Sparkling Celebration
I descend the stairs of the State Theatre, for that is where the emeralds are, beneath the Earth’s surface.
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New Definitions
SFDanceworks performs only a short run once a year, but it fills a big void in San Francisco.
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Paragon
From out of retirement came twelve dancers of the Australian Ballet. A dozen dancers to usher, in a sense, Adam Bull into his retirement at the close of the Melbourne season of “Identity,” in Alice Topp’s “Paragon.”
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Untethered
Much of the power behind Annie Rigney's “…she was becoming untethered” comes from what you can’t see. The new evening-length piece, which premiered at the 92NY, uses illusion and subtleties to meld experiences of sorrow, horror, courage, and humor, guiding the audience on a mysterious journey through the surreal.
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Vida Flamenca!
There’s hot and then there’s scorching. Such was the case when Madrid-born Daniel Ramos made an astonishing debut in his first Los Angeles performance at BroadStage last Saturday.
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Fractured Identity
A new Cathy Marston ballet for the Queensland Ballet had been a major draw card for the triple bill, however, there was a reverence to the evening that no one could have predicted
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Space for Transformation
Having just experienced the unboundedness of smoke that blew in from Canada’s wildfires to blanket the Midwest and the East Coast, I pondered “Extinction Rituals,” a dance-opera developed by the Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary duo Ximena Garnica, originally from Colombia, and Shige Moriya, from Japan.
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Big Ideas
Jacqulyn Buglisi is not one to shy away from big ideas. For the thirtieth season of the company founded by four of the last generation to have worked directly with Martha Graham, Buglisi takes on human rights, world peace, forbidden love, and climate crisis in a program of seven works, including three premieres.
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Change of Season
At the end of the busy spring dance season, just a few days before the summer solstice, two incubators for emerging choreographers—“Planting Connections: Curated by Kyle Abraham” at Lincoln Center’s Hearst Plaza as part of Summer for the City and “Fresh Tracks: New Works” at New York Live Arts—boasted mixed bills that were as provocative as they were entertaining.
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Worlds to Come
The final program of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s 50th anniversary season had a “cheering for the home team” flavor, and there was a lot to rally high spirits if you knew this team well.
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A Moveable Feast
Volta Collective, founded during the pandemic by Megan Paradowski and Mamie Green, fuses physicality, theatricality and multidisciplinary approaches to performance, with their recent “Salt” a testament not only to the group’s culinary prowess, but also to their musical, dance, thespian and literary chops.
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Still Life in Modern Classics
Illuminated by a single spotlight, a dancer seated atop a flight of dark, ominous stairs breathily whips and whirls her arms, reaching and pulling them inwards towards her stomach.
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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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