World-class review of ballet and dance.
Teeming with riotous colors, an exhilarating original score, and dancing of the highest, indeed, most glorious order, “Frida,” performed by Dutch National Ballet and choreographed by the insightful Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, not only proves that story ballet is alive and well, but can also be told in new and ingenious ways.
Continue Reading
Nicolo Fonte’s choreography first appeared on my radar when Aspen Santa Fe Ballet gave his “In Hidden Seconds” its Philadelphia premier in 2010.
Continue Reading
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of catching a perfectly shaped, humorous dance vignette of two dancers with two chairs, set to the first movement of Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor.
FREE ARTICLE
Why is it so hard to find a good “Swan Lake” these days? The ballet is performed by practically every classical company, and yet so few of the myriad versions in circulation are any good.
Continue Reading
In “Pioneers,” the new double bill from the pioneering Ballet Black, we are treated to two distinct works between which the dancers transition with grace and pizazz.
Continue Reading
Superlatives seem useless when making reference to Pina Bausch and her vast legacy. Words seem reductive.
Continue Reading
From the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago and Ballet Hispánico, to the Royal Ballet of Flanders and Danza Contemporanea de Cuba, choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa has covered the terpsichorean waterfront.
Continue Reading
At Kaatsbaan, the 153-acre cultural park in New York’s Hudson Valley, Emily Coates and Emmanuèle Phuon performed the intriguing program “We.”
Continue Reading
It has been reassuring to see relatively full houses so far during American Ballet Theatre’s spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House, its first under the leadership of Susan Jaffe.
Continue Reading
I descend the stairs of the State Theatre, for that is where the emeralds are, beneath the Earth’s surface.
Continue Reading
SFDanceworks performs only a short run once a year, but it fills a big void in San Francisco.
Continue Reading
From out of retirement came twelve dancers of the Australian Ballet. A dozen dancers to usher, in a sense, Adam Bull into his retirement at the close of the Melbourne season of “Identity,” in Alice Topp’s “Paragon.”
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.
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading