World-class review of ballet and dance.
Do you recall seeing your first ballet? No, says Francesco Gabriele Frola, first soloist with the National Ballet of Canada, but he does recall the first one he was in. “Every time my mother danced “La fille mal gardée,” she was pregnant,” he says. With two brothers and a sister, “after four times, she had enough,” he laughs.
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After taking her final bows as Juliet at the Metropolitan Opera House with American Ballet Theater in June of 2007, Alessandra Ferri may have left the storied company she had danced with since 1985, but, as she said in a recent phone interview from her home in Manhattan, she certainly did not retire.
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George Balanchine’s “Ballo della Regina” and “Kammermusik No. 2” were created approximately at the same time and premiered by New York City Ballet in January 1978. Both pieces are concise and small in scale; both are fascinating and unique; yet neither belongs to the pantheon of Balanchine’s greatest creations. Nevertheless, each ballet, precious in its own way, adds to our understanding and appreciation of the craft of the great ballet master. Dance critic Arlene Croce aptly summed up her attraction to “Ballo della Regina” in particular—and to a Balanchine ballet in general—simply and clearly: “Who cares if it isn’t great?...
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Fleur Darkin's brilliant Scottish Dance Theatre are like chameleons, or shape-shifters: endlessly versatile. Anton Lachky's utterly demented “Dreamers” is a study in waving your freak flag high. Everyone in the ensemble of ten gets a chance to shine. Soloists 'nominate' their dancer of choice, and their improvisational style is as individual as a fingerprint.
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In the programme notes for “…como el musguito en la piedra, ay si si si...” (“Like moss on a stone”), Pina Bausch’s final work before her sudden, unexpected death in 2009, dance writer Sarah Crompton insists the piece is “open to infinite interpretation,” that “[nothing] should be seen as explicit,” even the apparent allusions to Chile, where the German choreographer’s troupe took up temporary residence and conceived it as part of its famous World Cities series. Categorical interpretations might be off the table, but an abstract spirit of voyage and discovery does seem to infuse “Como el musguito,” inserting itself,...
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A dance of transcendent beauty, “Mozartiana,” set to the musical suite of the same title by Tchaikovsky, was George Balanchine’s final masterpiece. The ballet was created for Suzanne Farrell, his last and greatest muse; in a way “Mozartiana” was his farewell gift to her. Choreographed in 1981 to commence the New York City Ballet Tchaikovsky Festival, this ballet was also a heartfelt homage to Tchaikovsky himself, whom Balanchine all his life regarded as a mentor and inspiration. “Balanchine at the age of seventy-seven had given us a vision of heaven as he interpreted it from the Lord’s Prayer, ‘on earth...
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True to its mission of being an artistic collective, and loosely based on the principles of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, where great talents of the day were brought together to collaborate, L.A. Dance Project, founded in 2012 by Benjamin Millepied and a core group of artists, composers and designers, is proving its mettle. In its debut at the Wallis (a beautiful, intimate space for dance and an excellent fit for the nine-member company), the troupe brought two tried-and-tested goodies, and one U.S. debut that was breathtaking in its choreographic detail and jaw dropping in scope and execution.
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Meg Wolfe has tackled various subjects in her choreographic evolution, including a hat-tip to film noir (2008’s “Eleven Missing Days”) and fantasies of a post-apocalyptic renewal (2007’s “The Return of Captain Ladyvoice”). Since moving to Los Angeles from New York in 2004, the 47-year old with the elfin face and neo-bobbed hair has also amassed an impressive following among scenesters, envelope-pushing terpsichoreans and all stripes of gays and transpeople (and any and all combinations thereof).
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Frederick Ashton’s much-loved “Rhapsody” is perhaps epitomised by the scene in which six male dancers hold the lead aloft and parade him around like a king, a ring of glittering ballerinas encircling the reverent display. The plotless ballet, created as a birthday present for the Queen Mother in 1980 and presented here as part of a double bill celebrating the Royal Ballet’s founding choreographer, is all about spectacle—in fact, Ashton specifically enlisted Mikhail Baryshnikov, Russian virtuoso extraordinaire, for the starring role to ensure the piece had a central spark powerful enough to ignite the blaze of majesty he envisioned.
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Mystic, vibrant, violent, feminist—Akram Khan’s newest work is all this and more. The hour-long piece stars Khan himself alongside Ching-Ying Chien and Christine Joy Ritter, and takes its inspiration from Karthika Naïr’s 2015 collection of poems Until the Lions, a reinterpretation of the Mahabharata, the ancient Sanskrit epic. This postmodern narrative layering—in which mythology is reframed through a modern literary lens and then channeled through a prism of contemporary dance, itself informed, in this case, by kathak tradition—lends a rich complexity to the work, one that’s felt in many aspects, from the stratified music to the mosaic sequencing.
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Inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Oya, the Afro-Cuban deity of, among other elements, wind, storms, fertility and magic, Ana María Alvarez’ world premiere, “Agua Furiosa,” was, in fact, frantic, frenetic and infuriating—to this reviewer. Alvarez, a Cuban-American in her late 30s, has been crafting the soggy opus for more than two years. Possessed of the DNA activist gene (her parents were both union organizers and also involved in civil rights), Alvarez founded CONTRA-TIEMPO (literally, “against the times”), in 2005.
Continue ReadingWatching 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,...
Continue ReadingThe 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.
Continue ReadingAfter 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.
Continue ReadingAn “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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