So Far So Good
The School of American Ballet is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year. So is George Balanchine’s iconic “Serenade”—the first piece he made in America in 1934, choreographed on students from his brand-new academy.
PlusWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater held a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week. Ambitiously, the troupe alternated two programs and changed up casting a remarkable amount for so few shows. The programs, titled Contemporary Visions and All Ailey, were split into newer works (all were listed as new productions in 2023) and older company classics (including the stalwart “Revelations”). I wish I could’ve gone multiple times to see the various pieces and interpreters. I particularly wanted to see “Revelations” in the warm weather. Like the song “My Favorite Things” from the Sound of Music, “Revelations” has been coopted by the holiday season. The AADT performs it without fail at their City Center residency each December. Although I now associate it with mistletoe and holly, it really is a summery piece—with its sun umbrellas and fans and hazy amber lighting. Sigh, maybe next time. I did, however, make it to the contemporary program on opening night. It was a brief affair—running just an hour with an intermission—but the works were rich and the dancers were great, so I didn’t feel slighted. If you tacked on a nice dinner afterward it was a perfect night.
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The School of American Ballet is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year. So is George Balanchine’s iconic “Serenade”—the first piece he made in America in 1934, choreographed on students from his brand-new academy.
PlusSometimes there’s not much you’re able to say analytically about a dance work, and yet you know you’ve just witnessed a blood-guts-and-soul offering from an artist of the keenest kinaesthetic intelligence. Such was the case with gizeh muñiz vengel’s “auiga,” second on a double bill finale for the ARC Edge residency at San Francisco’s CounterPulse.
PlusThe Australian Museum Mammalogy Collection holds ten specimens of the Bramble Cay Melomys collected from 1922–24, when they were in abundance. One hundred years later, a familiar photo of a wide-eyed, mosaic-tailed Melomys, the first native mammal to become extinct due to the impacts of climate change, greets me as I enter the Arts House foyer.
FREE ARTICLEPre-pandemic, queerness and ballet were two terms not often put together. So, when choreographer Adriana Pierce started bringing a community of queer-identifying people together on Zoom—cis women, trans people of all genders, and nonbinary dancers—it felt like a watershed moment for many of them.
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