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REVIEWS | By April Deocariza

An Adventurous Delight

It seems like not too long ago that audiences ventured with Clara through the Land of the Sweets and now Cincinnati Ballet takes us yet on another journey, this time with Alice and her adventures in Wonderland. Septime Webre’s take on the iconic tale by Lewis Carroll is a feast for the senses both young and old can enjoy—vibrant sets and costumes, humor, an inspiring score by Matthew Pierce, and just enough touches of the classic story without being a total regurgitation (familiar characters like the Mad Hatter, King and Queen of Hearts, and White Rabbit all make their appearances). What’s more,...

REVIEWS | By Phoebe Roberts

Secret Things

What makes a choreographer great? This has been the question plaguing the dance world for the last thirty or so years. Is it their feeling for music, the originality of their combinations, the world they create?

INTERVIEWS | By Rachael Moloney

Tiler Peck, Creative Spirit

New York City Ballet principal dancer Tiler Peck is many things beyond ballerina. Although it’s a role she excels in—she is widely acclaimed for her immaculate technique, speed, and musicality —Peck has always sought more from her career in dance. Schooled from an early age in various genres, including jazz, she made her Broadway debut at age 11, appearing as Gracie Shinn in “The Music Man.” Other musical theatre roles followed, but after seeing a performance of “The Nutcracker” in New York, Peck set her heart on pursuing her ballet training. She entered the School of American Ballet when she...

REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

A Lover's Heart

Do we watch the classics with a scholar’s brain or a lover’s heart? Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Giselle” engages both, but a viewing of the company’s digital season stream leaves me feeling that the heart still has to triumph.

BOOKSHELF | By Phoebe Roberts

Dancing the Difference

“Dancing was about learning to disassociate,” the narrator of Lola Lafon’s 2022 novel Reeling informs us early on. “Feet like daggers, wrists like ribbons. Power and languor. Smiling despite persistent pain, smiling despite nausea.” This declaration, only five or so pages in, strikes as piercingly as the daggers Lafon imagines for feet. What in this compulsion towards violence, I wondered, is so imperative when telling a story about dance? Scarcely a narrative arises that is not characterized by gruesome extremes. Black Swan, with its body horror, comes to mind, as does Gelsey Kirkland’s 1986 memoir Dancing on My Grave, infamous...

FEATURES | REVIEWS | By Karen Greenspan

The Slowest Wave

A groundbreaking collaboration is afoot involving New York City butoh dance company Vangeline Theater; founded by French-born butoh performer, choreographer, author, and teacher Vangeline; and a neuroscience team from the University of Houston, Rockefeller University, and City University of New York. The collaborating parties are researching the impact of butoh on brainwave activity in a pilot study. I am in Houston, Texas, at the university’s theater watching the culminating butoh performance as a group of neuroscientists (visibly stationed in the wings) record and download the activity in the dancers’ brains. Simultaneously, a multi-media artist is “artistically” projecting the dancers’ real-time brain activity onto...

FEATURES | By Paul McInnes

Living Architecture

When I speak with Russian Tokyo-based photographer Yulia Skogoreva in a cozy coffee shop in the Yoyogi district of the Japanese capital, it becomes apparent very quickly that motion, or bodies in motion to be precise, is what she is essentially invested in. The Muscovite's ongoing projects with female sumo and contemporary dancers are, for her, much the same in that they celebrate the human body in a series of ritualistic, performance-focused or natural settings and her role is to be a spectator, a probenleiter who probes, pushes and guides the dancer to where they belong.

REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

This is Forty

How did you dance as a child in your bedroom? Before any kind of training, or the fumbling awkwardness of adolescence, I mean? In a series of wild routines, Katherina Radeva captures the feeling of dancing from when we were kids, governed by little more than energy, instinct and unabashed, uninhibited joy. It is this evocative spirit that permeates through her beautiful show, “40/40,” interrogating the spaces that women in middle-age take up. Our bodies, often sidelined, dismissed or ignored for more youthful figures in society, are repositories of life, love, complex emotions and boundaries, and we can only move...

REVIEWS | By Merilyn Jackson

A No-Tutu Night of Stellar Ballet

Philadelphia Ballet’s annual New Works series opened its 2023 season with a program called “Forward Motion” at the Kimmel Cultural Campus’ Perelman Theater last weekend. Over its 60-plus years, the company has seen many changes, including last year’s name change from Pennsylvania Ballet. It now dances its New Works program in the 627-seat theater with superb sightlines and, at intermissions, audience members can mingle in a new café seating area with window views of busy Spruce Street pedestrian traffic.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Karen Hildebrand

Revival: A Meditation on Aging, Dance, & Community

In spring of 2017, Ellen Graff, Stuart Hodes, and Marnie Thomas Wood, all former members of the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Tony award-winning Broadway choreographer George Faison, set out to make dances for a group of older adults, many of whom had never performed onstage. Josefina Rotman Lyons, an older dancer herself, volunteered to film the project. The resulting documentary, “Revival,” is an honest and engaging take on what it’s like to dance in later life. Now available for streaming at Revivaldocumentary.com, the film won jury and audience awards when it made the rounds of film festivals. At a...

INTERVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Jodie Gates, Changemaker

She’s been a principal ballerina in companies that include the Joffrey Ballet, Frankfurt Ballet and Complexions Contemporary Ballet, as well as a principal guest artist with companies around the world such as the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia. From 2006-2013, she was a tenured professor of dance at UC Irvine, and in 2013 she was named the first Vice Dean and Director of the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. In addition, in 2006, she was the founder and artistic director of the Laguna Dance Festival. But Jodie Gates has never been an artistic director of a dance troupe—until...

REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Free Reign

San Francisco Ballet, the U.S.’s oldest professional ballet company and second largest, is entering its 90th season at a moment of profound transition. Helgi Tomasson, artistic director for 37 years, has just handed the reins to Tamara Rojo, who arrives triumphantly after a decade of success raising the profile of the English National Ballet. Aside from both prizing the work of William Forsythe, the two are markedly different in their repertory interests, but Rojo’s programming direction—will the company still dance Balanchine and Robbins?—won’t be known until she announces the 2024 season this April. In the meantime, the company is dancing...

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.