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REVIEWS | By Candice Thompson

Identity Embraced

During the artist talkback after #QueerTheBallet’s April 5th show, as part of the Joyce Theater’s season at the new Chelsea Factory, artistic director Adriana Pierce proposed a thought exercise: consider the gendered nature of the pointe shoe, particularly in reference to partnering. The person not on pointe is able to be more grounded, and that stability and connection to the floor necessarily confers agency to that dancer. That agency is then often utilized in an unequal relationship with the dancer in pointe shoes, who has less friction with the floor and is set up best to be manipulated (turned, lifted,...

REVIEWS | By Cecilia Whalen

War & Peace

In his piece, “The Green Table,” which the Paul Taylor Dance Company presented for one-night-only at the 92Y on April 6th, Kurt Jooss depicts a group of ten nasty gentlemen at a conference. They discuss the world situation, lightly jumping on and off the table, making presentational gestures, and offering mixed applause for one another's bright ideas. Dressed in black suits and disgusting, balding masks with distorted faces, the gentlemen are a farce of politicians and diplomats who seem to start wars for sport. Jooss created “The Green Table” in 1932 reflecting on the disastrous Great War as his native...

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Springy Pizzazz

All hail the marching ensemble, a brigade of bouncing hips and outstretched arms, palms flexed and chins thrust to the sky! With its pop soundtrack and bold rearrangements of the classical lexicon, English National Ballet’s “Forsythe Evening” celebrates bravura in ballet, pairing two recent works from William Forsythe that emphasise the accessible side of the art form—the spectacular feats and showboating performances that create excitement in any audience.

REVIEWS | By Merilyn Jackson

A Touchstone of Sanity

Although seemingly an evening of classical ballet, Philadelphia Ballet’s mid-March run at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, “Bold, Brilliant, Balanchine” was a program where history, politics, race, gender issues and global affairs coalesced merely by virtue of the loaded times we live in. Artistic Director Ángel Corella conceived the program which opened with Georges Bizet’s “Symphony in C” some time ago, yet his choices deeply relate to current events. Among the threads to follow are how the concert’s three ballets depend on the creative talents of women (it was Women’s History Month after all) and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

REVIEWS | By Róisín O'Brien

Dancing in Time

Time is of the essence at the Royal Opera House this spring. It hazily drifts past in Kyle Abraham’s “The Weathering;” it brutally constrains the dancers in Crystal Pite’s “Solo Echo;” and in Christopher Wheeldon’s “DGV: Danse à grande vitesse,” journeys and travel through the eras come to the fore.

REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Connecting the Dots

Recently, when a fellow San Francisco-based critic told me how much he had “resented” watching dance on screen during the pandemic, I had to say that for me there had been an upside: getting to know Pacific Northwest Ballet.

INTERVIEWS | By Cecilia Whalen

Dancing Together

Sam Pratt and Amadi Washington have been dancing together since they were ten years old. The dancer/choreographer duo known as Baye & Asa, who are 2021/22 Artists in Residence at the historic 92Y and have recently completed a commission with the Los Angeles-based Bodytraffic, met in elementary school as students at the prestigious Dalton School in New York City. Their first dance class together was in fifth grade.

FEATURES | INTERVIEWS | By Lauren Wingenroth

Past Meets Present

Claudia Schreier’s “Passage” for Dance Theatre of Harlem was commissioned to mark the 400-year-anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to Virginia in 1619. But to think of “Passage” as a commemoration, or as a historical piece, doesn’t do justice to its purpose or its power.

INTERVIEWS | By Sophie Bress

The Voice Within

When Seibi Lee discovered Kathak, at first, she says she almost didn’t know what happened. Up until that point, her life—at least in terms of her career—was that of a typical 20-something: exploring, learning, and trying out multiple options in hopes of finding the best fit. Then along came Kathak, merging her multiple life paths and bringing a clarity and confluence that she hadn’t felt before.

REVIEWS | By Candice Thompson

Light, Color, Joy

Mark Morris Dance Group delighted the audience at Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday, March 24th, with the return of “L’Allegro, Il Penseroso il Moderato.” The performance was a reminder of the reassuring effects of good repertory: coming once again, like spring, to revive us with light, color, and joy.

INTERVIEWS | By Lauren Wingenroth

A Midsummer Makeover

Ethan Stiefel thinks the world could use some laughter right now. “My mantra as of late has been that love and laughter can prevail,” says the former American Ballet Theatre star, who took the reins of the Princeton, New Jersey-based American Repertory Ballet last summer. “I felt that coming out of the pandemic it would be great to have a new ballet that really exudes laughter and joy.”

REVIEWS | By Josephine Minhinnett

On Solid Ground

With new artistic director Hope Muir taking the helm of the National Ballet of Canada in January 2022, the company returned to the stage early March in a mixed winter programme that had a bit of the new, the old, and a goodbye. The quadruple-bill evening at the Four Seasons Centre included world premieres from Alysa Pires and Siphe November, Kenneth MacMillan’s ragtime classic “Elite Syncopations,” and a retirement performance from Jillian Vanstone in Christopher’s Wheeldon’s “After the Rain.”

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.