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Four Characters in Search of a Plot
FEATURES | Par Oksana Khadarina

Four Characters in Search of a Plot

On September 10th, the Bolshoi Theater opened its 245th ballet season with a surprising premiere. “Four Characters in Search of a Plot” ("Четыре персонажа в поисках сюжета") featured four young international choreographers, making their debut with Russia’s esteemed ballet troupe. Commissioned were an hour-long piece,“The Ninth Wave” by Bryan Arias (Puerto Rico) and three 15-minute works, “Just” by Simone Valastro (Italy), “Fading” by Dimo Milev (Bulgaria) and “Silentium” by Martin Chaix (France).

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Tanz im August 2.0
FEATURES | INTERVIEWS | Par Merilyn Jackson

Tanz im August 2.0

Despite what the world is suffering this year, two of Europe’s most prestigious international summer dance festivals commit to go forward with drastically truncated, yet vital and imaginative programs. Berlin’s Tanz im August, under the artistic direction of Virve Sutinen, and the Venice Biennale’s Festival Danza under Marie Chouinard’s curatorial leadership will open in late August and mid-October respectively. Each artistic director spoke with me via Skype and Zoom recently about the hardships and angst of redesigning their festivals during this brutal pandemic. This month, we feature Tanz im August and how they pivoted from cancellation to a ten-day online...

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Notes from Quarantine
FEATURES | Par Faye Arthurs

Notes from Quarantine

Like everyone else in the world, I’ve been trying to stay healthy, yet also connected to my work and passions during this abysmal pandemic. It’s a conundrum: I’m a dance critic now, but there are no live dance shows to review. This problem is small beans, of course, in the grand scheme of things. People are dying. People are starving. Life as we knew it has been irrevocably altered. The truly brave and selfless work of all those deemed essential is both humbling and awe-inspiring; I cannot thank these people enough for their intrepid commitment to the human race. But...

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The River
FEATURES | Par Josephine Minhinnett

The River

For dancers, moving beyond our comfort zones—the places we know to be familiar and safe—often involve pushing the physical limits of the body, training to extremes to create a new normal. But sometimes going beyond comfort zones can also be an inward action, having the bravery to be vulnerable and let go, trusting the body to move towards its places of intuition and feeling. This is what the Dublin-based Flora Fauna Project has been encouraging everyday people from their community to do.

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Desert Island Dances
FEATURES | Par Caroline Shadle

Desert Island Dances

Hua Hsu wrote in March for the New Yorker a quarantine-inspired piece about the BBC radio show “Desert Island Discs.” The program, which began during World War II as “part of the BBC’s broader effort to make life during wartime slightly more bearable” as Hsu puts it, presents interviews with cultural icons from various fields who are each asked to prepare a list of eight tracks that they would bring with them were they to be stranded on a desert island. Hsu uses “Desert Island Discs” to further his own investigation of the role of music in our lives and...

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[Web]Site-Specific
FEATURES | Par Rachel Stone

[Web]Site-Specific

The crowd is the first thing I notice in the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s 2016 performance of “Figure Eights” as part of a performance at Seattle Art Museum. The audience clusters behind the row of six dancers, who are all dressed in casual white shirts and loose, white pants. The audience claps and takes pictures, sits stage-side, heads in their hands, on their phones.

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Dance in the Time of Covid-19
FEATURES | Par Victoria Looseleaf

Dance in the Time of Covid-19

Who knew that the performance of American Ballet Theatre's world premiere, “Of Love and Rage,” that I was privileged to see at Segerstrom Center for the Arts on March 5 would be the last live dance concert I would share with some 3,000 thrilled theater-goers. Yes, that’s a rhetorical question, but since the world irrevocably changed in a matter of weeks because of Covid-19, the novel coronavirus, all dance troupes, performing arts organizations and any place people gather—whether for culture, entertainment, dining, drinking and/or to experience nature—have effectively shut down.

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Swan Lake
FEATURES | REVIEWS | Par Faye Arthurs

Odette vs Odile x 3

The ink is barely dry on year-end top ten lists, yet the first months of the new year bring no respite from heady contest. In sports (the Super Bowl), cinema (the Golden Globes through the Oscars), and politics (the primaries), winter in America is rife with competition. Why should the ballet world be any different? In the span of roughly a month, NYC dancegoers had to choose between three major productions of that classic synecdochical of the art form: “Swan Lake.” Actually, there were four—but in this review I won’t cover the St. Petersburg Ballet Theater’s two shows at BAM....

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Walk-on, Drop Dead, Exit
FEATURES | Par Josephine Minhinnett

Walk-on, Drop Dead, Exit

On a Wednesday afternoon in Toronto, I watched two former dancers, husband-wife duo Alisia Pobega and Louis-Martin Charest, work alongside a group of serious sixteen- and seventeen-year-old ballet dancers from Canada’s National Ballet School. Pobega crouches in one corner of the studio with half of the students rallied around her, speaking in low tones. Charest is on the opposite side of the room with his back to the mirrors, his dark hair barely perceptible above a crowd of ballet bodies clothed in leotards, loose t-shirts, and sweatpants. He draws the students in closer. They lean towards him, straining to hear....

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Dorrance Dance
FEATURES | REVIEWS | Par Faye Arthurs

Tappy Holidays

The Joyce Theater presented two festive tap shows this December: Dormeshia’s soulful “And Still You Must Swing” as well as a three-week residency by Dorrance Dance—featuring the premiere of a tap “Nutcracker Suite” to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s funky arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s ubiquitous holiday score. Dorrance’s programming changes weekly, but each show closes with the new “Nutcracker.” This comes to 21 performances, far more than most regional ballet companies and even American Ballet Theatre (with 12). Could a tap company loosen ballet’s yearly stranglehold on this Christmas classic?

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Koresh Dance Company
FEATURES | Par Merilyn Jackson

Is all that jazzy modern dance Jewish?

With a Jewish population of more than a quarter million and a rich dance culture that boasts five internationally known professional companies in as many ethnicities and dance genres, Philadelphia is a likely stage for a Jewish dance company. Jewish dancers, choreographers, presenters, entrepreneurs, critics, and even arts editors of prominent publications have largely shaped the city’s cultural dancescape over the past century. But, in fact, the first truly Jewish dance company, Koresh Dance Company, (KDC) was founded by Israeli Yemenite choreographer Ronen (Roni) Koresh in 1991. On its own, the company most represents Jewish dance in Philadelphia and nationally....

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Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Rachel Howard
Starry Nights

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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