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.
Elongated bodies meticulously keep time stepping on demi-pointe to the hard driving techno-beat. They crisscross the stage in various groupings from different directions with their prissy steps sporting opaque nylon knee socks, bare limbs, and nude colored leotards. The costumes by Rebecca Hytting amplify the picture of constricting uniformity; at the same time, they reveal the individual body shapes and builds of the seventeen highly trained dancers of tanzmainz. Trapped in a throbbing playlist and choreography of constrained energy, these bodies look like humans on a conveyor belt—intermittently exposing micro-signs of desperateness for escape. And occasionally some do escape—that’s when it gets interesting. Such is the set-up for Sharon Eyal’s “Soul Chain” created for and performed by tanzmainz, the contemporary dance company of the Staatstheater Mainz in Germany.
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Tanzmainz in “Soul Chain” by Sharon Eyal. Photograph by Andreas Etter
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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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