This site has limited support for your browser. We recommend switching to Edge, Chrome, Safari, or Firefox.

Latest


Batsheva Dance Company
REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Wild and Free

Finding my seat at Ohad Naharin and Batsheva Dance Company’s “Decadance,” the performance has already begun. In his own private world, on the stage of the State Theatre, Shamel Pitts, in a loose black suit and untucked white shirt, is dancing and I am so glad I have arrived with enough time to catch his playful, loose-kneed, liquid groove. To the side-to-side sway of early samba and late ’50s bossa nova, his moves call to mind how we might all dance if no one were watching. It is the contented, inward, and liberated dance of getting ready for a party,...

Continue Reading
Sankai Juku
REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Hourglass Figures

A kind of transcendent, spiritual healing took place over the weekend when Paris-based Sankai Juku, an eight-member troupe founded by Ushio Amagatsu in 1975—the master is still dancing at 66—wove a spell over those audience members who allowed themselves to be enveloped by a work about time, memory, the body and ritual. Visceral as well as highly cerebral, the 80-minute intermissionless “Umusuna” (it premiered in 2012 in Lyon, France), is a testament to humankind in all of its iterations.

Continue Reading
Liebeslieder Walzer
REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

Love and the Waltz

Throughout his life George Balanchine had a special affinity for the waltz. In his early works such as “Valse Fantaisie” and “Serenade,” and later in his mature pieces, especially in “La Valse” and “Vienna Waltzes,” and finally in “DavidsbĂŒndlertĂ€nze,” he imbued the waltz with dramatic meaning, bringing this popular social dance form to new emotional highs.

Continue Reading
Bill T. Jones
REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Keeping Time

An ubiquitous presence on the cultural scene for many decades, Bill T. Jones, at 63, has conquered Broadway, winning Tonys for “Fela!” and “Spring Awakenings,” as well as the world’s most elite concert halls. Snagging boatloads of awards along the way, including last year’s Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, several Bessies, and a 2010 Kennedy Center Honor, he has also been the artistic director of New York Live Arts since 2011.

Continue Reading
Diana Vishneva
REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Vish Fulfilment

Is there anything prima ballerina Diana Vishneva cannot do? Having recently turned 39, this reigning Goddess of the dance world (one who also commissions works made expressly for her), seems to be at the height of her powers—physically, emotionally and, possibly even spiritually—as she infuses every step, every swoop of her arms, indeed, her entire being, with breathtaking beauty, grace and a generous humanity.

Continue Reading
Twylight
REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Twylight

She’s twitchy, she’s testy, she’s Twyla! In this, her fiftieth year of dancemaking, Twyla Tharp barely needs a last name. And instead of going gently into that good night at age 74 and presenting a greatest hits concert for 12 dancers (plus one understudy), the choreographer has opted to make two new lengthy works, “Preludes and Fugues,” and “Yowzie,” each introduced by a John Zorn-composed fanfare as part of a 10-week, 15-city anniversary tour.

Continue Reading
Seeing Red
REVIEWS | By Madison Mainwaring

Seeing Red

In mid-July the grove on Amsterdam Avenue in front of the David H. Koch Theater was littered with cigarette butts. This wasn't anything out of the ordinary; the trees are adjacent to the stage entrance, and it's always where the dancers and musicians go for smoking breaks. The cigarette butts on this particular occasion, however, were a flaming red, making it look like a burst of confetti had just settled to the ground. No party had been thrown. It was just that the cigarettes, instead of the usual Parliaments or Marlboros, were Chinese, and the smokers were members of the...

Continue Reading
The Sleeping Beauty
REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

The Belle of the Ball

In his own cabinet of natural curiosities, the Amsterdam-based pharmacist, Albertus Seba (1665–1736), placed exotic plants and corals, birds and butterflies, and slithering snakes alongside shells in fantastical fanned formations to delight the eye. In the Australian Ballet’s Artistic Director, David McAllister’s first full-length production and choreographic debut with a staging of Petipa and Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty,” it is not hard to surmise that as a long-term former dancer with the company and now at the helm as director for his fifteenth year, McAllister himself has constructed something of his own golden ‘wunderkammer’ with this work. A production replete...

Continue Reading
Tree of Codes
REVIEWS | By Erica Getto

Colour Code

In 2010, author Jonathan Safran Foer took Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles and sculpted it into a new story: Tree of Codes. By die-cutting each page, Foer removed most of Schulz's words, but he left behind “a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities” on a single page. He tracked down “a small quick heartbeat, delicate and impatient.”[note]Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes, (London: Visual Editions, 2010)64[/note] And he carved out—literally—“an awkward undecided direction, a shaky and uncertain line of indefinite basic sadness.”

Continue Reading
Perpetual Motion
REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Perpetual Motion

Perpetual motion, states the first and second laws of thermodynamics, is believed impossible to produce, yet I unwittingly found it nesting within “20:21,” the Australian Ballet’s recent triple bill. The continuous motion within George Balanchine’s “Symphony in Three Movements” (1972), Tim Harbour’s new work “Filigree and Shadow” (2015) and Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room” (1986) circumvents such laws. Physicists, I’ll hear no more about it; you’ve been looking in the wrong places. There is a device that can make motion unstoppable and it can be found at the core of these three ballets.

Continue Reading
The Royal Ballet
REVIEWS | By Madison Mainwaring

Lobsterbacks

Is there such a thing as “Englishness?” What would be at the heart of such a quality—habits and customs, the time reserved for a late-afternoon snack, the famously reserved sense of humor? I'm writing this from America, a country that can only define its people by their plurality and multifariousness, the "anything goes" mentality which frequently manifests itself as aberrant exceptionalism. But contemporary scholars and thinkers shun the idea that a national stock or stereotype even exists. Characterizing a country's people reveals more about the observer's bias and preconceptions than it does anything else. According to this line of thought,...

Continue Reading
Amy Seiwert Imagery
REVIEWS | By Erica Getto

Starting Over

This week, I found myself curled up in the corner of my kitchen, shaking. It comes over me swiftly, sometimes, thunderously, always—a wave of weight. My partner knows this routine well by now, and slips into his role: he hovers over me, cups my ears, lifts my chin, and has me look into his eyes. Slowly, softly, it feels—no, I feel—lighter.

Continue Reading
Good Subscription Agency