All – Tagged "REVIEWS" – Page 85

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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.”...

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.

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.

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.

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.”

FEATURES | REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Story Lines

Prologue

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...

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.

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...

REVIEWS | By Merli V. Guerra

Rhapsody

Boston Ballet closed its 2018-19 season with a touch of the new and a revival of the past with “Rhapsody,” a mixed program featuring seldom-seen works by Leonid Yakobson, alongside George Balanchine, and the world premiere of “ELA, Rhapsody in Blue” by Boston Ballet principal Paulo Arrais.

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Rigour and vigour

It’s elaborate partnerwork and committed performances at programme C of San Francisco Ballet’s big London tour, a two-week bonanza of 12 UK premieres spread over four different mixed bills. This one features Liam Scarlett’s 2014 ballet “Hummingbird” sandwiched between 2018 works from Stanton Welch and Justin Peck. All three pieces invoke abstract themes and contemporary choreography, though their respective tones and textures vary widely.

REVIEWS | By Jade Larine

Arty-farty Nutcracker

Reuniting two separated siblings, opera and ballet, was Benjamin Millepied and Stéphane Lissner’s mantra. And so they did. The premiere of the extravagant double bill “Iolanta/The Nutcracker,” staged by Dmitri Tcherniakov, was a major highlight of the Paris Opera Ballet's 2015-2016 season. There wasn’t much left of the original 1892 version, though. Tcherniakov was much praised for endowing the two scattered works with a newfound unity, his “Nutcracker” responding to “Iolanta” in some ways.

Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Karen Hildebrand

Spellbound

Two 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.

REVIEWS | Sarah Cecilia Bukowski

Green Light

Will 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...

REVIEWS | Faye Arthurs

Home and Away

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).

REVIEWS | Karen Greenspan

Of Dandelions and Resilience

Zvidance 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.

REVIEWS | Steve Sucato

The Music Within

Cleveland 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.”