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Love and Loss
REVIEWS | Par Rachel Howard

Love and Loss

The final weeks of San Francisco Ballet’s ninetieth season brought a flurry of news, intrigue, and emotion. On April 20, the company announced an ambitious 2024 season, the first programmed by new artistic director Tamara Rojo. The next morning, the company dropped a bomb: executive director Danielle St.Germain had just resigned after barely a year in the job. Given that SF Ballet offered no reason for the resignation and the enthusiastic way St.Germain had positioned herself as co-leader with Rojo, speculation flew as to whether St.Germain had feuded with the board or Rojo or both. As I write this, news...

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Beneath the Surface
REVIEWS | Par Rachel Howard

Beneath the Surface

At the high point of Hope Mohr’s new hour-long “Horizon Stanzas,” the three dancers announce, in a zombie monotone, “I knew what to do now.” They crawl to the wall to scribble makeup on their faces. Then Suzette Sagisi buries her head in The Joy of Cooking and sobs about mayonnaise, Belinda He maniacally scrubs herself with a kitchen brush, and Tegan Schwab-Alavi stuffs potatoes and squash into her bra. (The vegetables keep tumbling out, making for classic slapstick.)

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A Mixed Bag
REVIEWS | Par Marina Harss

A Mixed Bag

Some programs at New York City Ballet feel like a well-balanced meal; others, like a hodgepodge. The “Masters at Work: Balanchine & Robbins 2” program, which I caught last week, fell into the latter category, as if the company had put together a program from bits and pieces left over from other programs.

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In the Ring
REVIEWS | Par Marina Harss

In the Ring

There are moments during boxing matches when the two combatants lean into each other, their bodies interlocking in an embrace. They linger there until the referee intercedes, pulling them apart. At those moments you realize that they are as close to each other as two humans can possibly be, vulnerable, exhausted, in pain, set apart from the audience by their herculean strength and effort. At that moment, nothing else really exists for them outside of that embrace. The audience is irrelevant.

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New Balance
REVIEWS | Par Merilyn Jackson

New Balance

Nothing becomes a legend like getting two National Medal of Arts awards from two different presidents. As Philadanco! founder, Joan Myers Brown received one from Barack Obama for her powerful effect on American dance over the past six decades. And in March, she received another from President Joseph R. Biden as a co-founder of the International Association of Blacks in Dance (IABD.) Early members such as Cleo Parker Robinson Dance, Dayton Contemporary Dance and Lula Washington Dance Theatrewere on board when they launched in 1988.

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Enchanted Evening
REVIEWS | Par Karen Hildebrand

Enchanted Evening

We enter off the commercial retail strip of Broadway into a whimsical garden of cardboard cut-outs painted in shades of neon pink, orange, and green by the artist Mimi Gross. The gleaming wood floor of the fully functional dance studio is now bordered with flowering hedges, mirrored wall draped in leafy boughs, the glass itself painted as an enchanted forest. It all seems to quiver under the glow-in-the-dark lighting design of Lauren Parrish. As if a salve for a troubled and contentious world, Douglas Dunn has turned his SoHo loft into a lush “Garden Party,” filled with poetry and music...

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À la Française
REVIEWS | Par Marina Harss

À la Française

Why program George Balanchine’s 1968 ballet “La Source” with Alexei Ratmansky’s 2010 “Namouna, A Grand Divertissement,” as New York City Ballet has done this season? The thing that binds the two ballets together is a similar spirit, born of their common origin: the Paris Opéra. Both are set to lustrous music composed by 19th century French composers (Léo Delibes and Édouard Lalo) for grandiose ballets filled with adventure and set in magical locales. Both Balanchine and Ratmansky have dispensed with their original plots, to differing degrees—Ratmansky keeps the whiff of a story and the notion of characters with specific traits,...

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Fabulously Dismantled
REVIEWS | Par Candice Thompson

Fabulously Dismantled

In Bobbi Jene Smith’s “Broken Theater,” 12 performers play artists unmoored and unraveling in a dark theater. The New York premiere of this work at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre last Saturday evening, as part of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival in association with American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), immersed the audience in a raucous dance theater work that reckoned with temporal and terminal themes. Layers of text, live music, and movement, built to an intensity that eventually stripped the production bare, exposing the trembling gap between artifice and reality.

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Victory Lap
REVIEWS | Par Faye Arthurs

Victory Lap

Dance Theatre of Harlem kicked off its final season under the artistic directorship of Virginia Johnson with a superb program at City Center that surveyed the troupe’s history. The bill went in chronological order, beginning with Balanchine’s “Allegro Brillante,” choreographed in 1956 and first danced by DTH in 1975. (Arthur Mitchell, DTH’s founder, was the first Black principal dancer with the New York City Ballet; Balanchine helped him to start his own company in 1969.)

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Shape and Story
REVIEWS | Par Sophie Bress

Shape and Story

For many, the movement of the human body is something that can be innately understood. The shapes we make with our limbs have the power to share stories. And the meaning we find in these shapes—and in the dances we make when we combine them—is something that so easily speaks to the soul. Ballet West’s season closer triple bill, “The Wedding,” draws out each of these elements of dance’s ethos.

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Dances for Utah
REVIEWS | Par Sophie Bress

Dances for Utah

It’s unlikely that when José Limón choreographed “The Winged” in 1966 he had the 200 different species of migratory birds that rely on Utah’s Great Salt Lake at the top of mind. And when Donald McKayle created “I’ve Known Rivers” in 2005, he was inspired by Langston Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and by Pearl Primus and Janet Collins, not the many river drainages that are being diverted from the Salt Lake. But, what’s wonderful about great art is that it’s timeless—it can conjure many things depending on who is watching and where they come from.

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Ballet for Life
REVIEWS | Par Veronica Posth

Ballet for Life

Kyiv-born Iana Salenko, a principal dancer at the Staatsballett Berlin, together with Oleksandr Shpak created their second benefit gala to support humanitarian projects in Ukraine, especially for children. “We'll keep at it,” Salenko had promised after the overwhelming success of the first “Ballet for Life” in 2022. “The suffering and death in Ukraine continue, day after day, night after night. Again and again, children are the victims of war, and the numbers are growing,” says Salenko.

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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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