World-class review of ballet and dance.
Okwui Okpokwasili’s arms undulate, reach, and circle in the near dark under an oval projection of rippling water. Her arms babble out from her expressive back, capable of relating tales both epic and intimate. Notably, this is how I first encountered her work, nearly a decade ago, in “Bronx Gothic”—through her incredibly articulate spine and upper body coming into its own, conveying the metamorphosis of adolescence.
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The United States is surreal at this moment. Dancers in black have been circling the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., performing Pina Bausch’s “Nelken Line” choreography to protest the self-proclaimed dictator making himself chair of the Center’s board. Choreographers are giving up hopes of National Endowment for the Arts funding now that guidelines demand “patriotic” art.
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Los Angeles-based Heidi Duckler, dubbed “Queen of Site-Specific Dance,” and whose Heidi Duckler Dance is celebrating 40 years of transforming spaces through the power of contemporary movement—kudos!—has stepped aside as artistic director, handing the reigns to associate artistic director, Raymond Ejiofor.
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“Tanz” opens on a ballet class like none I’ve ever attended. Onstage are two portable barres and four dancers in rehearsal clothes stretching and warming up. Eighty-three year old ballerina Beatrice Cordua teaches from a wheelchair, naked.
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John Scott Dance's “Begin Anywhere” started in the middle. A dancer walked to the center of the Irish Arts Center's JL Greene Theatre holding a discman, placed it on the floor, and pressed play.
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Today I have the immense privilege of speaking with Lucia Field. Lucia grew up with her family in Sydney, but with her dad, Anthony, as the original Blue Wiggle. It's not the childhood you might imagine. As the Wiggles became global superstars, Lucia didn't see her dad for nearly nine months a year. Instead, Lucia grew up alongside her mom, her brother, and her sister, dancing and dreaming of becoming a ballerina. And it was not just a dream. Lucia's star was already on the rise. And by 13, she was accepted into the Australian Ballet School. In this exceptionally...
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The story began with an impulse to go back and give something back—to the performing arts traditions of India. Acclaimed British dancer and choreographer of Bangladeshi descent, Akram Khan, long known for dancing between worlds—contemporary dance and classical Kathak, decided to return to his roots.
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I step off the elevator onto the 5th floor of the Whitney Museum and I am awed by the spectacle, vastness, and ground shifting power of the “Edges of Ailey” exhibition. This tribute to Alvin Ailey and his universe—past, present, and future—not only lifts up its larger-than-life subject but it also, like a great ocean wave, raises up and carries forward everything in its wake.
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Marius Petipa’s “Paquita” Grand Pas Classique has been around since 1881. I last reviewed a version in 2023, by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo.
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The IBStage Star Galas have a mission to unite the best and brightest for gala ballet evenings. As seen at New York City Center, New York. Photographs by Steven Pisano
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While Kendrick Lamar performed “Humble,” during his Super Bowl halftime set and was surrounded by dancers clad in red, white and blue—and in the process assumed the formation of the American flag (choreographed by Charm La’Donna)—so, too, did Faye Driscoll use performers who created slews of shapes/sculptures in her astonishing work, “Weathering,” seen at REDCAT on February 8, the last of three sold-out performances.
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Let’s start with the obvious, or maybe to some this notion will be highly disputable, even offensive. OK, then, let’s start with what kept repeating in my head as I walked out of UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, synapses abuzz with the wonders of Twyla Tharp Dance’s 60th anniversary “Diamond Jubilee” program: My God, Twyla Tharp really is the most brilliantly inventive choreographer now alive on the planet.
FREE ARTICLEWatching 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,...
PlusThe 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.
PlusAfter 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.
PlusAn “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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