World-class review of ballet and dance.
Do ballet trends bubble up cyclically, or did artistic directors collude to engineer this year’s “Firebird” mania? Suddenly this spring, the flaring-eyed creature immortalized in Stravinsky’s 1910 score is headlining programs at American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem, almost all at once.
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“Empreintes” featuring two new creations by Jess & Morgs and Marcos Morau, reads as a choreographic response to Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
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Maurice Béjart would surely have been delighted to see La Seine Musicale’s vast Grande Salle, that striking structure seemingly floating on the river above the Île Seguin, filled for all six March performances of his company’s tour.
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Penn Live Arts presented Rennie Harris’s “Losing My Religion” last week as part of its America Unfinished Series, marking the country’s semiquincentennial.
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A gifted satirist, Jane Comfort’s dance theater productions are razor sharp and wickedly indelible. Take, for instance, the evening length “Beauty” (2012), with its robotic Barbie beauty contest.
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On the first weekend of spring, Japan Society presented multidisciplinary, avant-garde artist Hiroaki Umeda and his dance ensemble Somatic Field Project in an evening-length program of his latest cutting-edge dance works.
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American Ballet Theatre typically holds court in NYC twice a year. Their Summer Season at the Metropolitan Opera House features classical narrative full-lengths, and the Fall Season at the Koch Theater showcases edgier, short-form works.
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Unlikeable humanity in a rapacious society, Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” hits the zeitgeist—again. Recently staged by the National Ballet of Japan, it’s a stunning testimony to the ballet’s relevance across time and space. Fifty years since its creation and set in eighteenth-century France, the production nevertheless holds a mirror to now.
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An ambitious yet flawed work, “Dis-order,” seen last week at the Skirball Cultural Center, was described in the program notes as a “communal ritual, and a family drama that asks what forces move through us when we enact an ancient spring rite, and what is left unspoken when we gather around the table.”
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Crystal Pite is a connoisseur of the ensemble, with a forte for spotlighting the humanity of the collective, from the tight-knit flock to the anonymised mass.
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Looking down into the rotunda from the spiral ramp of New York’s Guggenheim Museum can be dizzying. My perch tonight is located two-thirds of the way to the top—and it’s the best view in the house for Lucinda Childs’ Early Works program.
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Push and pull are pretty commonplace commands. You can push someone’s buttons, pull someone’s leg. Somehow we always manage to conflate the two when facing a door in a public place.
Continue ReadingThe title of this dance interpretation of The Tempest highlights a notable departure from canon. In “We Caliban,” Shobana Jeyasingh imagines Shakespeare’s titular native in the collective sense—a tribe, a spirit and a place at once.
Continue ReadingLong before the dancers take the stage, Dance Theatre of Harlem’s season at New York City Center feels like one of the most energizing cultural events of the spring.
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It is rare for George Balanchine’s grand, bedazzled “Symphony in C” to open a program. Its champagne-popping finale for 52 dancers tends to be a nightcap.
Continue ReadingWhen we think of countries that have shaped the world of dance our mind will often drift to the United States, Russia, or Germany. But what of Luxembourg?
Continue ReadingIn times of rapid change, predicting the road ahead can seem to be a fool’s errand. But on a spring afternoon at Lincoln Center, I feel confident in this assertion: the future of dance is very bright.
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