Youthful Ideals
Artistic Director Miyako Yoshida’s “Giselle” for the National Ballet of Japan excavates emotional freshness within the familiar landscape of the 1841 Romantic classic.
PlusWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
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. Week two kicked off with the triple hot wing challenge of “Western Symphony,” “Tarantella,” and “Stars and Stripes.” The murky, brief “Unanswered Question” section from “Ivesiana” was tossed in like a Tums tablet. I can’t say the program wasn’t fun, but it was a lot to digest. Real (tambourines), fake (a plastic trumpet), and imaginary (harmonicas, banjos, fiddles) instruments were played. There were three variations on coda fouettés, two dance-off trick competitions, and two calf-busting relevé diagonals. Two finales featured principals resting against the front wings in funny hats. Yes, two.
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Artistic Director Miyako Yoshida’s “Giselle” for the National Ballet of Japan excavates emotional freshness within the familiar landscape of the 1841 Romantic classic.
PlusAt a baseline, good art should move you. At its peak, it can change you. I did not expect to come out of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s season closer, Re-Act, a changed person, but that’s exactly the effect the performance—and particularly one work, Daniel Charon’s “From Code to Universe”—had on me.
PlusThe body as vessel; the body as memory container; the body as truth-teller. All of these corporeal permutations were on view at the UCLA Nimoy Theater last Thursday, when Eiko Otake and Wen Hui performed their haunting, elegiac and deeply meaningful work, “What is War.”
PlusIf ballet and politics were ever a thing, Houston Ballet principal Harper Watters is, perhaps, one of its staunchest advocates.
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Love Faye’s writing. Loved her dancing when we worked together at City Ballet. So smart.
Faye Arthur’s reviews are most insightful – I enjoy and learn – thanks
So descriptive of the performance that I closed my eyes and could see the ballet from a seat in the First Ring.