World-class review of ballet and dance.
Nine hundred years ago in China, a renowned poet-artist named Su Dongpo (1037-1101) lived in Meishan, a city in Sichuan Province. He lived during the Song Dynasty, a prosperous period known for the proliferation of poetry and sophistication in visual arts underpinned by classical Chinese philosophy.
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Talk about your OG—or, in this case, Original Gatsby! Indeed, Los Angeles-based American Contemporary Ballet (ACB) has set the bar(re) oh-so-high, with its Original Gatsby concept/concert, “Jazz,” that even F. Scott Fitzgerald would have dug it.
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Nearly spring and time for lightheartedness or hopefulness, and two of the three women choreographers in BalletX’s spring program gave us some sense of new beginnings.
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Last week as certain ageist opinions were being aired in Washington, D.C., five performers in a tiny NYC East Village theater quietly made a case for the power of creative longevity.
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On the evening of March 7th, New York City Ballet opened a run of shows at Sadler’s Wells Theatre.
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The first few minutes of Pontus Lidberg’s “On the Nature of Rabbits,” confounds the viewer with a series of inexplicable images in quick succession.
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The Brazilian company, Grupo Corpo, peerless for their kaleidoscopic sets, costumes, choreography and their music, are touring the US with two reimagined works from just before Covid hit.
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Past the Gallery Kitchen, which for tonight has become an open mic Poets Café, I swim through the swirling 100-metre-long, multi-panelled Mun-Dirra (Maningrida Fish Fence), woven by 13 Burarra women weavers, which hovers above the floor and makes the gallery a waterway.
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At the tail end of the New York City Ballet’s winter season, the sixth and final showing of the “Classic NYCB” program featured thrilling debuts: soloist Emma Von Enck and second-year corps de ballet member David Gabriel assumed the lead roles in Balanchine’s tricky “Ballo della Regina.”
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As Belgian choreographer and dancer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker approached her sixtieth birthday in 2019, she decided to gift herself a solo to the music of one of her favorite partners—Johann Sebastian Bach.
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One would think that a dance inspired by the events of the January 6 insurrection—yes, a dance!—would not be the ideal stuff of theater, but the eight members of Laurie Sefton Creates (formerly Clairobscur Dance Company), succeeded in giving life to Sefton’s premiere “Herd. Person?”, while the dance, itself, was occasionally problematic.
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A man stands on a dark box facing sideways. He gently shifts his weight from heels to toes, rocking forward and backward. His gaze remains front, but his body never lands anywhere. He is in constant motion: neither here nor there, caught somewhere in between.
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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