World-class review of ballet and dance.
Officially appointed director of La Scala Ballet on December 1st, Manuel Legris has been working with the company since last autumn. Thanks to him, the dancers, after many months in lockdown away from the theatre, could resume their daily training. Their discipline has been such that the troupe remains Covid-free, in spite of more than 50 cases being recorded among the chorus and the orchestra.
Continue Reading
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...
Continue Reading
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...
Continue Reading
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....
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading
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...
Continue Reading
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...
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading
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...
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading
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.
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.
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading