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REVIEWS | By Marina Harss

Dantesque

Everyone knows that Sarasota Ballet is Frederick Ashton’s unlikely home-away-from-home, on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Or not so unlikely, given that it is directed by Iain Webb and his wife Margaret Barbieri, both of whom danced for the Royal Ballet in London. Barbieri, in particular, worked directly with Ashton, as well as with Kenneth MacMillan, whose ballets are also performed here. The company’s second repertory program of the 2022-2023 comprised works by both, including two early ballets seldom seen anywhere. Each is a curiosity.

INTERVIEWS | By Veronica Posth

Finding Out

Out Innerspace Dance Theatre is devoted to creating exciting and integral contemporary-dance works. Through their research and experimentation, the Vancouver-based company celebrates the importance of challenging preconceptions of what is to be experienced and expounded in contemporary dance-theatre. The company was officially formed in 2007 by David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen, after years of various collaborative endeavours together. During a pleasant conversation with Raymond, I had the opportunity to ask him for some more detailed information about the company, the process of creation of their last work, their methodology, and upcoming productions.

FEATURES | By Valentina Bonelli

Dancing from the Heart

At La Scala the 2021/2022 season closed with a very beloved ballet, “Onegin,” a mainstay of the Milanese repertory for some thirty years. Roberto Bolle, La Scala's iconic Onegin, was greeted by his fans who feared that this could be his last performance in Cranko’s ballet, once again partnered by Marianela Nuñez as Tatiana. For the subsequent performances, ballet director Manuel Legris decided to cast dancers debuting in the leading roles for one night each (aside from aside from principals Marco Agostino and Nicoletta Manni who debuted three years ago). We talked to each couple to discover how they prepared...

REVIEWS | By Candice Thompson

Flora, Fauna, and Flesh

On the evening of Tuesday November 8th, 2022, I was not up for a night out. An existential dread, induced by the U.S. midterm elections, had finally caught up with me as I was walking up to Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater. A friend texted me a list of soothing cures which included plunging your face into a bowl of ice water for 15-30 seconds. A little over an hour later, I added another item to that mood-lifting list: Lia Rodrigues’s “Encantado.”

REVIEWS | By Cecilia Whalen

Extending the Limits

Dimitris Papaioannou's “Transverse Orientation” starts with a joke: Entering from a single door in a blank white wall, several tall, pin-headed figures rush onstage with ladders. Dressed in all black, they skitter towards a lone, flickering fluorescent light. How many of the faceless shadow people does it take to change a lightbulb? They put their shrunken heads together to find out.

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Taylor Revamped

This November, the Paul Taylor Dance Company returned to the Koch Theater for the first time since 2019 under the tagline “Taylor: A New Era.” They’ve had a rough go of it since 2018, when Taylor passed away, at age 88, months after handing the reins over to former company member Michael Novak. Then, just as the troupe was restructuring after the loss of its founder, a pesky virus you may have heard of set them back again. But now, like a phoenix rising from the ashes of so very many brushfires, they have emerged on the other side with...

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Haunting Hospitality

Dramatic set designs and sweeping contemporary ballet combine in this mixed bill from Birmingham Royal Ballet, which pieces together three new additions to BRB’s rep, each with a live orchestral score. Jiří Kylián’s “Forgotten Land,” created on the Stuttgart Ballet in the 80s, sends six couples wafting through the wilds of Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da requiem, while Uwe Scholz marshals the stateliness of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in a like-titled ensemble ballet from 1990. The hardest-hitting piece, “Hotel,” a new commission from Morgann Runacre-Temple, isn’t as musically driven as its companions, though Mikael Karlsson’s score slickly informs its eerie mood. Either...

REVIEWS | By Karen Hildebrand

Migrations

Not all the reasons to celebrate Zvi Gotheiner’s newest work were immediately visible as the company of seven dancers took to the black box stage at New York Live Arts last week. “Migrations” is the first work Gotheiner has made since suffering a stroke in March 2021. That he is able to choreograph at this stage of his healing process is a credit to his dancers, including associate artistic director Doron Perk, and other longtime collaborators. Also, the announcement that Gotheiner’s long-running Maggie Black inspired ballet class has returned in person to City Center is welcome news to many who...

REVIEWS | By April Deocariza

Purity and Power

Cincinnati Ballet’s “Carmina Burana” and “Extremely Close” formed the second program of its 2022-2023 season, led by new artistic director, Jodie Gates. Pairing Nicolo Fonte’s powerful “Carmina Burana” with Alejandro Cerrudo’s tantalizing “Extremely Close” was a match made in heaven, showcasing the breadth and versatility of the company’s dancers.

INTERVIEWS | By Apollinaire Scherr

Making Meaning with Neil Greenberg

In 1994, at the peak of the AIDS crisis, Neil Greenberg premiered what has become his best- known work, “Not-About-AIDS-Dance.” Over the heads of the five dancers, surtitles narrated—in sans serif type and the most laconic terms—what had been happening in the dancers’ lives outside rehearsal as well as what was happening right before us on the stage: the wide lunges, wheeling legs, windmilling arms, supplicant kneels, reckless penchés, and bouts of stillness more rash than anything you’d see in Cunningham, with whom Greenberg had danced for seven years, beginning in 1979.

FEATURES | By Victoria Looseleaf

Reunited in Dance

In 2019, Xander Parish, then principal dancer with the Mariinsky Ballet—the first and only British dancer in the troupe’s history—was awarded an OBE for services to dance and to UK/Russia cultural relations. Fast forward to November 2022 and the world has, to say the least, radically changed. While a global pandemic still factors into daily life, in February of this year, Russia did the unspeakable by invading Ukraine.

REVIEWS | By Marina Harss

That Elusive Magic

We all know the sensation that comes once in a while during a performance, when something extraordinary happens onstage, time stops, and the audience and performers seem to co-exist within the same thrilling, elevated bubble. That magic only happens in live performance. But during the pandemic, one dance for online consumption, came close, and that was Ayodele Casel’s tap evening “Chasing Magic.”

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.