Music as Muse
Music was muse, medium, and the message during Kyle Marshall Choreography’s recent engagement at the Joyce Theater.
FREE ARTICLEWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
Music was muse, medium, and the message during Kyle Marshall Choreography’s recent engagement at the Joyce Theater.
FREE ARTICLEWTF! And this reviewer means that in a good way. No, make that a great way! Whatever it was—and is—“takemehome,” the 65-minute work choreographed by Paris, France-based Dimitri Chamblas, was, by turns, provocative, enigmatic, stunning, stirring, singular and, well, something else again.
Continue ReadingAs Ballet West celebrates its 60th anniversary, it is clearly on an upward trajectory. The company is consistently filling seats, tackling more ambitious work, and the company’s first triple bill of the season was no exception.
FREE ARTICLEI’d nearly forgotten the many pleasures of watching dance from a folding chair on a riser in a SoHo loft, sound of sirens and traffic rising from the street outside to compete with the more subtle notes of a cello.
Continue ReadingOla Maciejewska’s “Bombyx Mori” is the second hour-long work in the “Dance Reflections” festival I’ve seen so far. Is this a new trend in European dance, I wonder?
FREE ARTICLEAmerican Ballet Theatre’s fall season has been brief, too brief to form a sense of the new director Susan Jaffe’s tastes and intentions.
Continue ReadingIn Sankai Juku's “Kōsa,” bodies don't just speak, they echo. Movement is generated on dancers then released into the air.
FREE ARTICLEEvery human dreams of flying at some point. We watch the birds and imagine ourselves soaring above the landscape.
Continue Reading“What is dance?” is a question posited by postmodern choreography, and postmodern choreographers generally seek to answer it through means as far away from conventional notions of dance as possible.
Continue ReadingTo consider (La)Horde is to contemplate cool. The French collective is made up of artists Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer, and Arthur Harel.
Continue ReadingWhat’s that you see out of the corner of your eye? Is the painting . . . moving? In Florence Peake’s “Factual Actual,” the artist and her collaborators break down the boundaries between inanimate objects and living people with calm assurance and a dash of whimsy.
FREE ARTICLEThink Sankai Juku on steroids, or a sort of fractured Sufism where spinning does rule, but in the über-darkness of night.
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.
Continue ReadingBeneath 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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