World-class review of ballet and dance.
Ballet22 is a new pick-up company in the San Francisco Bay Area born of one dancer with extraordinarily strong feet. Growing up in Puerto Rico, Roberto Vega Ortiz longed to dance on pointe, but his teachers said that wasn’t acceptable. So he practiced in private. Obsessively. And his pointe work became very, very good.
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For Red Sky Performance, dance is deeply connected to oral traditions, ceremony, and place—the land and water of Turtle Island, a name that many Indigenous communities in Canada use to refer to the continent and the ancestral territories where they live, work, and create today.
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The New York City Ballet’s Digital Spring Season continued this week with the premiere of the dance film When We Fell, choreographed by Kyle Abraham and co-directed by Abraham and Ryan Marie Helfant. This was an ambitious departure from the old performance recordings and Zoom rehearsal footage of the first three weeks of the season. It was also an about-face from the first ensemble work Abraham made for the company: 2018’s splashy, rap-scored “The Runaway.” When We Fell is somber and distilled. No matter which vein Abraham is working in, his singular choreographic voice and clear messaging come through.
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In early April, the Australian Ballet returned to the main stage of the Sydney Opera House for the first time in over a year. Like companies the world over, they were on hiatus while the pandemic raged. With Australia now essentially Covid-free, the company returns to a packed house, and a “new era.” In 2020, former American Ballet Theatre star David Hallberg took over from longtime artistic director David McAllister, and this is his Sydney debut. The programme throws back to Hallberg's roots, a triple bill called “New York Dialects.”
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Queensland Ballet opened their 2021 Season with a belated celebration. The company performed their 60th Anniversary Gala—a production which, like most others around the globe, was cancelled last year due to coronavirus. It paid homage to Queensland Ballet’s history. It listed the contributions made by previous Artistic Directors and, on the surface, showcased the technical might of the dancers. Underneath all this glamour, however, lies a very specific subliminal message; one that could be easily misread or overlooked entirely. The production acted as a teaser to its audience of where Queensland Ballet, and the artistic team, wishes to head in...
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I’m having a pandemic love affair with Pacific Northwest Ballet. It’s most unexpected, as so many of the emotional complexities of the past year have been. I live in California’s Bay Area; San Francisco Ballet has been my “home” company for two decades; I feel a loyalty to them. Yet it cannot be denied that when it comes to meeting the many challenges of these times with grace, authenticity, and whole-heartedness, Pacific Northwest Ballet has proven not just impressive but exceptionally endearing. It’s their behind-the-scenes glimpses of the dancers in each program’s “Five Minute Call” that carve a place in...
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It's always fascinating when a production asks serious and intellectual questions of the audience. What is the role of dance? How does it reflect our lives and the world in which we live? How can it viscerally change us as human beings?
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The Bolshoi Ballet recently unveiled a world premiere of “Orlando”—a two-act ballet based on the famous novel by English writer Virginia Woolf. The premiere took place on the Bolshoi Theater’s New Stage on March 24, with the cast led by the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina, Olga Smirnova, in the title role. The ballet was choreographed by Christian Spuck, a German dance-maker, who is currently artistic director of Ballet Zurich.
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Like all the dancers at New York City Ballet, Taylor Stanley has been away from the company’s studios for much of the last year. Most of that time, he’s been in New York, where he lives with his sweet dog, Theo. The break has given him time to reflect, but that’s nothing new. Stanley is as thoughtful offstage as he is internal onstage. He dances as if he were digging toward some very deep and quiet place within. For a few years, he has been exploring different ways of moving, outside of ballet. He’s attracted to Ohad Naharin’s Gaga technique,...
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The wavering, crepe paper-thin voice of an old man sings on a loop: “Jesus' blood never failed me yet, never failed me . . . yet, Jesus blood . . . never failed me yet / This one thing, I know, for he loves me . . . . So.” This is the first track of the soundtrack of the delicate, beautiful film Worn, screened through the Byre Theatre St Andrews, and could only be an appropriate choice to open. The heartbreaking track, by composer Gavin Bryars, samples the singing of a homeless man recorded on the streets, a vulnerable...
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The American Ballet Theatre aired a pre-filmed, all-Ratmansky program this week on City Center’s digital platform. For $25, it is accessible on demand through April 18th. I highly recommend it. There were three works offered in excerpt and one world premiere, “Bernstein in a Bubble,” created recently in a working quarantine at the Silver Bay YMCA in upstate NY. During a pleasant intermission interview between Linda Murray (Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the NY Public Library) and Alexei Ratmansky, he explained that the new ballet used music which had been composed by Leonard Bernstein to fête the...
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William Forsythe is a dancers’ choreographer. Dancers love working with him, he challenges their minds and their bodies, his knowledge and understanding of the vocabulary of ballet is profound. In the studio, the atmosphere is one of co-conspirators, playmates. All this comes through in his most recent creation, a collaboration with New York City Ballet’s Tiler Peck called “The Barre Project (Blake Works II)” released on March 25, with a repeat performance on March 27. (The platform is CLI Studios, an online clearinghouse for dance classes.)
Continue ReadingWatching 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,...
Continue ReadingThe choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.
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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.
Continue ReadingAfter 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.
Continue ReadingAn “Ajiaco” is a type of soup common to Colombia, Cuba, and Peru that combines a variety of different vegetables, spices, and meats.
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