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REVIEWS | By Valentina Bonelli

A Dance of Seduction

The long-awaited “Don Juan” by Johan Inger for Aterballetto has at last found its way on a national and international tour. Due to the first Italian lockdown, the creation of the new ballet was suspended and postponed and when it finally premiered, last autumn, it had only two performances: a preview in Reggio Emilia, the city where Aterballetto is resident, and an official debut in Ferrara. An important stop in this year's new tour was in Ravenna, at the renowned festival founded by Riccardo Muti’s wife. Performed indoor at Alighieri Theatre, a beautiful “teatro all’italiana,” “Don Juan” had two performances,...

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Animals & Angels

“Animals & Angels,” the new pas de deux by #QueertheBallet founder Adriana Pierce, is so pretty and easygoing you almost forget how radical it is. The piece is under five minutes long and features two women, Cortney Taylor Key and Audrey Malek, wafting joyfully around an airy white loft. They beam affectionately at each other as Joy Oladokun sings the opening line of her song, “Animals & Angels:” “Would you like some coffee with a side of cream?” Suitably, Key has a on a cream-colored shirt with latte brown high-waisted pants, Malek sports the inverse. It’s all so pleasant and...

REVIEWS | By Claudia Lawson

Bangarra's SandSong

Astoundingly impactful, Bangarra’s “SandSong: Stories from the Great Sandy Desert” is a work that needs to be seen by all Australians.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Prelude to Anarchy

There is no genuflecting here. Joan Clevillé's new film for Scottish Dance Theatre, The Life and Times, is as close to the classic lush period cinema of Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman, with all of the integral anarchy, mischief and darkness as it's possible to create, without getting too controversial or explicit (neither director was a stranger to controversy, or well-crafted filth).

REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

In the In-between

The “Five Minute Call” proceeds a bit differently for this final offering in Pacific Northwest Ballet’s unprecedented digital season. In the pre-curtain video montage created by principal dancer Dylan Wald, we see the dancers pulling off false eyelashes and packing up—including sealing an era-defining face mask back inside a Tupperware container—then walking out of the dressing room to their post-performance lives. Except suddenly the footage runs in reverse. The eyelashes and costumes go back on, the dancers are back on the stage. Here we are in the heightened “already-but-not-yet” experience of our moment: We feel we are already past the...

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Rain Dances

When I attended a performance at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park last summer, it was a picture-perfect day. Though I went during the thick of the Covid pandemic, a gentle breeze rustled the sunny fields framing the beautiful dancing and I could almost forget about the raging virus. This year, Mother Nature had other plans. My original ticket was for the Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend, which was correctly predicted to be a rainout, so I was encouraged to attend the same program on Saturday instead. The show went on, though it poured up until a few hours before and...

REVIEWS | By Josephine Minhinnett

Mixed Moments in Montreal

It has been over a year since theatres closed due to Covid-19 and against my own logic, I am holding a ticket to see Canada’s first in-theatre dance program since the start of the pandemic: Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in “Echoes,” a 70-min mixed program of eight pieces, contemporary and classical, to include two new works by Canadian choreographers Hélène Blackburn and Andrew Skeels.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

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Part of thinking about dance is thinking about bodies, the space they inhabit and the intimacy involved in creation: this is surely as true for critics as makers. So it is with Jasmin Vardimon Company's enigmatic Canvas, which interrogates such themes. In the middle of the pandemic, we are all becoming increasingly mindful of the space we take up, how to not get in the way of others, and how to be sensitive and recalibrate where we walk, queue, run, and travel (if possible). Just a hand placed in the wrong way is dangerous, just invading someone else's path is...

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Take Me Somewhere

The beloved festival of performance, provocation and boundary pushing, Take Me Somewhere, curated by artistic director LJ Findlay-Walsh, would of course have been a live experience at Glasgow's Tramway this May, but with the city still in lockdown, it is in a virtual format online for the first time. A real genre crusher, TMS proves dance and live art can mesh easily together, as evinced by so many of the artists that are programmed as part of this year's line-up. Two such artists are featured here, both with very different pieces captured and live streamed on film. It can often...

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REVIEWS | By Candice Thompson

A Rite of Spring for our Time

Andrea Schermoly’s Rite of Spring, a dance film created for Louisville Ballet and currently streaming until May 31st, opened to the sound of the wind blowing and an ominous sci-fi text reading: “Post apocalypse, a seeded band of humans struggle to survive on a frozen planet. Battling a viral plague, they await a sign of hope.”

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

A Critical Failure

New York City Ballet’s Spring Gala featured excerpts by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and a new piece by Justin Peck—all filmed for the occasion by Sofia Coppola. Phillippe Le Sourd served as director of photography, Chad Sipkin edited, and Peck and Coppola were jointly credited for the concept—which placed snippets of dances all over the David H. Koch Theater as it reawakened from its long Covid slumber. The gala premiered on May 6th, but I sat down to watch it after I dropped my son off at preschool a few days later. This is the only upside to reviewing in...

REVIEWS | By Merli V. Guerra

Resilience

Pennsylvania Ballet’s recent virtual production, “Resilience,” presented a skillfully curated collection of ballets, beautifully reimagined for film. Contemporary works by Dwight Rhoden and Christopher Wheeldon balanced the classical nature of George Balanchine’s “Allegro Brillante” (1956) and Angel Corella’s rendition of Marius Petipa’s “Raymonda Suite,” both of which were brilliantly executed. Yet it was Rhoden’s “And So It Is…” and Wheeldon’s “Polyphonia” that made “Resilience” exactly that—resilient.

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REVIEWS | Lorna Irvine

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,...

INTERVIEWS | Marina Harss

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.

REVIEWS | Rachel Howard

Starry Nights

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.

REVIEWS | Faye Arthurs

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.

REVIEWS | Emily May

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.