Lycra and Lace
What is he looking at? The dancer in a blue biketard bounds around the stage, his curly hair flip-flopping as his head snaps right, left, and center.
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World-class review of ballet and dance.
What is he looking at? The dancer in a blue biketard bounds around the stage, his curly hair flip-flopping as his head snaps right, left, and center.
Continue ReadingTwo performers crawl in on hands and knees wearing neon green, hooded coveralls—the lightweight papery kind made for working in a sterile environment—and clusters of balloons pinned to their backs.
Continue ReadingWill Rawls makes boundaries visible by defying them. Known for the disciplinary and topical range of his projects, the choreographer, director, and performer approaches issues of representation in “[siccer],” a multi-part, multi-site work co-presented by L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival. A live performance at Performance Space New York accompanies a multimedia installation at the Kitchen, a book published by Wendy’s Subway, and an album published by the artist. With a creative process reaching back to 2018, the work delves explicitly into pandemic-era energies and inertias with focused intimacy and a pervasive sense of instability.
Continue ReadingIt is always interesting when multiple theme steps emerge over the course of a mixed repertory evening, but it is uncanny on one featuring five different ballets, each with a different choreographer and composer, covering a twenty-year span (2005-2025).
Continue ReadingZvidance premiered its new work “Dandelion” mid-November at New York Live Arts. Founded by Zvi Gotheiner in 1989, Zvidance has been a steady presence in the New York contemporary dance scene, a reliable source of compositional integrity, and a magnet for wonderful dancers.
Continue ReadingHe’s a choreographer, movement composer and trans-media storyteller: He’s d. Sabela grimes, who grew up in Lompoc, California, and didn’t know that his true calling would be as a dancer, choreographer and teller of tales until he moved to Philadelphia in the late 1990s and met Rennie Harris of Rennie Harris Puremovement.
Continue ReadingHere where I live in California, San Francisco Ballet will soon gear up for a revival of its massive ballet about Artificial Intelligence, a spectacle that ends on a note flattering to the tech bros in nearby Silicon Valley: strife gives way to eternal hope, and the vision of a sleek, luminous future reigns. Well, up the coast in Seattle they’ve got a different take on unregulated AI, and I’m here for it.
Continue ReadingPiece by piece, spanning two decades, Lucy Guerin Inc’s “Pieces” continues to grow. An invitation extended to a selection of choreographers to give shape to adventurous ideas and create a new choreographic work within a supportive framework has expanded from a five- to ten-minute work presented in the Lucy Guerin Inc studios to a twenty-minute piece on the University of Melbourne Art and Culture (UMAC) stage.
Continue ReadingCleveland native Dianne McIntrye received a hometown hero's welcome during her curtain speech prior to her eponymous dance group thrilling the audience in her latest work, “In the Same Tongue.”
Continue ReadingA man, much to his wife’s chagrin, has a nasty little habit: at night, he turns into a bat and flies out of their marital bed to partake in all kinds of infidelities.
Continue ReadingThe Japan Society continued its Yukio Mishima Centennial Series with a newly commissioned dance work titled “The Seven Bridges (Hashi-zukushi)” based on Yukio Mishima’s short story by that name originally published in 1956.
Continue ReadingLondon is a changed city this week. The cold front has come, and daylight hours have plummeted. The city is rammed with tourists, buskers, and shoppers.
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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