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REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Classical, Revisited

I had the fortune to sit next to two very charming and chatty longtime Smuin fans for the company’s San Francisco run of its fall triple-bill. David and Dan, let’s call them, are in my experience representative of the 16-dancer troupe’s loyal base. They relish connoisseurship of the Bay Area arts in general, and just that week also attended the San Francisco Opera and American Conservatory Theater. For more than a decade they subscribed to front-row dress circle seats at the San Francisco Ballet—“until the board ousted Michael Smuin for that boring new director”—Helgi Tomasson. Under Tomasson, they said, “suddenly...

REVIEWS | By Jade Larine

Enigmatic Ode to Nature

The premiere of the new ballet season celebrated the Paris corps de ballet with a triple bill dedicated to its century-long grandeur. Yet the traditional défilé—a grandiose opening—looked at odds with the following minimalist pieces. Versatility or schizophrenia? The 300-year old company still suffers from identity disorders. Tino Seghal's “Sans Titre” (untitled piece) was the most obvious warning sign of such disarray. One can only hope that erratic mixed bills will soon be gone with the wind.

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

Hidden Drama

New York City Ballet’s spectacular bill “Balanchine x Vienna” presented during the company’s fall season at David H. Koch Theater in New York comprised three ballets: the effervescent “Divertimento #15,” the astringent and haunting “Episodes,” and the theatrically engrossing “Vienna Waltzes.” This stylistically diverse program revealed various facets of the choreographer’s genius, giving us Balanchine the classicist, the modernist and the showman. As the title suggests, the program also paid homage to Vienna, featuring music of five composers—Mozart, Webern, Johann Strauss II, Franz Lehár and Richard Strauss—whose life and career had close ties to the city that for centuries has...

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Living Doll

On a Tuesday night, I fancied myself carved from the pages of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. I cast myself as Gwenda Reed from “Sleeping Murder.” The year was 1951, and I pinned a bakelite Bluebird of Happiness brooch to my coat lapel. I swapped The Duchess of Malfi for “Coppélia” because this was fantasy, and made for the Palais Theatre in St Kilda. And true to the liberties of daydream, 1951 rolled into both 1962, when the Australian Ballet first performed “Coppélia”during its inaugural season, and 1979, when founding artistic director Peggy van Praagh and former theatre director George Ogilvie...

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

It’s the Time of the Season

Frederick Ashton’s sun-soaked “La Fille mal gardée” isn’t the most obvious choice for a fall production, but its cheery pastels and verdant setting are, I can attest, an excellent antidote to the autumnal dusk starting to settle over London.

REVIEWS | By Jonelle Seitz

Corps Strength

Ballet Austin opened its season with a triple bill titled to announce the company’s upcoming monthlong, 150-city tour of China—its first performances in that country. Two works the company will tour, artistic director Stephen Mills’s “Wolftanzt” and “Liminal Glam,” sandwiched Lar Lubovitch’s “Dvořák Serenade.” Taken as a whole, the program was a study of ensemble: How does an ensemble hang together? In what ways is it threatened? Because Ballet Austin is an unranked company, such questions are especially intriguing.

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Shadow Play

This performance of Alexander Whitley’s “Pattern Recognition,” which premiered at London’s Platform Theatre in April, was the kick-off to a five-leg autumn tour around the UK. The London-based choreographer has teamed up with digital designer Memo Akten to create a 50-minute contemporary work that uses motion-responsive technology to explore themes of consciousness, memory and fragmentation in the digital age. The technology comes in the form of eight chunky floor lamps that sense and track the dancers’ movements, responding with their own illuminated patterns. The lights, the programme makes clear, “are not pre-programmed but are driven only by the movement of...

REVIEWS | By Rachel Elderkin

Ritual & Rhythm

A fast ticking rhythm counteracts the slow, hyperextended movements of a solo dancer. Her back to the audience she moves with creeping extensions, her articulate body creating enticing distortions. Eventually a man enters and parades in circles around her, the statuesque stillness of his slow walks the antidote to her rippling, insect-like contortions.

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

In the Wild Loop

Living up to its post-postmodern moniker, Diavolo|Architecture in Motion™ not only rocked its 14-by-17 foot undulating boat in the troupe’s 1999 classic work, “Trajectoire,” but shook the rafters of the Broad Stage in four sold-out performances over the first weekend of autumn. Founded and directed by Paris-born Jacques Heim in 1992, the Los Angeles-based company kicked off its 25th anniversary season in fine style.

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Blowin' Up

The warmth of the spring day did not hold in the Substation. Inside the capacious, high-ceilinged, former industrial space, it is never warm. It is resolutely sub-temperature. Seated for the first of three solos presented under the collective awning of “Blowin’ Up,” I sat, cleared my throat, and cleared my throat again. The cold of the building crept inside my chest with the intention to make me the spluttering, wheezing, noisy audience member. My defence of stoicism and Soothers was going to be tested.

REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

The Possibilities of Love

Fragile, delicate things must be handled with great care. So it is with choreographer/dancer Marc Brew's “MayBe,” conceived and directed by Natália Mallo in collaboration with him. It is a thing of profound beauty.

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

The Allure of Nijinsky

“Throwing his body up to a great height for a moment, he leans back, his legs extended, beats an entrechat-sept, and, slowly turning over onto his chest, arches his back and, lowering one leg, holds an arabesque in the air. Smoothly in this pure arabesque, he descends to the ground…. From the depths of the stage with a single leap, assemblé entrechat-dix, he flies towards the first wing.”[note]Bronislava Nijinska describing Vaslav Nijinsky’s Paris debut in Michel Fokine’s “Le Pavillon d’Armide,” from Bronislava Nijinska: Early Memoirs, trans. ed. Irina Nijinska and Jean Rawlinson (California: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981), 270-271[/note] Vaslav Nijinsky...

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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.