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REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Another Fall Season

Fall is here, and the New York City Ballet embarked upon a new season on Tuesday night. Business as usual—except for the fact that I watched it on Wednesday morning. The dance scene in New York will remain virtual for the foreseeable future, alas. But there was great comfort in the fact that City Ballet could still offer an All-Balanchine program to commence its calendar year. The company’s fall season generally begins with a strong return to roots after the lengthy summer hiatus. I so look forward to seeing pristine executions of the Black & Whites, or a slate-clearing “Serenade,”...

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Flower of the Season

Now, it seems, more than ever, do we need art. And while Covid continues its assault on a huge swath of our population, relief came to this reviewer in the form of a live-streamed concert by butoh master Oguri. Bringing laser-like intensity to each and every performance while simultaneously creating portraits of staggering resilience, this supreme mover continues to surprise, stun and satisfy with his dances, whether solo or in conjunction with others.

REVIEWS | By Valentina Bonelli

Spilled Ink

There is a global and personal story behind “Ink,” the new creation by Dimitris Papaioannou that premiered in September in Turin, Italy. Just before the European lockdown, the Greek artist was working on his new creation (still untitled): a piece for seven performers which was supposed to debut on the 6th of May at the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, an international co-production involving thirteen main institutions, among them the Avignon festival, Lyon Dance Biennial, London Sadler’s Wells, Paris’s Théâtre de la Ville, Napoli Teatro Festival.

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

An Eternal Giselle

When German poet Heinrich Heine wrote De l’Allemagne (“On Germany”), which was published in Paris in 1835, he couldn’t have imagined that two short paragraphs from his book, where he so evocatively and vividly described an ancient Slavic legend of the Wilis, betrothed young maidens who perished before their wedding day, would inspire “Giselle”—one of the most enduring and popular ballets ever made—the quintessential Romantic-era classic.

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

Daring and Destiny

When Alexei Ratmansky was commissioned to create a new version of “Cinderella” for the Mariinsky Ballet, in 2002, he was an up-and-coming choreographer, virtually unknown in the West. In Russia, however, he was already regarded as a promising talent and a new hope.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

New [digital] Ghosts

What was live, I can pause, and it occurs to me that not being able to conveniently pause a live performance was one of the things I most enjoyed about it. It was live. It is live. It was/is roaring along, independent of my will. And in having no control over any part of its trajectory, I disappeared completely, in the best possible sense. I wasn’t me in the theatre or hall, but a series of notes, a flurry of limbs, a lightness, an extension, particles illuminated by stage lighting; anything. In this freedom, a different kind of pause. A...

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

Summer Shorts

In the beginning of August, Marquee TV—a performing arts streaming platform—unveiled its inaugural “Summer Short Film Festival,” a curated selection of 28 short films of dance and music from around the world. The festival is a result of the partnership of Marquee TV with the San Francisco Dance Film Festival and Scotland’s Screen.dance festival. All the entries of “Summer Shorts” are offered for free viewing until the end of the month.

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Kaatsbaan Dance Oasis

Real live dancing! In other times those three words might connote a neon sign outside a strip club. But in the time of Covid-19 you can simply take them at face value. And in this case, they refer to the highbrow shows of the Kaatsbaan Summer Festival, where a rotating cast of stars from the NY dance scene are performing on weekends all summer long. Stella Abrera, whose retirement performance as a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theater was canceled due to the pandemic just months ago, is already flourishing in her second career as artistic director of the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli, NY. In fact, she and executive director Sonja Kostich have managed to pull off quite a feat, holding the only live dance performances pretty much anywhere in the United States this summer. I lucked out: for the last five months...

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Róisín O'Brien

Festival Lights

Edinburgh is quiet. In August, the city normally swells with people jostling to get into theatres, pubs, shipping crates, beer gardens, and tents. The festivals are a key part of Edinburgh’s identity, and while there are often murmurs within the industry that a break from, or a scale back of the festivals wouldn’t do the city any harm, nobody wanted a break this way.

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

Memories and Illusions

The details of the tragic demise of the Romanov family, the last Imperial dynasty of Russia—and what really happened on the fateful night on July 17, 1918, in a secluded mansion, in Ekaterinburg, a town in the Ural Mountains—presented a great mystery that puzzled historians and researches for decades. The ultimate destiny of Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicolas II and Tsarina Alexandra Fedorovna, was particularly clouded by enigma, speculation and intrigue. For years, there were several pretenders, riotously claiming to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, who (as was believed by many) managed to survive the bloody...

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Bright Lights and Bach

It begins in a place I know well. In the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria. Benedicte Bemet, who was promoted to coryphée in 2013, to soloist in 2016, to senior artist in 2018, and to principal artist in 2019 with The Australian Ballet, is seated at the far end of the hall. Beneath the prismatic revelation of Leonard French’s Great Hall ceiling (1963–67), Bemet is alone.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

On the Front Line

With only a few words—“Lately, it has been considerably harder to rise,” Jacques Heim, founder and artistic director of the risk-intensive, hyper-physical dance troupe, Diavolo|Architecture in Motion, has managed to capture how so many of us are feeling during the unprecedented crisis perpetrated by Covid-19. These words, written by performer France Nguyen-Vincent frame Diavolo’s first foray into film, This Is Me: Letters from the Front Lines, which was commissioned by the Soraya and is available to view for free on that organization’s Facebook page.

Featured Reads

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.