World-class review of ballet and dance.
The Royal Ballet’s first mixed bill of the 2019/20 season is a snapshot of 1960s British ballet and the polar places it went. Sandwiched between a spare modern creation and a frothy classical revival are bouncy character variations set to a turn-of-the-century orchestral work—slightly mismatched courses, sure, but an interesting snapshot of the company’s mid-century catalogue, plus a chance to see the Royal’s robust solo talent in action.
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Sydney Dance Company’s second program marking their 50th anniversary year is “Bonachela/Obarzanek.” This double bill celebrates the company’s history as laid out by its dancers and choreographers, and also the cultural contribution SDC has made to the contemporary dance scene in Australia and around the world.
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Birmingham Royal Ballet is on a creative commissioning spree. Set on widening its audience at home and away, the company has been funnelling resources into a range of choreographic initiatives and collaborations, and its shows are looking sharper for it.
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There is an itchy sense of restlessness to Emanuel Gat's ephemeral piece with Scottish Dance Theatre, a heightened kind of hypervigilance with a dozen dancers onstage always looking over their shoulders. They appear primed to pounce at any time, all too aware of lurking predators. It's there in Gat's lighting design, which is hugely evocative of twilight corners. It's woven into the alertness of eyes, the scratchy shapes of arachnid hands twitching in the air and protective hunches on haunches, the groups of two or three, rearing up like horses on hind legs. This “fight or flight” stance is a...
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“I remember the day.” So begins Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang’s crowdsourced lament, a eulogy for the lost, an encomium for those still with us, a sorrowful remembrance of a bygone world, one forever changed when some 3,000 lives perished on that horrific Tuesday in September. Making use of a single day as metaphor to cut to the heart of humanity, the 2016 Lang composition, “the day,” was commissioned by contemporary cellist Maya Beiser as a prequel to Lang’s 2003 opus, “world to come,” which was composed in response to 9/11, with “The Day” receiving its West Coast premiere over...
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There’s a mythic quality to Angelin Preljocaj’s “La Fresque,” both in theme and aesthetic. The 2016 production, recently shown in the UK for the first time, is inspired by a medieval Chinese saga about Chu (Marius Delcourt), a man who delves into a mural and marries its subject before being booted back to reality. There are pounding drums and starry skies, hair coiled to evoke ancient deities. We see pilgrims scaling mountains, seraphim swinging from the heavens, Spartans squaring off for battle. The folkloric angle is right up Preljocaj’s alley: other works with his Aix-en-Provence-based company include “Snow White” and...
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There is an ineffable poignancy, a sense of subtle melancholy even, to this immersive and moving piece, “Bodies of Water” created by Saffy Setohy, Aya Kobayashi, Nicolette Macleod and Joanna Young for family audiences. It is dancers Setohy and Young who perform, and invite the audience into a quiet, dark but cosy space for interaction and dance. Tables are festooned with little clay pots created across Scottish communities over the course of a year. As pairs, we too are invited (with eyes closed) to create little makeshift pots of clay, something to contain water.
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George Balanchine’s unconventional, even shocking, “Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir,” revived for this fall season by New York City Ballet, shows the choreographer at his most avant-garde and unexpected and allows the audience to appreciate once again the extraordinary range of Balanchine’s creative genius and his daring musical choices.
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The scenography here, from the ever-inspiring designer Alison Brown, is truly striking: black confetti on a clinical white floor; spiky masked not-quite-human creatures, elusive faces turned away, eerie white bound furniture, which is decorative as well as functional. Brown's black and white flimsy costumes act as sheaths (called winding sheets in ancient Celtic culture) both encasing and exposing the slender bodies underneath. This is “Endling,” Rob Heaslip's disquieting Gaelic meditation on death and the ritual of condolences and care. The sounds, created by composer Michael John McCarthy, range from birdsong to guttural, slurping sounds, drones to choppy electronica, and there...
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I don’t live in Sacramento—state capital of California, the world’s sixth biggest economy—but I half wish I did after catching “Mozart in Motion,” the Sacramento Ballet’s mixed-bill opener for its second season under new artistic director Amy Seiwert. From a corner of Midtown Sac, the year-old, $29 million Sofia Center gleamed with twinkly lights against fashionably angled concrete. Inside, diverse patrons dressed in architect-chic took their glasses of Pinot Gris inside the well-equipped, pine-paneled and burnt-orange upholstered 365-seat theater, one of two performance spaces in the complex. Most appealing of all, when the curtain went up: A company of 21...
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Sixteen years in, City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival continues to deliver. The shows can sometimes be a mixed bag, but the variety of programming is always interesting and the theater is unfailingly abrim with positive energy. There’s good reason for this: with every seat in the house costing just $15, world class dance companies are as accessible as movie tickets. The entire run is sold out this year, as usual. On opening night the crowd was a balanced blend of young and old, the gussied up and the flip-flop-wearing. The diversity of the entertainers on the stage also translates...
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With the Berliner Festspiel under renovation on Berlin’s western end, artistic director, Virve Sutinen, spread this year’s Tanz im August festival (TIA)—its 33rd—throughout venues in the eastern part of the city. By theater and neighborhood, here are 15 of the shows I took in at this year’s TIA. Each theater has a bar, but not one has so much as a standing or ceiling fan to fend off sweltering heat. So it’s BYOF—Bring Your Own Fan.
Continue ReadingTwo performers crawl in on hands and knees wearing neon green, hooded coveralls—the lightweight papery kind made for working in a sterile environment—and clusters of balloons pinned to their backs.
Continue ReadingWill Rawls makes boundaries visible by defying them. Known for the disciplinary and topical range of his projects, the choreographer, director, and performer approaches issues of representation in “[siccer],” a multi-part, multi-site work co-presented by L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival. A live performance at Performance Space New York...
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It is always interesting when multiple theme steps emerge over the course of a mixed repertory evening, but it is uncanny on one featuring five different ballets, each with a different choreographer and composer, covering a twenty-year span (2005-2025).
Continue ReadingZvidance premiered its new work “Dandelion” mid-November at New York Live Arts. Founded by Zvi Gotheiner in 1989, Zvidance has been a steady presence in the New York contemporary dance scene, a reliable source of compositional integrity, and a magnet for wonderful dancers.
Continue ReadingCleveland native Dianne McIntrye received a hometown hero's welcome during her curtain speech prior to her eponymous dance group thrilling the audience in her latest work, “In the Same Tongue.”
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