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INTERVIEWS | By Marina Harss

Stella Abrera, on Moving Forward, Steadily and with Grit

In early March of 2020 the American Ballet Theatre principal Stella Abrera was in St. Petersburg, Russia, setting Alexei Ratmansky’s “Seven Sonatas” on the Mariinsky Ballet. She was so busy in the studio, she told me a few months later, that she was barely conscious of what was happening in the larger world around her. That is until her husband, former ABT soloist Sascha Radetsky—now director of the Studio Company—called to say he had booked her on the next flight out of St. Petersburg. Hers was one of the last flights to leave Russia in those days when the seriousness...

REVIEWS | By Valentina Bonelli

Box of Dreams

Someday we will recognize the dance pieces created during the pandemic, conceived for the camera, performed by a few dancers, innervated by a sense of instability. It is the case with the new “I wonder where the dreams I don’t remember go,” staged by Yoann Bourgeois for NDT1, filmed without audience and streamed on demand in two performances on the website’s company. A piece that in the past we would have called a “video dance.” The French artist, trained as a circus acrobat and raised as a contemporary dancer, is quite in demand in Europe as a choreographer since his...

INTERVIEWS | By Marina Harss

Bijayini Satpathy on her Transformative Year

I’ve been meaning to do this for months, but I’m only getting around to it now. I’ve come to think of this strange expansion of time as “Covid time.” The “this” that I’m referring to is a series of check-ins with dancers and choreographers, a way to hear about what they’ve been up to during the past however-many-months since the pandemic began. Everyone has reacted differently. There are the hyper-productive artists, who have been busy creating dance videos and teaching and planning Zoom seminars. There are the depressed ones, who are just gritting their teeth and watching the months melt away....

REVIEWS | By Paul McInnes

A Joyous Nutcracker

As Tokyo and its surrounding areas prepare to go into a second lockdown, it's unclear what the immediate future of ballet and live events will be in the Japanese capital. Only last month, ballet, dance, opera and other performing arts had made a welcome return and the outlook was bright as companies regrouped and held performances around the city playing to sold out or near sold out venues.

REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Dance & Diplomacy

Blessed be the diplomats and the grant writers! Seven years ago, Silicon Valley-based dancer and choreographer Philein Wang applied to the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and secured a $50,000 grant for a series of U.S.-China exchanges and tours. This year, confronted with anti-Asian racism in the U.S. and the police killing of George Floyd, she saw both a need and an opportunity and reached out to the State Department again.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Season’s Greetings

The sputtering stop-start of lockdown measures in the U.K. has wiped most of the 2020 dance season from the calendar, including a few live holiday performances that were optimistically (and, in hindsight, unrealistically) scheduled this autumn, like a bill of world premieres from English National Ballet. But it’s the year of make-do, and few companies have the leadership and resources to salvage so much from the wreckage as ENB, who swiftly rejigged those new works into a series of pay-per-view films for homebound audiences. It might be an emergency stopgap, but the digital programme works hard to capture the versatility...

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Tanowitz at the Joyce

Solos and site-specific works were the dance world’s prevailing themes in 2020, for obvious reasons: people couldn’t touch each other or congregate. But the term site-specific can mean two different things. Sometimes it refers to a live event attended by a real, albeit limited, audience. For example, the LA Dance Project put on a series of drive-in shows, the Kaatsbaan summer festival offered spaced-out picnic blanket-seating, and Troy Schumacher and company are currently staging walk-through “Nutcracker” performances at the Wethersfield Mansion. But site-specific also refers to a dance choreographed for a particular place, which is then filmed and broadcast to...

FEATURES | INTERVIEWS | By Sophie Bress

Finding Sanctuary

Lillian Barbeito is a dancer, first and foremost. But beyond that, she’s a mover. Perhaps this is why when she has an idea, she can’t sit still. And when she devotes herself to bringing these ideas to life, she doesn’t do it halfway.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

A Beautiful Toybox

It's not just little girls who dream of escaping into ballet. Created for the screen by Christopher Hampson and set and costume designer Lez Brotherston and filmed by directors Jess and Morgs, The Secret Theatre comes across as a Victorian toybox full of rich, endless surprises. When a young boy, played with exuberance and wonder by Leo Tetteh, finds his way into an empty theatre, he is taken on an adventure into the heart of Christmas ballet, where dancers cast spells before his eyes. Here, Scottish Ballet bring the viewer not one, but two, magical ballets for the festive season, as...

INTERVIEWS | By Claudia Lawson

Venus Rising

Patricia Barker, former star of Pacific Northwest Ballet became artistic director of Royal New Zealand Ballet in 2017. Before taking up the position, Ms. Barker, who would be the third AD of the company in a decade, had only visited New Zealand once previously for a fleeting 72 hours. Ms. Barker has since brought stability to the company and has sought to cultivate an environment in which dancers can develop as artists. In this condensed version of our conversation, Ms. Barker discusses how the RNZB has fared during Covid, supporting female choreographers, and her vision for 2021.

REVIEWS | By Paul McInnes

Fair, Kind, and True

Shakespeare wasn't a man unfamiliar with pandemics. He lived through the plague and his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon was decimated by it, leaving thousands dead. It's timely, then, that Megumi Nakamura and Yasuyuki Shuto's beautifully produced and choreographed “Shakespeare The Sonnets” hit the New National Theatre Tokyo stage for two performances in late November 2020.

REVIEWS | By Claudia Lawson

Cultural Connection

It is difficult not to be effusive about Sydney Dance Company’s first live performance since Covid emerged. For the first time in nine months the audience is being ushered into Sydney's Carriageworks. It’s like so many performances, the lights are dimmed, there is chatter, but there are differences. Some people wear masks, and there is a spare seat on either side of each audience member. The occasion is not lost on the audience, excitable gratitude and disbelief seems to hang in the air. The Welcome to Country, recognizing the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians 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.