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REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Stella A Trois

Tennessee Williams' most spiky love triangle, the ultimate study in late 1940s Southern American melodrama, is an interesting piece to adapt in the twenty-first century. Tackling issues around abuse, class and consent would undoubtedly be a challenge for any dance company. To that end, Scottish Ballet brought in an intimacy coach—ensuring all of the dancers feel comfortable, dealing with portraying the darker themes of sexual violence, addiction, suicide and domestic violence.

INTERVIEWS | By Cecilia Whalen

Annie Rigney, Loosening Up and Letting Go

Hovering over her on all fours, the man looks into the woman as if he's caught his own reflection. Cradled on the floor, she has nestled her feet into his chest. Slowly, without breaking eye contact, the man begins an ascension to standing. The woman extends her legs, and it looks like he is floating, drawn upward by some mystery in the clouds. This striking scene comes from emerging choreographer Annie Rigney's “Galithea,” which was selected for presentation at the Joyce Theater in 2021 as part of the 92NY Harkness Dance Center's Future Dance Festival.

REVIEWS | MARINA HARSS

When Beauty Awoke

How many ways to think about “Sleeping Beauty”? In the first written Italian and French versions, the plots outline the fate of a young girl as the object of family jealousy, trickery and, after being drugged asleep, ravishment. By the mid-19th century, the Brothers Grimm toned down the storyline, romanticized and adapted it as a story fit for children. Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Tchaikovsky, and Marius Petipa’s 1890 landmark ballet further refashioned it. But another few generations of scholarly research recognized the darker undertones and representations of girls in the fairy tale tradition. Apart from handsome swains or huntsmen who save damsels like...

REVIEWS | MARINA HARSS

Rainbow After

In a world in the midst of war, emerging from its post-pandemic slumber, themes and acts of unity, contact and harmony are more than welcome. The differences that make us human are also, dichotomously, the magic that brings us closer together. The subtle nuances of language, the freckles on your skin, the color and glorious hues of your eyes, the food you eat and the mannerisms and peculiarities that identify you as you, are the uncompromising glue that holds us together.

REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Stabat Mater

It’s a bit shocking to see un-ironically religious art onstage in our age, and all the more so as Lent turns a corner toward Holy Week. The world premiere of Jessica Lang’s “Let Me Mingle Tears with Thee” at Pacific Northwest Ballet was not timed to the church calendar, though. Lang has been working with Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater,” from 1736, for at least a decade, with ever deepening responsiveness. Her latest visual manifestation of this score for harpsichord, strings, and two voices capped a winner of a mixed bill that also unveiled a world premiere by Alejandro Cerrudo, in a...

REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

When Dreams Come True

San Francisco Ballet is riding high this season, cruising onward from a new works festival that yielded some real keepers; a “Giselle” freshly energized by new artistic director Tamara Rojo’s coaching; and a mixed bill that scored a hit with the stage premiere of Myles Thatcher’s youthful “Colorforms.” Recently retired artistic director Helgi Tomasson handled all this programming before he stepped down, and it was surely smart of him, box-office-wise, to schedule Christopher Wheeldon’s family friendly “Cinderella” to coincide with spring break. A packed Wednesday night house was clearly delighted by the whole spectacle. I regret, then, to confess an...

REVIEWS | By Marina Harss

Smooth as Silk, Strong as Steel

The style Kyle Abraham has honed over the years is unmistakable: a silken coordination of the body in which ripples and undulations pass through skin and sinew; an expressive use of the back; hands that touch, and really feel; impulses that start here but find their way there, and then there; a deep sensitivity to music coupled with an intelligent response to lyrics; a penchant for melancholy, leavened with sass. Abraham has a way of revealing his dancers to us without depriving them of mystery or coolness; he builds an atmosphere of intimacy, but something is held in reserve.

INTERVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Vision of Hope

“It’s amazing!” she gushed. “I’m loving every minute. It’s been busy, exciting and there’s a lot of momentum.”

REVIEWS | By Marina Harss

Northern Exposure

The good news is that companies are touring again. It seems like an age since New York received regular visits from large troupes from Europe and Russia. Seeing the National Ballet of Canada at City Center this weekend, back in the city for its first visit since 2016, brought home just how much the world has changed, and not for the better, in the last few years, through a global pandemic and, now, a shattering war that has divided the world into two camps.

FEATURES | By Karen Hildebrand

A Woman's Point of View

On one of the first warm days of late March, Fifth Avenue pedestrian traffic was teeming outside the Guggenheim, ubiquitous Mister Softee truck idling at the curb. Down the avenue, people posed for photos on the steps outside the Met and Central Park resembled the Seurat painting that inspired “Sunday in the Park with George,” while a crowd of some two hundred seventy dance lovers found their way down a ramp to the Guggenheim’s circular theater to sit in the dark for one of two sold out presentations on Bronislava Nijinska’s ballet from 1923, “Les Noces,” presented by Works &...

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

March Gladness

I’ve long been preoccupied with the blurry boundary between arts and sports. To my mind, the Rose Adagio balances in “Sleeping Beauty” and Odile’s 32 fouettés in “Swan Lake” are akin to the triple axels in figure skating competitions. It was fitting, then, that Ailey II’s New York Season, which opened last week at the Ailey Citigroup Theater, fell during March Madness. As anyone with a busted bracket knows—and that’s most people this year—stats and seeds can amount to nothing in that wild window that is a live performance. Oddly enough, most young dancers get very little performance experience until...

REVIEWS | By Marina Harss

Clipped Wings

“La Sylphide” is a cautionary tale. Young men should not abandon their fiancées on their wedding day; they should not be unkind to beggar-women who turn up on their doorstep; and certainly they should not attempt to capture and possess that which can never belong to them. These lessons are hard-won. By the time the ballet has ended, a sylph—a spirit of the forest—has lost her wings, gone blind and died. The transgressor has lost everything: his family, his future, and, quite possibly his life.

Featured Reads

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.