Light on their Feet
It was sensory overload at the Marciano Art Foundation last weekend when six members of LA Dance Project performed side-by-side, around, and, at times, seemingly in tandem, with Doug Aitken’s film, Lightscape.
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Tidal Movements
Three dancers drip down a wall like paint. Their backs press against the background as they slowly bend their knees, oozing down a blank canvas. This is a scene from John Jasperse's latest work, “Tides,” which had its premiere as part of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival April 10-13.
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Box Office Ballet
In its 92nd season—its second programmed by still relatively new artistic director Tamara Rojo—San Francisco Ballet kept playing with box office strategies.
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Evolving Dynamism
English National Ballet’s latest mixed bill presents a trio of works from William Forsythe, a dancemaker known for slanting ballet into new gradients, some playful, some confrontational, all of them spirited and agile.
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Portraits of a Lady
Martha Graham is the Georgia O’Keefe of dance. No matter what the source material, the primary subject of her works is womanhood.
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Aim True
With his peerless vocabulary of postmodern abstract moves—or, as he’s called it, “gumbo style,” which blends Black dance with classical ballet techniques—Kyle Abraham, a 2013 MacArthur Genius grant awardee, has been making thought-provoking works for decades.
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The Right Way
Can art save civilization? The question matters deeply to Brenda Way, who has dedicated her life to the arts in San Francisco.
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Artistic Reintegration
While the television show Severance has been exploring the pitfalls of a complete division between people’s work and home lives, Sara Mearns’s recent solo show at New York City Center presented the dangers of the inverse.
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Call to Action
Reggie Wilson's “The Reclamation” opens in a waiting room. The stage is bare, and one dancer wanders downstage alone, as if his number's been called.
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British Balanchine
The Royal Ballet, with their polite style and emphasis on purity of line, does not always make for the best interpreter of George Balanchine’s works.
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The Dancers Have It
In Ballet West’s most recent triple bill, which featured Jiří Kylián’s “Symphony of Psalms,” George Balanchine’s “Apollo,” and Nicolo Fonte’s “The Rite of Spring,” the dancers shone brighter than the choreographers.
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A Moving Prayer
In 1982, Bebe Miller made her debut as a dancemaker when Ishmael Houston-Jones invited her into his Parallels series that featured Black choreographers who were experimenting in new forms.
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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,...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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