New York City Ballet's Summer Residency
For the fifty-seventh year of its summer residency in July at Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC), upstate in Saratoga Springs, the New York City Ballet brought three programs.
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Escalation
The inaugural season of “Escalator,” presented by Stephanie Lake Company in association with Abbotsford Convent, begins with the slow traction of Kady Mansour dressed head to toe in white as a tampon, replete with two strings around each ankle, and concludes with two dancers dressed as mirrored disco balls, declaring to the audience that they are “strong enough / to live without [us]” as they rewind and rotate on the dancefloor to Cher’s “Strong Enough.”
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The Music Man
Has any choreographer extracted as much value from the chug step as Mark Morris? Jerome Robbins came close in “Glass Pieces,” and George Balanchine gave chugs some big moments in “Apollo,” but Morris consistently uses the simple move to demonstrate a profound musicality.
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Postcard From Lake Tahoe
Adrian Danchig-Waring is a poet. His body articulates anticipation and pleasure, the tumult of ecstasy, and the ache of longing in Lar Lubovitch’s “Desire,” created as part of Lubovitch’s 80th birthday celebration in collaboration with the Guggenheim’s Works and Process series.
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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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50 years of Embodied Knowledge
The headline performance of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival’s Hip Hop Across the Pillow mini-festival—which took place from August 2-6, 2023 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip hop—was an abundance of embodied knowledge.
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Collective Growth
What would the story of Alice in Wonderland look like if it was reimagined by a group of women?
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Tangled up in Blue
The show starts outside the theater. A car, with its right rear window busted out, pulls up, music blaring, bass turned up.
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Lucky Thirteen
Four distinct works, their creation initiated by a shared prompt. Four choreographers, plus time, space, and the ten dedicated contemporary ballet artists of Amy Seiwert’s company, Imagery.
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Momentum
“This is historical,” Ballet22 co-founder Theresa Knudson told the audience between works on the company’s latest program, “Momentum.”
FREE ARTICLEFeatured Reads
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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