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INTERVIEWS | By Claudia Lawson

Journeys, Stories, Dances

Like dance companies the world over, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Australia’s premier Indigenous performing arts company, went into lockdown. As Covid-19 restrictions begin to ease in Australia, I spoke with Bangarra’s formidable and inspirational leader, Artistic Director Stephen Page. What follows is a condensed version of our conversation, where Stephen talks about the soul searching Bangarra has undertaken, the energy of audience, the responsibility of telling First Nation stories, and what the Black Lives Matter movement means to him.

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

A Ballerina like no Other

From the wide variety of ballet performances that have been streamed on Mariinsky.TV during the last four months, “Giselle” holds a place of its own. It’s a unique and exceptionally-made 2016 recording of the beloved 19th-century classic, produced by Telmondis, with Mariinsky Theatre, Mezzo, France Télévisions, and featuring the company’s prima, Diana Vishneva, in the title role and Étoile of Opéra National de Paris, Mathieu Ganio, in the role of Count Albrecht.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

As Night Draws In

Few choreographers made work which endures and resonates like the mighty Pina Bausch. She wasn't just an iconoclastic presence, she created work that still shocks, gets under the skin and into the marrow, and feels so visceral that it is timeless—whether it was through certain nuanced presentations of violence or societal taboos; staging work in unusual locations or bringing older and younger dancers together as twinned iterations of themselves. She stripped back veneers of genteel bourgeois respectability. She got down and dirty, she provoked, teased at larger truths about the human condition, and kept it real. Work was not always...

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

What light (and darkness)

Zürich Ballet’s production of “Romeo and Juliet” is a visually and emotionally gripping piece of dance-theater, a poignant dramatic vision of William Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy, which was created for the company by its artistic director, Christian Spuck, in 2012.

DANCE FILM | INTERVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Outside/Inside

Critically acclaimed duo Holly and Duncan Wilder are New York-based Wilder Project. They are siblings who create beautiful, inventive, often playful films which interrogate human connection, ritual, and nature. Their work has been screened at over forty film festivals internationally and include The Weight, Wake, Evergreen, Undertow, Ashes to Ashes, and most recently, We Are So Very Far Away. Lorna Irvine caught up with them as they finished filming a brand new project, to find out more about what makes them tick, and creating art during lockdown.

REVIEWS | By Róisín O'Brien

Dancing Virginia Woolf

I was so excited to see “Woolf Works” when it first premiered in 2015. Alessandra Ferri, Wayne McGregor, Virginia Woolf, Max Richter: an irresistible collision of the new with the old, a meeting of talent and history. I had been studying in London for a few years. £5 seats up in the gods at the Royal Opera House were a regular, somewhat guilty, indulgence (the opulence both beguiling and entrenched). In those trips, I got to ‘know’ the current company and found favourites: Edward Watson, Natalia Osipova, Eric Underwood. Already that is a snapshot in time, a constellation of people...

DANCE FILM | INTERVIEWS | By Penelope Ford

Alone Together

Aterballetto, contemporary dance company based in Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, was among the first to release a dance film in response to the pandemic. The region was particularly hard hit by Covid-19, and 1 Meter Closer, which aired in April, tells the emotional story of this dark period, and reflects on the changing nature of body language and gesture in times of crisis. At 20 minutes in length, 1 Meter Closer is paced like a short dance work, and is a significant piece in itself, not only for quarantine times.

REVIEWS | By Róisín O'Brien

Tale of Woe

“Maybe this time, it won’t end that way . . .” A wishful sentiment shared, perhaps, by the audience as they watch a well-known classic. Romeo and Juliet: Beyond Words, written and produced by BalletBoyz founders Michael Nunn and William Trevitt in association with the Royal Ballet and Footwork Films, unfortunately does not manage to create this tension.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Emotional Landscapes

For any dance aficionado, Sadler's Wells is a legendary location. From the first theatre built in the seventeenth century, to the present day, with the sixth theatre standing in the prestigious Clerkenwell area of London, countless numbers of dancers, actors, choreographers and directors have cut their teeth here. The series of short online films presented by Sadler's Wells and currently available on YouTube are as eclectic as anything from the venue's centuries of inspiration. They all show the diversity of performances as well as the progression of dance, in terms of both choreography and developmental film techniques on screen. Watching these...

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

Seasons Change

Since the middle of March, when St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater closed its doors due to the Covid-19 pandemic, nearly 85 million people from all around the world have accessed a variety of high-quality streaming performances—symphonies, choral works, operas, ballets and ballet classes—which the company has offered on various online platforms, including Mariinsky.TV. This staggering number of viewers speaks for itself. In such unprecedented times for performing arts, Mariinsky Theater has demonstrated an exemplar way of outreach and engagement with their audiences.

INTERVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Lots of Love

For twenty one years, Luca Silvestrini’s Protein have been creating wildly inventive, witty and moving dance pieces, including “LOL (lots of love),” which interrogates our interactions with technology; a vivid, colourful version of “The Little Prince,” and “Border Tales,” a thoughtful, heartfelt look at immigration. Lorna Irvine catches up with Protein's artistic director Luca Silvestrini to find out more as they launch their new digital programme.

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Taking Shelter

All around me, things are beginning to ‘return to normal’ which is misleading in both meaning and reality for things cannot return to normal; what was normal—what was before—was precisely the problem. In our separation from nature, and a balanced system of replenishment, driven by our greed and need for super-sized efficiency, our grand-scale consumerism, as Arundhati Roy writes, “another world . . . . She is on her way.” And how she forms, it is up to us all. “As the ice caps melt, as oceans heat up, and water tables plunge, as we rip through the delicate web...

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.