Shades of Opulence
Ako Kondo in Stanton Welch's “La Bayadère.” Photograph by Lynette Wills
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Old Wounds
The billing for “Young Men,” Iván Pérez’s contribution to NOW's WW1 Centenary Art Commission, features an up-close shot of a man’s grimy, tear-stained face alongside a quote from Jose Narosky: “In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.” The ad speaks to the hushed, harrowing sense of violence Pérez endeavours to capture and shape in his forthcoming piece, which is due to premiere in January and meditates on the psychological reverberations of wartime bloodshed.
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Give and Take
There are few dancers who can reconcile vigour and grace as seamlessly as Sylvie Guillem, she of Paris Opera and Royal Ballet fame. The French superstar teamed up with the acclaimed Russell Maliphant to create “Push” back in 2005, and nine years, dozens of performances and a handful of awards later, the programme feels fresh as ever as it returns to London for its final run.
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Something different, something new
In a recent conversation with the Royal Opera House, Wendy Whelan compares “Restless Creature” to a flower blossoming, explaining “at the beginning it is a tight bud ... but as the programme goes on the movement unravels.” To take her analogy further, I’d liken the bill to a romantic relationship unfolding, one that blooms in the wake of desire and fights to flourish, despite losing a few petals to the tribulations of couplehood. This interpretation may represent but a personal take, but there's no denying the four duets at hand—each of which features a young male choreographer who doubles as...
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Solo for Two
Today’s dancers are getting younger and more technically dazzling, coming from the jump-higher-turn-faster school of ballet. Indeed, So You Think You Can Dance, where the 90-second “contemporary” swaggerfest lives, springs to mind. But the question remains: Are these brave young terpsichores also more artistic or is it merely a surface thing?
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New and Unsettled
To begin, it is all about numbers and the patterns they form. One inaugural award, the Keir Choreographic Award, dedicated to commissioning new choreographic work and fostering innovation in contemporary dance both nationally and internationally.
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Hidden Talents
With “Tryst: Devotion and Betrayal,” New English Ballet Theatre demonstrates an unfortunate truth: enthusiasm alone does not a successful performance make. The dancers here are sound and their energy laudable, but the mixed bill, a hodge-podge of five wildly different works, ultimately proves a victim of its own ambition, pitching overpowering choreography to underwhelming effect.
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In pursuit of profundity
There’s ample room for wavering quality within a mixed bill. A couple of solid pieces can easily compensate for a weak one, and it only takes one standout work to make audiences recall a programme favourably, provided its companions aren’t complete duds.
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Imperial Suite
“See the music, hear the dance,” a quote attributed to George Balanchine, perfectly encapsulates “Ballet Imperial,” Balanchine’s one-act love letter to the choreography of Marius Petipa and the compositions of Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and the splendour of imperial Russia as he saw it. The work employs Petipa’s courtly overtone with its hierarchical framework of dancers and melds it to Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 2 in G major, op. 44. The result is a work that whilst recalling the Winter Palace with all its grandeur, typifies his belief that “dance is music made visible.” And having now seen this work performed twice...
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Torque of the Town
Deoxyribonucleic acid, a hereditary, self-replicating material present in humans and nearly all living organisms is a near-to dictionary definition of DNA, and this year’s “Bodytorque” theme. When we think of DNA, we picture two threads coiled to form a double helix not unlike a spiral staircase. And just as this genetic blueprint of “who we are” exists in countless possible conformations, so too it does in the 2014 season of the Australian Ballet’s “Bodytorque.” “Mysterious and ubiquitous, secretive and powerful, the elegant molecule is the engine of life on this planet. Now, a new generation of choreographers have created works...
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Playlist
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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Still Current
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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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,...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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