Smoke and Mirrors
“Vibrations” closes the Opéra Garnier’s 2025/26 season with what might be read as a triptych on dance’s future, past, and present.
Plus
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.
Performance
Place
Words
“Uncommonly intelligent, substantial coverage.”
Your weekly source for world-class dance reviews, interviews, articles, and more.
Already a paid subscriber? Login
“Vibrations” closes the Opéra Garnier’s 2025/26 season with what might be read as a triptych on dance’s future, past, and present.
PlusParticles or string? Dark matter or light? The National Ballet of Japan offers up a contemporary double-bill of dance, loosely connected by visual metaphors to modern physics.
PlusWhen Yvonne Rainer choreographed “Trio A” on herself in 1965, it took six months to work out the four-and-half-minute solo. But for many early audience members, its effect was immediate and electric.
PlusNina Ananiashvili was still thrilling audiences as an exceptional ballerina when, in 2004, she got a call from Georgia’s newly elected president, Mikheil Saakashvili.
Plus
comments