Phoenix Rising
The traditional striped kabuki curtain of black, persimmon and green hangs tattered and faded. It’s our first hint of destruction.
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World-class review of ballet and dance.
Like most new adaptations of existing story ballet classics, the world premiere of artistic director James Sofranko’s “Swan Lake” for Grand Rapids Ballet retained the bones of the original it was based on. Sofranko’s redux stayed faithful to the storyline of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov’s 1895 production, based on Russian and German folk tales, which told of Prince Siegfried, who fell in love with Princess Odette, a woman cursed to be a swan by day and to take human form only at night. It also retained a good measure of their original choreography. Into that, Sofranko seamlessly created and integrated his own choreography for portions of acts one, three, and four of the four-act production, which ran a tidy two hours.
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The traditional striped kabuki curtain of black, persimmon and green hangs tattered and faded. It’s our first hint of destruction.
PlusOn the final weekend of August, Kaatsbaan Cultural Park presented Anna Sperber’s Bessie award-winning dance “Bow Echo” during the opening day of its 2026 Annual Festival.
PlusThere is site-specific dance—think Trisha Brown’s 1970 groundbreaking work, “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building”—and then there’s Sarah Gordon Butler’s “Hay Rake Ballet.”
PlusThis summer, hidden within the red brick warehouses and graffitied construction panels of industrial East Williamsburg, Brooklyn lay a secret garden.
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