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Les Grands Ballets
REVIEWS | Par Penelope Ford

Lost in Transfiguration

“Transfigured Night,” Belgian choreographer Stijn Celis' third ballet (“Les Noces,” “Cinderella”) for les Grands Ballets Canadiens, premiered in May. It is a ballet in two parts: the first half tells the Greek myth, Orpheus and Eurydice, entitled “Orpheus' Gaze.” The second half takes its cue from Richard Dehmel's 1896 poem, Transfigured Night, and is set to Arnold Schoenberg's 1899 composition of the same name. The advantage of pairing the two apparently independent ballets in narrative terms, is a subtle one.

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Mouth to Mouth
REVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

Mouth to Mouth

Scott McCabe hops on one leg, his other limb elevated and tucked behind his ear at 6 o’clock (think Stephen Colbert dancing with the Rockettes to Daft Punk as part of his Colbchella week); David Maurice cuts a Nijinsky-esque swath as he leaps through the air; and Danielle Agami, clad in red-trimmed, high-waisted black satin boy shorts and a solitary stiletto boot, whip in hand, her breasts adorned with palm tree-like, er, pasties, could be a terpsichorean dominatrix—or a distant cousin to Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.

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Love is Blind
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Love is Blind

Dance is music and music is dance and none more so than in “Love is Blind” by choreographer Russell Dumas. What we hear moulds what we see, and what we see moulds what we hear. As befits the black ink setting where faces are glimpsed and bodies are cloaked, this work teasingly and beautifully poses more questions than it seeks to answer, as it looks to renegotiate the terms of engagement of dance and music. This is a work that “investigates the intricate relationship between sight and sound and the somewhat surprising way that hearing trumps seeing.”

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Into the Unknown
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Into the Unknown

In similar fashion to a time capsule, I am writing down what I think Nat Cursio’s “The Middle Room,” presented by Theatre Works as part of the inaugural Festival of Live Art (FOLA), might be before I see it so as to compare it to the experience of after—Robots in the home and flying cars by 2010! Really? You can’t be serious? In writing down what I expect, as surmised from interviews and descriptions of the performance; I am laying open my anxieties and smallness where the interactive is called for. The name alone—Festival of Live Art—fills this quiet mouse...

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Manon
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Lavish Farewell

All bathed, all drowned in a golden light. Like Carle Van Loo’s 1737 painting, Halt in the Hunt, our stage palette is set. Rusty browns and sandy ochres give way to earthy greens. This is nature, human nature, with all its lust for power and pleasure, its poverty and its rat-catchers, harlots, and spinsters jostling side-by-side. Our eye, like in that of the painting, is drawn to those of import in blue (des Grieux, our romantic, besotted and well-intentioned student-cum-hero) and red (Monsieur GM, “an old voluptuary, who paid prodigally for his pleasures”[note]Abbé Prévost, History of Manon Lescaut and of...

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L.A. Dance Project Ace Hotel
REVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

Reflections

Dance, architecture and Hollywood came together in a big way when L.A. Dance Project began its residency (performances are also scheduled for the fall) at the new Ace Hotel. And no, this was not a site-specific work danced on the rooftop by the troupe Benjamin Millepied founded in 2012 as an artist collective along the lines of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, but a bona fide concert presented on stage of the hip hotel’s theatre.

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Harry
REVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

And all that Jazz

Ballet and jazz can make for some interesting, if occasionally odd bedfellows. Throw in some cookware and neo-Pina Bausch gestures, and a program could turn raucous, joyful and, well, neither balletic nor jazzy. At least that was the case when BJM took to the stage of the Wallis, Southern California’s newest entry into the performing arts arena, where, happily, its 500-seat Bram Goldsmith Theater is a welcome—and spectacular—venue for dance (theater and music also co-exist here in the heart of Beverly Hills).

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Casse-Noisette Compagnie
REVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

Through the Snow, Glitter

This is decidedly not your mother’s “Nutcracker!” Sure, there’s that big, beautiful Tchaikovsky score—played by the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra under the deft baton of Nicolas Brochot—as well as a little girl called Clara (an enchanting Anjara Ballesteros), who dreams that her toy soldier will one day be her main squeeze (Stéphan Bourgond). But as for Drosselmeyer, this is where any resemblance to those many “Nutcrackers” of Christmas Past ends.

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The Inkomati (dis)cord
REVIEWS | Par Apollinaire Scherr

Fault Lines

“The Inkomati (dis)cord”—a world-travelling collaboration between dance-theatre artists Boyzie Cekwana of Soweto and Panaibra Canda of Maputo, Mozambique—ends on a bright, sardonic note, with a multilingual game of “Telephone.” The words travel down a bench of performers—from Portuguese, Mozambique’s official language, to Sena, one of its native languages, back to Portuguese, and finally to South African English, all of which, including the English, appears in English surtitles on a screen behind the action. As for the story, a woman’s dangerous border-crossing becomes, by the end of the line, a bid for a boob job and a bucket of KFC.

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Diana Vishneva
REVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

Woman in a Room

Every era has its balletic superstars. From the early 18th century rivals, Marie Sallé and Marie Camargo, through the Romantic period’s Marie Taglioni (the world’s first “La Sylphide”), who was so adored that a male fan allegedly ate her slipper, ballet has mostly been about feminine mystique, beauty and allure. The beginnings of the 20th century saw those ideals embodied in Anna Pavlova, whose “Dying Swan” captivated the world and who may have been the first ballerina to embrace branding, endorsing beauty products and department stores, as well as gracing the pages of fashion magazines.

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Beauty & Anger
REVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

Beauty & Anger

Beauty and anger co-exist in a restless evening of hard-driving dance and thrashing rock music in Susan Marshall’s “Play/Pause.” The Los Angeles premiere of the 75-minute, neo-rave-like work features an original score by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, David Lang (of Bang-On-A-Can fame and frequent Marshall collaborator), and marks only the second time that the New York-based troupe, currently in its 27th year, has performed at Royce Hall. (The work has its New York premiere at BAM Fisher November 20.)

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The Metamorphosis
REVIEWS | Par Apollinaire Scherr

Kafka-esque

In art as in life, there is no such thing as being faithful enough. Fidelity is an absolute. It cannot be measured in numbers of steps or scenes preserved any more than a romantic betrayal can be calibrated by the quantity of lovers taken on the side, though the numbers do tell some kind of story. Rather, faithfulness to a text, whether choreographic or literary, is a question of spirit. We want a given “Swan Lake” or, in the present case, adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis to honour the heart of the work (as we understand it).

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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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