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Battery Dance Festival
REVIEWS | By Rachel Stone

Battery Dance Festival

Though Battery Dance Festival has had many names and neighborhoods through nearly 40 years running, shifted by floods and unnatural phenomena altering the geography of the city, its home here, along the waterfront in Battery Park against the New York Harbor, brings the sublime into the space. The sun, in particular, backgrounding the seven dances on the first day of the weeklong free festival, arcs through the acts of the show, giving a program from companies from around the globe some grandeur and structure. It’s beautiful, and free, so its flaws can be forgiven.

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Yang Liping
REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

The Ultimate Sacrifice

It's the screaming that resonates around the auditorium. The blood curdling, hellish shrieks that chill to the bone. Such shrill cries to the gods to intervene. Ululations to despair and emptiness, entirely bereft of hope, rise up and circle the space. Is there anything more heart-rending, to see someone cry, and feel powerless to intervene? Crying, we enter the world. Screaming, we leave.

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Ballet Festival
REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Ballet Festival

By late summer in NYC the big hometown ballet troupes have followed their well-heeled supporters to their summer playgrounds in Vail, Nantucket, the Hamptons, and Saratoga Springs. What a treat then to have stars of the Royal Ballet present four different programs at the Joyce Theater in the doldrums of August. Kevin O’Hare, the company’s artistic director, curated the opening lineup and also invited current principals Lauren Cuthbertson and Edward Watson as well as former dancer/current designer Jean-Marc Puissant to arrange the other three—an interesting and generous idea. The first two bills ran last week, and though they were rather lightweight that...

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Venice Dance Biennale
REVIEWS | By Merilyn Jackson

The 13th Venice Dance Biennale

Leaving Venice after nearly two weeks of watching dance at the 13th Biennale Danza, our water taxi hurtled over the wakes of other boats darting from the airport. The Adriatic, a dancing sea of oscillating currents, provided an exhilarating ride along its shallowest tip. I would miss the dance, our lovely flat above a narrow canal and filled with musical toy-like gondolas each morning, the people and conversations. Maybe not so much being lost among the narrow, shaded alleys, the only escape from the brutal heat. The Biennale, and all of Europe, endured a few days of the “Sahara Wave.”...

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Montpellier Dance Festival
REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

States of Flux

While the global village keeps getting smaller, thanks to Google, YouTube, Instagram and the like, the real world of dance, happily, is growing larger. At least that’s the way it seemed during the 39th edition of the Montpellier Dance Festival. Founded in 1980 by dancer-choreographer Dominique Bagouet, who died of AIDS at age 41 in 1992, this annual celebration in the glorious south of France has been directed by Jean-Paul Montanari since 1983.

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The Little Prince
REVIEWS | By Merilyn Jackson

Seeing (and dancing) with heart

Philadelphia’s contemporary ballet company, BalletX continues to reach for, and often achieves, its ambition to commission new works, sometimes seven or eight in a season. To its credit, many commissions go to women choreographers, as underserved in the dance world as in the real world.

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Vuyani Dance Theatre
REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Dancing Death

For the first time in its 72-year history, the Holland Festival invited two artists to program its prestigious multidisciplinary three-week arts celebration that unfolded over various venues around Amsterdam—and both hail from Africa: The visual artist William Kentridge is from South Africa and the choreographer Faustin Linyekula is Congolese. It’s no surprise, then, that the internationally acclaimed dancer/choreographer, Gregory Maqoma, was asked to perform with his Vuyani Dance Theatre.

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Living Archive
REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Living Archive

He’s collaborated with some of the world’s most notable boldfaced names, including Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jack and Meg White of the White Stripes. He’s also served as movement director in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. But one of Wayne McGregor’s most recent collaborators is, perhaps, his most audacious yet—the Google Arts & Culture Lab, the results of which, “Living Archive: An AI Performance Experiment,” was seen onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion last weekend in a program dubbed, “Adès & McGregor: A Dance Collaboration.”

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LAC
REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Light and Shade

A bevy of black swans circled our car parked near to the lake’s edge. It was my first encounter with a black swan, nose to beak, separated only by a wind-up wind-down window pane. I would have been no taller than one of the swans, had I’ve been out of the car. I remember feeling awestruck by their scale, their very presence. And yet as I was four years of age, or thereabouts, is this a later addition stitched to a memory derived from family folklore? My mum recalled one of the swans hopped up on the car’s bonnet, but wonders...

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Birmingham Royal Ballet
REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Two Premieres and a Reprise

Birmingham Royal Ballet’s latest bill, “[Un]leashed,” treats us to two premieres and a reprised 2012 ballet, all from female choreographers. It’s an attractive offering, somewhat unfocused but capably danced and dressed with some handsome moments.  

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Gary Clarke
REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

The Pit and the Podium

Masculinity is at the core of Gary Clarke's best work: from “Bagofti” which used masks to distort through Francis Bacon's violent triptychs, to the surreal, dreamlike “2 Men and A Michael” and “Horsemeat,”  his is an iconoclastic approach to the representation of modern men. So it is with “Wasteland,” the follow-up to his award-winning “Coal.” “Wasteland” interrogates the effects of the closure of mines (in this instance, the Grimethorpe Colliery) on the local working-class male community, and the galvanising influence of rave culture on the younger lads. Using film footage, video work from Charles Webber and live vocals from local...

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