NYCB On and Offstage
New York City Ballet concluded its 75th anniversary year with its traditional summer residency upstate at the amphitheater of Saratoga Springs’s Performing Arts Center (SPAC).
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United
The inaugural Unite Ballet Festival, directed by Calvin Royal III, took place at the Joyce Theater from August 13-18, 2024.
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New Horizons
Before digital audio, compact discs, cassette tapes with their ribbons of sound sandwiched within a small case, and pressed vinyl records, came wax cylinders to record and reproduce sound, thanks to Thomas Edison’s 1877 invention of the hand-cranked phonograph.
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Forever Flamenco
Far from Southern Spain, but in the heart of Hollywood, that once monthly dance staple, “Forever Flamenco,” was alive and well again at the Fountain Theatre, if only for the month of August.
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On the Road
Since 1980, the Australian Ballet's National Tour (or really, the Dancers' Company as everyone calls it), is a much anticipated event for the graduating students of the Australian Ballet School.
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Man, Woman, Butoh with Ichi & Vangeline
On a mid-summer evening, along the banks of the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan, a colorful band of performers costumed in orange and blue merged with the sunset and the water. Akihito Ichihara, principal dancer with the Butoh dance company Sankai Juku and founder of Elf, performed with a group of students who had just completed a workshop with him.
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Taiwan Season
Every year at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, I look forward to the Taiwan Season. A curated selection of shows within the organised chaos of the festival, the quality of the dancing is always exemplary. I caught two out of the four shows of this season’s offering.
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Internal Noise
Dance aficionados are on high alert any time there’s a new Bill T. Jones work. That the artistic director/co-founder and choreographer of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company did not make dances for “The Motherboard Suite,” but directed it, still made for a solid evening of dance drama.
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Oceanic Feeling
Once a year New York City dance lovers and Brooklyn beach-goers converge in the Venn diagram of performance art and natural splendor that is Beach Sessions Dance Series.
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Dancing with Duende
The temperature rose again on Thursday at the Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles’ celebrated outdoor venue, when Spanish-American conductor François López-Ferrer brought the heat to the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a program dubbed “Symphonic Tango & Flamenco.”
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Featured Reads
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,...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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