Making a List
It’s the end of the year! How did we get here? I don’t think I’m alone in the impression that January was just yesterday.
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Best of Dance 2023
Astonish me,” said impresario Serge Diaghilev to choreographers, composers and collaborators of his famed Ballets Russes, the bespoke company that reigned supreme from 1909 through 1929.
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Embodying Untold Histories
Tucson, Arizona-based choreographer Yvonne Montoya’s latest work, “Stories from Home,” is part history, part geographical homage, and part family scrapbook.
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Border Crossings
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ current exhibition is a dance epic. Full of tragedy and triumph spanning centuries and the globe, “Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance 1900 – 1955” recenters the story of modern dance around historically marginalized artists often left out of the modern dance canon.
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Art on The Mart
In downtown Chicago, 100-foot-tall dancers glide along the Chicago River. Projected onto the enormous digital installation Art on The Mart, the dancers of the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project look like ancestral spirits keeping watch over the city.
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Limitless Creativity
The year was 1983 when Sister Beth Burns of the order of St. Joseph of Orange began teaching children to dance in a summer pilot program for at-risk youth. The program was an immediate success, with Burns’ vision eventually becoming the Wooden Floor, a non-profit organization that provides tutoring, academic services, counseling and dance education to low-income youth at no cost.
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A Woman's Point of View
On one of the first warm days of late March, Fifth Avenue pedestrian traffic was teeming outside the Guggenheim, ubiquitous Mister Softee truck idling at the curb. Down the avenue, people posed for photos on the steps outside the Met and Central Park resembled the Seurat painting that inspired “Sunday in the Park with George,” while a crowd of some two hundred seventy dance lovers found their way down a ramp to the Guggenheim’s circular theater to sit in the dark for one of two sold out presentations on Bronislava Nijinska’s ballet from 1923, “Les Noces,” presented by Works &...
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A Resilient History
Returning after its two-year pandemic hiatus, the 33rd International Conference and Festival of Blacks in Dance kicked off at the end of January with 500 attendees from ten countries convening in downtown Toronto. Hosted in a different North American city each year, the conference visits Toronto for the third time with local co-host dance Immersion, a non-profit organization that produces and promotes dancers and dances of the African Diaspora.
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The Slowest Wave
A groundbreaking collaboration is afoot involving New York City butoh dance company Vangeline Theater; founded by French-born butoh performer, choreographer, author, and teacher Vangeline; and a neuroscience team from the University of Houston, Rockefeller University, and City University of New York. The collaborating parties are researching the impact of butoh on brainwave activity in a pilot study. I am in Houston, Texas, at the university’s theater watching the culminating butoh performance as a group of neuroscientists (visibly stationed in the wings) record and download the activity in the dancers’ brains. Simultaneously, a multi-media artist is “artistically” projecting the dancers’ real-time brain activity onto...
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Living Architecture
When I speak with Russian Tokyo-based photographer Yulia Skogoreva in a cozy coffee shop in the Yoyogi district of the Japanese capital, it becomes apparent very quickly that motion, or bodies in motion to be precise, is what she is essentially invested in. The Muscovite's ongoing projects with female sumo and contemporary dancers are, for her, much the same in that they celebrate the human body in a series of ritualistic, performance-focused or natural settings and her role is to be a spectator, a probenleiter who probes, pushes and guides the dancer to where they belong.
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The Collective is Strong
2022’s abundant, and at times, overwhelming, calendar of dance was a weekly reminder of New York’s place as ‘a’ if not ‘the’ major dance capital of the world. Though the pandemic caused an exodus of artists from the city in search of affordability and space, I was thrilled again and again, by how many have stayed and continued to make powerful work centering their fellow dancers and uplifting their communities. And while there were many singular performances of note—like Jacquelin Harris’s brilliant conjuring of Winnie Mandela in “Survivors” during Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s winter season last week—what has stayed...
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Teenage Angst and Institutions
Watching Matthew Bourne's reworked version of the “star-cross'd lovers,” I was briefly reminded of Veronica, played by Winona Ryder, in the dark 1988 comedy by Daniel Waters and Michael Lehmann, Heathers, and her line, “my teen angst bullshit has a body count.” Yes, this is the darker side of Bourne's repertoire,...
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The Me of Today
The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.
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Beneath blue California skies, manicured trees, and the occasional hum of an overhead airplane, Tamara Rojo took the Frost Amphitheater stage at Stanford University to introduce herself as the new artistic director of San Francisco Ballet.
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America, F**K Yeah
After a week of the well-balanced meal that is “Jewels”—the nutritive, potentially tedious, leafy greens of “Emeralds,” the gamy, carnivorous “Rubies,” and the decadent, shiny white mountains of meringue in “Diamonds”—the New York City Ballet continued its 75th Anniversary All-Balanchine Fall Season with rather more dyspeptic fare.
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Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup
An “Ajiaco” is a type of soup common to Colombia, Cuba, and Peru that combines a variety of different vegetables, spices, and meats.
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