World-class review of ballet and dance.
American Ballet Theatre typically holds court in NYC twice a year. Their Summer Season at the Metropolitan Opera House features classical narrative full-lengths, and the Fall Season at the Koch Theater showcases edgier, short-form works.
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Unlikeable humanity in a rapacious society, Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” hits the zeitgeist—again. Recently staged by the National Ballet of Japan, it’s a stunning testimony to the ballet’s relevance across time and space. Fifty years since its creation and set in eighteenth-century France, the production nevertheless holds a mirror to now.
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An ambitious yet flawed work, “Dis-order,” seen last week at the Skirball Cultural Center, was described in the program notes as a “communal ritual, and a family drama that asks what forces move through us when we enact an ancient spring rite, and what is left unspoken when we gather around the table.”
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Crystal Pite is a connoisseur of the ensemble, with a forte for spotlighting the humanity of the collective, from the tight-knit flock to the anonymised mass.
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Looking down into the rotunda from the spiral ramp of New York’s Guggenheim Museum can be dizzying. My perch tonight is located two-thirds of the way to the top—and it’s the best view in the house for Lucinda Childs’ Early Works program.
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Push and pull are pretty commonplace commands. You can push someone’s buttons, pull someone’s leg. Somehow we always manage to conflate the two when facing a door in a public place.
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The Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory is a yawning, cavernous space. In its depths, even the fiercest applause can be rendered a mere din, sounding hollow and unappreciative.
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In transparent specimen bags, arranged in a circle, float Lemon Myrtle, Warrigal Greens, and Red Bottle Brush.
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Where language falls silent, dance speaks. That is the case for balletic interpretations of Shakespeare’s great works—particularly Lar Lubovitch’s three-act “Othello,” choreographed for American Ballet Theatre in 1997.
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Like most new adaptations of existing story ballet classics, the world premiere of artistic director James Sofranko’s “Swan Lake” for Grand Rapids Ballet retained the bones of the original it was based on.
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Shakespearean purists, leave your expectations at the door. With his rendition of Sergei Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet,” first staged in 2009 to mark the 10th anniversary of K-Ballet Tokyo, Tetsuya Kumakawa plays freely with details from Shakespeare’s tragedy to create a psychological, theatrical study of doomed love.
PlusWatching 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,...
PlusThe 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.
PlusAfter 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.
PlusAn “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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