World-class review of ballet and dance.
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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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“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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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...
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Royal New Zealand Ballet finished their “Live in Your Living Room” series with a tribute to old and new; their penultimate episode honoured the romantic roots of classical ballet whilst the season ended with a sweet and delicious encore of an audience favourite.
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Mariinsky Ballet’s spectacular production of “Raymonda,” presented on Mariinsky.TV as part of the company’s online season, is a real treat. Rarely seen in the West in its entirety, it’s a jewel of a ballet—the last great creation of Marius Petipa for the Imperial Russian Ballet.
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2 in a Million (Director’s Cut) is J.A. Moreno’s personal take on the official music video he directed for Grammy-nominated DJ and producer Steve Aoki, multi-award winning musician Sting, and platinum-selling trio SHAED.
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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