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.
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World-class review of ballet and dance.
June 16, 1989. Wearing only black leggings and a pixie haircut, Molissa Fenley performed her solo, “State of Darkness,” inspired by Nijinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” at the Colorado Dance Festival in Boulder. I had never seen anyone dance the way she did that night—she was both electric spark and unprotected newborn foal—expressing an unfathomable state as the Chosen One to Stravinsky’s dramatic score. Thirty-five years later, I still remember the stag leaps she made with fingers spread next to her face like antlers.
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“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.
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