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INTERVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Dancing All Over Town with Heidi Duckler

The reigning goddess of Southern California site-specific dance, the indefatigable Heidi Duckler, began her terpsichorean journey in 1985 in Los Angeles. Originally dubbed Collage Dance Theatre, the troupe, now Heidi Duckler Dance (HDD), began its storied history in, well, a laundromat. That work, “Laundromatinee,” originally staged in 1988 in Santa Monica’s Thrifty Wash Laundromat, featured dancers performing amid washing machines, dryers and a bevy of onlookers, intentional or not.

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

New Year, Old Ballets

After the comfort-food programming of December, January tends to kick off with prestige offerings and new works. So it was unusual that the first dance show I saw in 2023 featured timeworn ballet standards like “The Dying Swan” and “Paquita.” These warhorses were being performed by the Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, however, so they were not exactly pablum. And to be fair, I caught the Trocks in the third week of their run at the Joyce Theater; so this was, in part, feel-good holiday programming. But though the Trocks have been affectionately spoofing ballet en travesti since 1974,...

BOOKSHELF | INTERVIEWS | By Marina Harss

Why Dance Matters

Mindy Aloff’s new book Why Dance Matters is part of a series, published by Yale University Press, on why this or that thing should matter to the reader. The series has already taken on such subjects as architecture, translation, poetry, and acting. And as of next January, it will include Aloff’s meditation on the many ways dance enters and alters our lives. At different points in her career, Aloff has been a poet, a dance critic, an essayist, a teacher, the editor of the anthology Dance in America, and the author of Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation....

REVIEWS | By Marina Harss

Snowfall in Miami

Not satisfied with the lone “Nutcracker” I saw in New York a few weeks back, and finding myself in Florida, I decided to pay a visit to Miami City Ballet’s “Nut” at the Arsht Center in Miami. (After Christmas, the production moves on to West Palm Beach.) The company, whose founding director was Edward Villella, is now headed by Lourdes López. Both spent their careers at New York City Ballet. And given the company’s strong Balanchine lineage, it’s no surprise that it is Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” that is performed here, albeit, since 2017, with new designs by Isabel Toledo (costumes) and...

TALKING POINTES | Claudia Lawson

Talking Pointes: Summer Season

Congratulations to Talking Pointes, bronze medal winner of Best Arts & Culture podcast for the Australian Podcast Awards. To celebrate, we are revisiting conversations with our guests from Season One, including David Hallberg, Emma “Wiggle” Watkins, Frances Rings, and many more.

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Jazz at City Center

You know something is up when, on the Friday night the last weekend before Christmas, “Revelations” is not the peak of an Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performance at City Center. This was not the fault of “Revelations,” which still galvanized the sold-out crowd. But it couldn’t hold a candle to the opener: Ailey’s “Night Creature,” which was brilliantly led by Sarah Daley-Perdomo and danced in front of the Future of Jazz Orchestra, curated by Jazz at Lincoln Center. Throughout the first half of the evening, the pairing of the live band with some of Ailey’s best pieces to Duke...

REVIEWS | By Valentina Bonelli

Nureyev's Nutcracker

Even those who don’t like Rudolf Nureyev as a choreographer (and this writer is among them), cannot fail to appreciate his “Nutcracker,” returning this season to La Scala after a sixteen-year absence. It was foreseeable that the director of the ballet, Manuel Legris, a pupil of the dancer-choreographer and a great performer of his ballets, would dust off the production, allowing few regrets for the previous versions that have passed on the stage at La Scala without leaving a mark: from the bad edition by Nacho Duato to that sadly staged by George Balanchine. The return to a ballet by...

FEATURES | REVIEWS | By Candice Thompson

The Collective is Strong

2022’s abundant, and at times, overwhelming, calendar of dance was a weekly reminder of New York’s place as ‘a’ if not ‘the’ major dance capital of the world. Though the pandemic caused an exodus of artists from the city in search of affordability and space, I was thrilled again and again, by how many have stayed and continued to make powerful work centering their fellow dancers and uplifting their communities. And while there were many singular performances of note—like Jacquelin Harris’s brilliant conjuring of Winnie Mandela in “Survivors” during Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s winter season last week—what has stayed...

FEATURES | REVIEWS | By Marina Harss

The Power of Performance

In New York, the year that is drawing to a close was marked by a true return to the pleasure of live performance. Going to the theater felt almost normal again. Sure, theaters were a bit emptier than before the pandemic, and that is understandable. Some people are still nervous about spending hours in close proximity to others, especially now that the masks are coming off. But many are returning, reacquainting themselves with the irreplaceable sensation of sharing time and space with extraordinary performers, knowing that what one is about to see will never again be repeated in quite the...

FEATURES | REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

A Movable Feast

With the global pandemic mostly in the rearview mirror, dance lovers once again enjoyed—literally—a movable feast. Indeed, the movers and shakers on this writer’s radar during the past year proved to be resilient, gorgeous and, happily, an embarrassment of riches.

REVIEWS | By Karen Greenspan

A Gift for the Season

Considering the ongoing conversation regarding the true scope of dancers’ labor and the role they play in a choreographer’s dance making process, I mused about the Gibney Dance Company’s announcement of their recent New York Live Arts season (December 13-17) presenting “Yag 2022,” a reimagining of Ohad Naharin's acclaimed 1996 work for Batsheva Dance Company. “Yag” is a family memoir—come to life in the Gaga-trained bodies (and minds) of the Batsheva dancers. What would happen when such a collaborative and personal work was restaged on a completely different company of dancers?

REVIEWS | By Marina Harss

Romancing to Robbins

While practically every other ballet company is putting on a “Nutcracker,” Sarasota Ballet has decided to present a program of chamber ballets in the weeks before the end of the year. And why not? It’s a triple bill, with two works by Jerome Robbins (“In the Night” and “Fancy Free”) and, in the only concession to the season, Frederick Ashton’s picture postcard “Les Patineurs,” set at a Victorian skating rink. Given the scale of the theater (the Sarasota Opera House) and of these works, it is a perfect program for getting to know the company better, with the luxury of...

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.