A Lover's Heart
Do we watch the classics with a scholar’s brain or a lover’s heart? Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Giselle” engages both, but a viewing of the company’s digital season stream leaves me feeling that the heart still has to triumph.
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The Slowest Wave
A groundbreaking collaboration is afoot involving New York City butoh dance company Vangeline Theater; founded by French-born butoh performer, choreographer, author, and teacher Vangeline; and a neuroscience team from the University of Houston, Rockefeller University, and City University of New York. The collaborating parties are researching the impact of butoh on brainwave activity in a pilot study. I am in Houston, Texas, at the university’s theater watching the culminating butoh performance as a group of neuroscientists (visibly stationed in the wings) record and download the activity in the dancers’ brains. Simultaneously, a multi-media artist is “artistically” projecting the dancers’ real-time brain activity onto...
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This is Forty
How did you dance as a child in your bedroom? Before any kind of training, or the fumbling awkwardness of adolescence, I mean? In a series of wild routines, Katherina Radeva captures the feeling of dancing from when we were kids, governed by little more than energy, instinct and unabashed, uninhibited joy. It is this evocative spirit that permeates through her beautiful show, “40/40,” interrogating the spaces that women in middle-age take up. Our bodies, often sidelined, dismissed or ignored for more youthful figures in society, are repositories of life, love, complex emotions and boundaries, and we can only move...
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A No-Tutu Night of Stellar Ballet
Philadelphia Ballet’s annual New Works series opened its 2023 season with a program called “Forward Motion” at the Kimmel Cultural Campus’ Perelman Theater last weekend. Over its 60-plus years, the company has seen many changes, including last year’s name change from Pennsylvania Ballet. It now dances its New Works program in the 627-seat theater with superb sightlines and, at intermissions, audience members can mingle in a new café seating area with window views of busy Spruce Street pedestrian traffic.
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Revival: A Meditation on Aging, Dance, & Community
In spring of 2017, Ellen Graff, Stuart Hodes, and Marnie Thomas Wood, all former members of the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Tony award-winning Broadway choreographer George Faison, set out to make dances for a group of older adults, many of whom had never performed onstage. Josefina Rotman Lyons, an older dancer herself, volunteered to film the project. The resulting documentary, “Revival,” is an honest and engaging take on what it’s like to dance in later life. Now available for streaming at Revivaldocumentary.com, the film won jury and audience awards when it made the rounds of film festivals. At a...
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Free Reign
San Francisco Ballet, the U.S.’s oldest professional ballet company and second largest, is entering its 90th season at a moment of profound transition. Helgi Tomasson, artistic director for 37 years, has just handed the reins to Tamara Rojo, who arrives triumphantly after a decade of success raising the profile of the English National Ballet. Aside from both prizing the work of William Forsythe, the two are markedly different in their repertory interests, but Rojo’s programming direction—will the company still dance Balanchine and Robbins?—won’t be known until she announces the 2024 season this April. In the meantime, the company is dancing...
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Horses for Courses
“Horse, the solos” is yet another new work with a pandemic backstory. Deborah Hay created the work remotely from her living room in Austin, Texas while the dancers of Cullberg were in Stockholm, rehearsing in the studio with Jeanine Durning, who has previously performed in Hay’s works. The premiere, in an empty theater on March 2021, was also atypical and unique to the time; but perhaps, completely aligned with Hay’s postmodern ethos. She writes in a program note:
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Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
On Wednesday night, the New York City Ballet premiered “Fortuitous Ash,” the first ballet choreographed by an Asian American woman, Keerati Jinakunwiphat, in the company’s history. It was set to the first score by a female Asian composer, Du Yun, to enter the repertory. Unfortunately, the overdue shattering of dual glass ceilings was more exciting than the work itself. When the curtain fell on the ballet’s final tableau, it came as a surprise; it felt like the piece was finally gearing up to say something. Before the gold fabric dropped, I thought the lights were dimming to signal the end...
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American Romance
Justin Peck’s new ballet, “Copland Dance Episodes,” is a project Lincoln Kirstein would have embraced. Seventy-five minutes of great, unmistakably American music for a ballet company that in many ways reflects the country; with choreography by a young American dancemaker; framed by stage designs by an artist (Jeffrey Gibson) whose inspiration lies in the symbols and patterns of his Choctaw-Cherokee culture. Creating a new American ballet idiom was the aim of Kirstein’s short-lived company Ballet Caravan, which toured the US and Latin America. And it was Kirstein who, in 1938, commissioned “Billy the Kid” from Aaron Copland, and asked the...
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Ukrainian Giselle
Shortly after Russia invaded its neighbor, Ukraine, almost a year ago now, Ukrainians began streaming across the borders into Hungary and Poland, and from there into Western Europe. Most were traumatized; some had lost homes; all feared for their lives or their family’s lives. Among these multitudes were dancers and dance students who, like so many refugees, were unsure what would happen next, to them or their country.
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Galván's playground
Everything is everything for Israel Galván. A circle of wood is a hockey puck and a stage; a microphone stand is a broom and a drumstick; a hand is a flower, a light switch, and then a hand again in his tremendous “Solo” which was recently presented at Baryshnikov Arts Center.
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Kyle Marshall Channels Matisse
Over the decades, the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) has presented music and dance events in the East entrance’s Great Stair Hall as well as in its other spaces. In 2022, the PMA used the new cantilevered Gehry staircase for dance and music. It replaces the small auditorium where I once saw performances of Trisha Brown’s company and others dance. Inaugurating the new space, Philadanco danced memorable pastiches of Merce Cunningham’s early works, and former Cunningham Dance Company member, Melissa Toogood soloed down the staircase to choreography by Pam Tanowitz.
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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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