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Jasmin Vardimon Park
REVIEWS | Par Sara Veale

Community Spirit

Instead of employing a straight narrative, this dance theatre piece tells its story through a series of interlacing vignettes, each one evocative, impassioned and quasi surreal. The twisted tale centres on an urban park facing commercial redevelopment and its occupants' response to the impending loss of their communal space, which brings together homeless people, tourists, street performers, pedestrians and more. It's an elliptical piece, its tone careening from wacky to biting in a flash, but the quality is steady throughout: Jasmin Vardimon's dancers commit themselves to their roles wholly, and the result is a crisp slice of social commentary on...

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Jillian Vanstone and Harrison James Manon
REVIEWS | Par Penelope Ford

Heart to Heart

Jillian Vanstone and Harrison James made an exquisite pair, dancing the lead roles in “Manon” with the National Ballet of Canada on Sunday. It may be getting cold outside, but inside, the pas de deux were scorching.

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Crystal Pite
REVIEWS | Par Sara Veale

Dancing Melodies

Though it lags somewhat in the middle, this four-part bill is robust and stimulating. The intricate music of London-based contemporary composer Thomas Adès unites the pieces, each of which features the musician conducting from the pit or tickling the ivories on stage. Adès' participation in the programme elevates it greatly, breathing life into his already vigorous notes so that they form an integral and unforgettable element of the performance.

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Batsheva Dance Company
REVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

Fields of Grace

Who knew that when modern dance legend Martha Graham teamed up with Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild in 1964 to be artistic advisor of an Israeli dance troupe (Graham held the role until 1975), that the company would not only be going strong 50 years later, but would be at the forefront of contemporary dance. That fact, of course, has to do with the iconoclastic choreographer Ohad Naharin, who has helmed the 34-member troupe since 1990, his full-bodied dancemaking never failing to astonish, mesmerize and awe.

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L.A Dance Project
REVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

Energy to Burn

When it was founded in 2012 by Benjamin Millepied, L.A. Dance Project was touted as some kind of second coming for the dance scene in Los Angeles. It’s too bad, then, that the 9-member troupe is rarely in town and that its home, the Theatre at Ace Hotel, a refurbished United Artists movie palace originally co-founded by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith, has extremely bad sight lines and a small stage for dance. That the audience can also bring in food and drink (popcorn, wine and whatever), is another reason the venue is a less than...

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Tale as Old as Time
REVIEWS | Par Sara Veale

Tale as Old as Time

Forget crooning crockery; it’s waltzing pigs and jazz-dancing ravens in David Bintley’s “Beauty and the Beast,” a glittery production with a green twist. Bintley’s version reframes the fairytale as a pro-conservation allegory: an arrogant prince with a heartless hunting habit is cursed into living as a beast himself among the very animals he once targeted. The eco slant calls to mind Bintley’s excellent “Still Life at the Penguin Café” in its manifest respect for the natural world, though “Beast” is less of an admonitory tale than one focusing on personal redemption.

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Matthew Bourne's New Adventure
REVIEWS | Par Sara Veale

From Civil to Savage

Equal parts dystopian horror show and raucous romp, Matthew Bourne’s “Lord of the Flies” is a firecracker of a production. Over two acts, nine members of Bourne’s New Adventures and 22 locally sourced teenagers retell William Golding’s allegorical tale of marooned British schoolboys and their atavistic descent.

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Compagnie Mossoux-Bonte
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Magnetism and Symmetry

The ritual began the moment I entered the upstairs studio at Dancehouse. Correction, the ritual began before that. As befits a work which looks at the liminal space between states, and between performer and audience, unbeknownst to me, it began in the series of actions I undertook to dress and walk around the corner to Dancehouse, ready to fill my agreed role as ‘audience member’ awaiting ‘a performance.’

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Garth Fagan Dance
REVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

Lightning Rod

After an inexplicable 10-year absence from the City of Angels, this 44-year old, Rochester, N.Y.-based troupe roared back into town with power, grace and its unique brand of high-octane ebullience, courtesy of Ebony Repertory Theatre’s Wren T. Brown. The timing, as it were, couldn’t have been more propitious: It was recently announced that the smash Broadway hit, “The Lion King,” choreographed by Tony award-winning Garth Fagan and directed by Julie Taymor, had become the most successful work of entertainment in history. Besting the box office of films including Titanic and Avatar and stage shows such as “Phantom of the Opera,”...

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The Nutcracker
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Not Too Sweet

Flourishing his sword in the air, the Nutcracker cried aloud, “Crack—crack—crack—stupid pack—drive mouse back—stupid pack—crack—crack—mouse—back—crick—crack—stupid pack.”[note]E. T. A. Hoffman, Nutcracker and Mouse-King, trans. Mrs. St. Simon, (New York, 1953) 36. Viewed online at American Libraries archive.org.[/note] In the beginning, in the words of E. T. A. Hoffmann, there was a “hateful” Mouse-King with fourteen eyes and seven heads who gnawed with sharp teeth at the gingerbread and sugar-plums. In the beginning there was a Mouse-King and his ragged army to defeat. A dancing cast, there on the page, their actions written as sounds, ripe for musical translation and, arguably, the...

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The Summit is Blue
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

The Summit is Blue

In 1924, Captain John Noel, with the aid of his hand-cranked camera (and steel nerves, I wager) captured footage of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine’s infamous attempt to climb Everest in all its beauty and brutality. The footage, recently restored by the British Film Institute National Archive in The Epic of Everest: The official record of Mallory and Irvine’s 1924 expedition (with a score composed, orchestrated and conducted by Simon Fisher Turner), saddles a backpack to the shoulder of the viewer even by today’s standards, and leaves me in little doubt as to the majesty of such an environment. Alongside...

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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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