—ended at Bastille the way it had started, i.e. with yet another American double bill, reuniting an eagerly-awaited creation by the so-called NYCB enfant prodige Justin Peck with a great classic by his major source of inspiration: George Balanchine. Two choreographers, one similar theme, some mixed results and an inevitable sense of fatigue, generated by a season overflowing with a limited choreographic set of possibilities that is typical of NYCB but not of Paris Opera Ballet.

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Best Beware My Sting

Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew has long been plagued by its thorny gender politics. For decades, critics have debated the play’s depiction of female submission—is Petruchio’s ‘taming’ of Katharina straightforward sexism or satirical social commentary? In either case, the implicit likening of opinionated women to wild horses—strong-willed creatures that need to be broken—remains central to the plot, in which a roguish man is challenged to conquer a brassy woman so her charming (read: more compliant) younger sister can get married.

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

New, Hot, NOW

“Hot time, summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirty and gritty.” Here’s to the steamy summer solstice in L.A., and although there was no sign of the Lovin Spoonful at REDCAT’s three-week annual NOW festival (nine premieres by some of the city’s foremost dance, theater, music and multimedia artists), there was decidedly some heat on stage—not all of which was fabulous, however—during the festival’s second week (the festival continues August 4-6 with three new works).

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Visions of Enlightenment

Mythili Prakash, an exquisite purveyor of the South Indian classical dance form, bharata natyam, characterized by elaborate arm and hand gestures, mimetic acting and intricate foot-slapping, is no stranger to portraying demonic characters in Buddhist literature. With “Mara,” she has crafted a spectacle inspired by Deepak Chopra’s novel, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment, that was part Bollywood mash-up, part musical extravaganza and part psychedelic-inspired cinema.

REVIEWS | By Jade Larine

A Midsummer Night’s Breeze

As France was mourning the loss of its Nice fellow citizens, the warm tribute which the New York City Ballet paid to French musical heritage with an all-French-composers evening proved heartening. It doesn't matter that the program was planned long before the attacks happened; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly. Performing “Walpurgisnacht,” “Sonatine,” “La Valse” and “Symphony in C,” the NYCB tour in Paris drew to a close with rose petals and Champagne bubbles. It was just what everyone needed at that time.

REVIEWS | By Alessandra Tribotti

Young Stars on a Summer Night

At the Roman Amphitheatre in Fiesole, a town on a hill that dominates Florence from above, the sidereal luminosity of a cloudless night, married with the soft (for once) hum of the cicadas and the breathtaking roman and etruscan stones reminiscent of classical artistic glory, provide the ideal setting for a dance gala.

REVIEWS | By Jade Larine

A Tricolore Anthem

When the French-born but American at heart Benjamin Millepied took over the Paris Opera Ballet in 2014, he stated that the tri-centenarian company was aging in every way. Even though the troupe’s repertoire offered one of the world's widest ranges of ballets, from Nureyev’s masterpieces and Lacotte’s reconstructions to Preljocaj, Teshigawara or Bausch's iconoclastic works, the departing artistic director intended to dust off the supposedly stiff institution. Loudly and clearly. To start with, he nurtured a brand new generation of soloists in their early twenties, whom he brought into the spotlight: Léonore Baulac, Hannah O'Neill and Hugo Marchand. Then he...

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Firebird

Some things are eternal, such as the music of Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Bernstein. Alexei Ratmansky, one of the world’s greatest living choreographers, has made mostly astute and fascinating use of works by these composers in a program that also showed off the formidable talents of dancers from American Ballet Theatre as the troupe, in full-throttle dazzle mode, charmed Los Angeles audiences last weekend.

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.