Smooth as Silk, Strong as Steel

The style Kyle Abraham has honed over the years is unmistakable: a silken coordination of the body in which ripples and undulations pass through skin and sinew; an expressive use of the back; hands that touch, and really feel; impulses that start here but find their way there, and then there; a deep sensitivity to music coupled with an intelligent response to lyrics; a penchant for melancholy, leavened with sass. Abraham has a way of revealing his dancers to us without depriving them of mystery or coolness; he builds an atmosphere of intimacy, but something is held in reserve.

Northern Exposure

The good news is that companies are touring again. It seems like an age since New York received regular visits from large troupes from Europe and Russia. Seeing the National Ballet of Canada at City Center this weekend, back in the city for its first visit since 2016, brought home just how much the world has changed, and not for the better, in the last few years, through a global pandemic and, now, a shattering war that has divided the world into two camps.

March Gladness

I’ve long been preoccupied with the blurry boundary between arts and sports. To my mind, the Rose Adagio balances in “Sleeping Beauty” and Odile’s 32 fouettés in “Swan Lake” are akin to the triple axels in figure skating competitions. It was fitting, then, that Ailey II’s New York Season, which opened last week at the Ailey Citigroup Theater, fell during March Madness. As anyone with a busted bracket knows—and that’s most people this year—stats and seeds can amount to nothing in that wild window that is a live performance.  Oddly enough, most young dancers get very little performance experience until...

Clipped Wings

“La Sylphide” is a cautionary tale. Young men should not abandon their fiancées on their wedding day; they should not be unkind to beggar-women who turn up on their doorstep; and certainly they should not attempt to capture and possess that which can never belong to them. These lessons are hard-won. By the time the ballet has ended, a sylph—a spirit of the forest—has lost her wings, gone blind and died. The transgressor has lost everything: his family, his future, and, quite possibly his life.

View from the Still Point

You can fit a lot into three hours. You can span, if you have the reach and vision of choreographer Lucy Guerin, 21-years in a performance installation at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). A Lucy Guerin Inc production, presented in partnership with ACCA, as part of Frame: a biennial of dance, “Newretro” is 21 works, for 21 dancers, 21 years in the making. It is a recreation, rather than a retrospective, remixed from what was into what is, because this is as much about what the next 21 years might hold as it is about the wealth and...

A Jubilant Don Quixote

Just as the iconic 1973 film transferred stage designs to film, and the choreography “from a stage setting to a film setting [to] let the camera tell the story,”[1] The Australian Ballet have transferred the energy and humour of the film to the stage once more. As befits a company’s 60th anniversary, transplanting Rudolf Nureyev and Robert Helpmann’s “Don Quixote” from screen to stage 50 years later, called, of course, for a repolish of colour, as all tributes to legacy should. And so, to do justice to both anniversaries, as artistic director David Hallberg introduced, this rendition connects Nureyev’s “original stage...

Elevation

For the first time in six years an international choreographer has created a work on Sydney Dance Company. Spanish superstar Marina Mascarell’s “The Shell, A Ghost, The Host and The Lyrebird” is one of three works being performed at the Sydney Opera House as part of the company's triple bill, “Ascent.” The night brings together three wildly different works, three sublimely different choreographers, and two world premieres.

Rainbow After

In a world in the midst of war, emerging from its post-pandemic slumber, themes and acts of unity, contact and harmony are more than welcome. The differences that make us human are also, dichotomously, the magic that brings us closer together. The subtle nuances of language, the freckles on your skin, the color and glorious hues of your eyes, the food you eat and the mannerisms and peculiarities that identify you as you, are the uncompromising glue that holds us together.  

15 Minutes of FRAME

This time yesterday I was sat on the floor. This time yesterday, at 3pm, in the van Praagh studio, named after Peggy van Praagh, the Australian Ballet’s founding artistic director, at the Primrose Potter Australian Ballet Centre, I was unsure what I’d see, in the truest and best sense of being uncertain. Having taken the lift to level five, the path ahead was unfixed, something of which many tales of curiosity require. I was there to experience “An Afternoon of Work-in Progress Studio Showings” presented by the Australian Ballet as part of the inaugural 2023 FRAME festival program.

Kylin’s Garden

Some years ago, I wrote, “Dance has the power to stir the viewer's innermost longings and outermost visceral reactions. Few choreographers reach into those sensibilities as effectively as Kun-Yang Lin. With quiet power, he arrives at the essence of an emotion—humor, spirituality, anguish, ecstasy—extracts it raw, and then, with quicksilver speed, subtly refines it.”*

When Beauty Awoke

Avenging Angels

“I’m really into vengeance, sadly,” Maurya Kerr told the 92nd Street Y’s Harkness Dance Center director Taryn Kaschock Russell following Kerr’s “black calls to dark calls to deep underneath.” “I try to get it out in my work instead of in person,” Kerr added.