World-class review of ballet and dance.
Trisha Brown said her conversations with former French Minister of Culture Michel Guy occurred “outside of time.” Brown and Guy, who was the founder of the avant-garde international Festival d'Automne, would sit for hours discussing dance and art. Brown said during those discussion, Guy would have to adjust the blinds more than once to accommodate the changes in daylight.
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On one of the strongest lineups of the spring season, the New York City Ballet bookended Balanchine’s 1957 masterpiece, “Agon,” with the first and last ballets choreographed by Jerome Robbins: “Fancy Free” (1944) and “Brandenburg” (1997). “Fancy,” a theatrical Fleet Week farce, is starting to show its age. Though some tonal tweaks have been made, the scene in which the trio of sailors steals a woman’s red purse and playfully yanks her around doesn’t get the laughs it used to. Running concurrently across the plaza at the Met this month, coincidentally, is the powerful new opera “Champion.” It also has...
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Science fiction met real-time emotional animation in Australasian Dance Collective’s “Lucie in the Sky.” When the company released news of this work, there was resounding excitement—bold, pioneering, and arguably the most ambitious artistic choice ADC has made to date. From the outset, one question hovered over “Lucie in the Sky:” can we, as artists, anthropomorphise objects using choreography and spatial empathy to elicit an emotional response from our audience? A question that was answered with three words: emotionally coded drones.
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The Indian dance company Nrityagram, which specializes in the East Indian dance form Odissi, has been a frequent visitor to New York since the nineties. Each visit has been revelatory in some way. For years that revelatory quality seemed intimately linked to the choreographic relationship between the company’s director and choreographer, Surupa Sen, and its main star, Bijayini Satpathy. The two have performed solos and duets of breathtaking beauty and complexity during which time seemed to stop, and the audience tried not to blink for fear of missing something.
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All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female. “I Sing The Body Electric” - Walt Whitman
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Talk about a radical retelling of a classic story! In Benjamin Millepied’s “Romeo & Juliet Suite,” performed by members of LA Dance Project, the troupe he founded in 2012, there are three casts playing the title roles: a traditional heterosexual couple, two men, and two women. And, as if that weren’t a major departure from your standard issue “R & J,” this evening-length rendering has much of the action captured through projections from a Steadicam while the cast navigates myriad areas of the theater.
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The set is a mid-century living room. A green lamp and a bookcase rest downstage right; a typewriter and an abacus lie upstage on a desk. Cushioned chairs sit invitingly among scattered suitcases which are stuffed to the brim, and a single wooden chair sits center. This is the opening shot of Kayla Farrish's “Put Away the Fire, dear, pt. 2,” a second draft to the dancer/choreographer's exploration of American film and archetypes, which was presented as part of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival in the lower east side.
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Frigid waterfalls. Fog rising in the grey of morning. Dense forest yielding to expansive lakes. These are some of the landscapes in Santee Smith's latest production “Homelands” for Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, which premiered at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre. Smith is Kahnyen’kehàka/Mohawk Nation, Turtle Clan, from Six Nations of the Grand River territory in southern Canada and since 2005, she has built her company on a repertoire of innovative multimedia and contemporary dance productions that bring Indigenous experiences and Onkwehón:we worldviews to the stage.
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Without a program, I would have confused the two premieres at the New York City Ballet’s Spring Gala. With its geometric arm motifs, calculated group patterns, and tastefully spare retro costumes, I’d have attributed “Standard Deviation” to former resident choreographer Christopher Wheeldon instead of newcomer Alysa Pires. It seemed like an outgrowth of Wheeldon’s “Mercurial Manoeuvres,” from 2000. But Wheeldon’s influence could also be felt in the energetic, shifting corps patterns of Justin Peck’s “The Times Are Racing” closer too. In fact, his presence was more palpable in these than in his own piece, “From You Within Me,” a dance...
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Kenneth MacMillan created the short expressionist ballet “Sea of Troubles” in the late 1980s. The work draws on Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, and its central theme is Hamlet’s mental state following the suspected murder of his father, the King. As in many of MacMillan’s creations, an exploration of darker aspects of the human psyche underpins the ballet, whose nine scenes chart Hamlet’s journey as he becomes consumed with the desire for revenge and questions about guilt, morality, death, and what is true and false.
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There were shots fired—blanks, of course—when the New York-based Paul Taylor Dance Company, founded in 1954, opened the 20th season of Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center during the last weekend of April. Indeed, in a concept program of three anti-war works, which may have looked good on paper, the program mostly misfired, none of the works more than Lauren Lovette’s world premiere, “Dreamachine.”
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As a choreographer and dancer who conceives and directs experimental performance, Dominican-born, Florida-raised Ligia Lewis is not shy about expressing her opinions, whether in an interview, on stage, or in real life. Indeed, with her most recent work, “A Plot/A Scandal,” which has its U.S. premiere in Los Angeles at the Geffen Contemporary at Museum of Contemporary Art, May 5-6, Lewis once again pulls no punches as she weaves together historical, anecdotal, political, and mythical narratives as only she can.
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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