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.
Eyeballs, screaming crones, and bloody axes were projected on a scrim at the top of American Ballet Theater’s new production of “Crime and Punishment.” Not bad for Halloween programming! Yet, despite Isobel Waller-Bridge’s cinematic, pressure-cooker score—which frequently evoked escape room music—there was very little suspense in Helen Pickett and James Bonas’s new narrative full-length. (Pickett is credited with choreography, co-direction, and treatment, while Bonas is credited with direction and treatment.) Between the program notes that thoroughly described all 22 scenes, and the onstage supertitles that presaged and sometimes interpreted them, there was not much room for surprise. That the murders occurred only in flashback, and at an arty distance, didn’t help.
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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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