World-class review of ballet and dance.
From the second definition of the word chroma, freedom from white, comes the entry point to this work of the same name, which affords the dancers of the Australian Ballet a whole new range of brilliant, athletic, hyper-extended movements. A languid wave one moment, convulsing and angular the next, movement and tempo in “Chroma,” choreographed by Wayne McGregor in 2006, appears built on contrast and a reduction of means that allows you to see the whole.
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Russell Maliphant’s latest mixed bill is an ode to the art of stage lighting and its uncanny power to charge a performance atmospherically. Under the direction of award-winning designer Michael Hull, the scenic ether of “Still Current” transforms from frantic to serene, intense to halcyon, the performers roving their way through shadowy pathways and flickering swathes of luminosity in search of something brighter. That’s not to say the dancing takes a back seat in this performance, however. The movement on display here is lovingly crafted and consciously centred, drawing its vigour from within and pitching it outwards to electric effect....
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When it comes to geometric shapes, Jacques Heim, 50, is obsessed. After founding the risk-intensive, hyper-physical dance troupe Diavolo in Los Angeles in 1992, Paris-born Heim translated that passion into full-blown, custom designed stage sets. Included are a 2-1/2-ton aluminum wheel, a 17-foot-long rocking boat and an enormous cube with more configurations than Mr. Rubik’s.
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“Transfigured Night,” Belgian choreographer Stijn Celis' third ballet (“Les Noces,” “Cinderella”) for les Grands Ballets Canadiens, premiered in May. It is a ballet in two parts: the first half tells the Greek myth, Orpheus and Eurydice, entitled “Orpheus' Gaze.” The second half takes its cue from Richard Dehmel's 1896 poem, Transfigured Night, and is set to Arnold Schoenberg's 1899 composition of the same name. The advantage of pairing the two apparently independent ballets in narrative terms, is a subtle one.
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Scott McCabe hops on one leg, his other limb elevated and tucked behind his ear at 6 o’clock (think Stephen Colbert dancing with the Rockettes to Daft Punk as part of his Colbchella week); David Maurice cuts a Nijinsky-esque swath as he leaps through the air; and Danielle Agami, clad in red-trimmed, high-waisted black satin boy shorts and a solitary stiletto boot, whip in hand, her breasts adorned with palm tree-like, er, pasties, could be a terpsichorean dominatrix—or a distant cousin to Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.
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Dance is music and music is dance and none more so than in “Love is Blind” by choreographer Russell Dumas. What we hear moulds what we see, and what we see moulds what we hear. As befits the black ink setting where faces are glimpsed and bodies are cloaked, this work teasingly and beautifully poses more questions than it seeks to answer, as it looks to renegotiate the terms of engagement of dance and music. This is a work that “investigates the intricate relationship between sight and sound and the somewhat surprising way that hearing trumps seeing.”
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In similar fashion to a time capsule, I am writing down what I think Nat Cursio’s “The Middle Room,” presented by Theatre Works as part of the inaugural Festival of Live Art (FOLA), might be before I see it so as to compare it to the experience of after—Robots in the home and flying cars by 2010! Really? You can’t be serious? In writing down what I expect, as surmised from interviews and descriptions of the performance; I am laying open my anxieties and smallness where the interactive is called for. The name alone—Festival of Live Art—fills this quiet mouse...
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All bathed, all drowned in a golden light. Like Carle Van Loo’s 1737 painting, Halt in the Hunt, our stage palette is set. Rusty browns and sandy ochres give way to earthy greens. This is nature, human nature, with all its lust for power and pleasure, its poverty and its rat-catchers, harlots, and spinsters jostling side-by-side. Our eye, like in that of the painting, is drawn to those of import in blue (des Grieux, our romantic, besotted and well-intentioned student-cum-hero) and red (Monsieur GM, “an old voluptuary, who paid prodigally for his pleasures”[note]Abbé Prévost, History of Manon Lescaut and of...
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Dance, architecture and Hollywood came together in a big way when L.A. Dance Project began its residency (performances are also scheduled for the fall) at the new Ace Hotel. And no, this was not a site-specific work danced on the rooftop by the troupe Benjamin Millepied founded in 2012 as an artist collective along the lines of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, but a bona fide concert presented on stage of the hip hotel’s theatre.
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Ballet and jazz can make for some interesting, if occasionally odd bedfellows. Throw in some cookware and neo-Pina Bausch gestures, and a program could turn raucous, joyful and, well, neither balletic nor jazzy. At least that was the case when BJM took to the stage of the Wallis, Southern California’s newest entry into the performing arts arena, where, happily, its 500-seat Bram Goldsmith Theater is a welcome—and spectacular—venue for dance (theater and music also co-exist here in the heart of Beverly Hills).
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This is decidedly not your mother’s “Nutcracker!” Sure, there’s that big, beautiful Tchaikovsky score—played by the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra under the deft baton of Nicolas Brochot—as well as a little girl called Clara (an enchanting Anjara Ballesteros), who dreams that her toy soldier will one day be her main squeeze (Stéphan Bourgond). But as for Drosselmeyer, this is where any resemblance to those many “Nutcrackers” of Christmas Past ends.
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“The Inkomati (dis)cord”—a world-travelling collaboration between dance-theatre artists Boyzie Cekwana of Soweto and Panaibra Canda of Maputo, Mozambique—ends on a bright, sardonic note, with a multilingual game of “Telephone.” The words travel down a bench of performers—from Portuguese, Mozambique’s official language, to Sena, one of its native languages, back to Portuguese, and finally to South African English, all of which, including the English, appears in English surtitles on a screen behind the action. As for the story, a woman’s dangerous border-crossing becomes, by the end of the line, a bid for a boob job and a bucket of KFC.
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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