Wicked Moves with Christopher Scott
Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) steps down the steps, rests her hat on the floor and takes in the Ozdust Ballroom in Wicked. She elevates her arm, bringing her bent wrist to her temple.
PlusWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
The haute joaillerie house Van Cleef & Arpels has a long history of supporting dance, since Louis Arpels attended the Paris Opera Ballet in the 1920s. In the 1940s, the company began producing jewel-encrusted ballerina clips. When Claude Arpels met George Balanchine in 1961, it led to the New York City Ballet’s first abstract full-length ballet, “Jewels,” in 1967. Since 2012, the house has sponsored the L.A. Dance Project, and, in 2015, they began awarding the Fedora–Van Cleef & Arpels Prize for Ballet. Winners include Alexei Ratmansky, William Forsythe, and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. So it was fitting that VC&A commissioned a new dance to be performed during its second annual Fifth Avenue Blooms festival, an outdoor celebration of spring running along NYC’s Fifth Ave from 50th-59th Street throughout the month of May. What was less fitting was the choice of downtown experimentalist choreographer Pam Tanowitz to headline this floral-festooned uptown stretch of consumerism—and the incongruity was a delight.
Performance
Place
Words
“Uncommonly intelligent, substantial coverage.”
Your weekly source for world-class dance reviews, interviews, articles, and more.
Already a paid subscriber? Login
Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) steps down the steps, rests her hat on the floor and takes in the Ozdust Ballroom in Wicked. She elevates her arm, bringing her bent wrist to her temple.
PlusThe Sarasota Ballet does not do a “Nutcracker”—they leave that to their associate school. Instead, over the weekend, the company offered a triple bill of which just one ballet, Frederick Ashton’s winter-themed “Les Patineurs,” nodded at the season.
PlusI couldn’t stop thinking about hockey at the New York City Ballet’s “Nutcracker” this year, and not only because the stage appeared to be made of ice: there were a slew of spectacular falls one night I attended.
PlusLast week, during the first Fjord Review Dance Critics’ Festival, Mindy Aloff discussed and read from an Edwin Denby essay during “The Critic’s Process” panel.
Plus
comments