World-class review of ballet and dance.
What does dance and the car of the future have in common? In a warehouse of the former Toronto Star printing press, restyled as the Lighthouse Immersive Artspace at the city’s waterfront, the world premiere “Touch” from Côté Danse and Montreal multimedia artist Thomas Payette turns the technology of self-driving vehicles into a vehicle for an experiential multimedia dance installation.
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It’s rare to encounter an artistic director’s program note offering more than generic greetings, yet I always read Peter Boal’s opening thoughts before pressing “play” on a Pacific Northwest Ballet program. (Happily the company has continued to offer a digital season alongside its return to the live stage.) To introduce this second mixed-rep bill, Boal could have angled for “relevance” and stressed how Ulysses Dove’s “Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven” connects to our moment of grief in the wake of the pandemic. But Boal is more personal and specific and less crudely calculating than that. He writes instead...
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If ever there was a can-do dancer, it’s Megan Fairchild. At New York City Ballet, where she has been a principal dancer since 2005, she performs all the toughest ballets, the ones that are full of jumps, quick footwork, and pin-prick pointework. At a point in her career when most principals forego certain punishing roles like Dewdrop in “The Nutcracker”—all those jumps! so much speed!—she has no plans to take things easy on herself. In fact, when I caught up with her to talk about her new book The Ballerina Mindset (Penguin Life, December 2021), Fairchild was in the middle...
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Emerging from the global pandemic, which brought isolation, fear and, most tragically, death to so many, has indeed given us new reasons to enjoy simple things—the human connection, a hug, embracing hope again. And so it was with dancer/choreographer Danielle Agami’s world premiere, “Joy.” Performed by her Los Angeles-based Ate9 troupe at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts (a special shout-out to the Wallis’ artistic director Paul Crewes, who departs his position at the end of the year but who has given local dance a position of prominence over his tenure), the work lived up to its name...
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When first developing "Set and Reset" in 1983, Trisha Brown knew that she wanted the work to be a collaboration. Right away, Brown decided she wanted interdisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson to create a score, and being that both were also talented visual artists, Brown figured that they could actually complete the entirety of the work together, covering costumes and set design, as well. This is what she planned to tell her board when first announcing the idea; However, upon their initial meeting, before she could even explain her full plan, Brown's chairman spoke up: "Who is going to do the...
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Entire generations have grown up reading Le Rouge et le Noir, finding in the 1830 novel by Stendhal a Bildungsroman and in Julian Sorel an alter ego for our own aspirations of career and love. For those who would like to find again that esprit de jeunesse, Pierre Lacotte’s “Le Rouge et le Noir” is a ballet not to be missed. Obviously, they have to be fond of those grands ballets in classic style that no choreographer stages anymore. Monsieur Lacotte is probably the last one, a specialist of that kind, who at 90 years of age was able to...
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As Tony Bennett sang, the curtain rose on silhouetted dancers dressed in all black and in whimsical monochrome polka-dotted tutus. Then the three female leads in Jessica Lang’s new work “ZigZag” whirled onstage in bursts of yellow, blue and pink tulle designed by Wes Gordon for Carolina Herrera. What came next was an infectiously joyful, yet nostalgic performance, filled with its fair share of jazzy shimmies and finger snaps.
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Tapping into wanderlust in its seventh season (and most ambitious one yet), Fall for Dance North (FFDN) took audiences on an expansive journey to Bangalore, Havana, and London through its Signature Program, a three-part dance film conceived by Ilter Ibrahimof and Indo-Canadian director Vikram Dasgupta.
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It’s no accident that dancer/choreographer Micaela Taylor named her troupe The TL Collective, the ‘TL’ short for ‘To Love,’ because watching this standout performer in her own works, one instantly falls in love with her. Indeed, with Taylor, who is decidedly the complete package, another word comes to mind: Star, with a capital ‘S.’ And so it was that this magnetic performer and her troupe of seven shredded the stage at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on Friday with three works, including a world premiere, “Time.”
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Opening night of Martha Graham Dance Company’s run at the Joyce Theater was a momentous occasion. Not only did this engagement mark the MGDC’s return to live performance in its home city—a milestone nearly every other marquee company based in New York City has been celebrating this fall—it was also the start of the company’s 96th season. On Tuesday October 26, 2021, the company dancers were in fine form despite more than a year of pandemic protocols, carrying on Martha Graham’s legacy with technical virtuosity and dramatic intensity.
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Every year, City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival offers true medley programming, with hit-or-miss results. But the fifth and final program of this year’s festival was strong from start to finish. Talented young Roman Mejia (New York City Ballet’s newest soloist) kicked off the show by stepping into “Fandango,” a gypsy solo Alexei Ratmansky choreographed for Wendy Whelan in 2010. It has also been danced before by Sara Mearns, but Mejia is the first male to take it on. It was somewhat reworked for Mejia—the women did not perform such aerial manèges—but many of the steps were left unaltered and...
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Ronen (Roni, as he likes to be known) Koresh premiered “TikVAH,” his first work back at Philadelphia’s Suzanne Roberts Theatre since 2019. Two years is a long time in a dancer’s short performance life. Tikvah may mean hope in Hebrew, but it comes from a root word that means to bind or to wait for. In celebrating the 30th year of Koresh Dance Company he kept his 10-member troupe and dance school together through the Covid-19 ordeal by keeping them socially distanced yet moving and in dancing shape in their own Rittenhouse Square studio. No one guessed how long they’d...
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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