World-class review of ballet and dance.
To Vaslaz Nijinsky, the circle was the embodiment of a complete, perfect movement from which everything in life could be based. The intersection of two circles form an almond-like shape, and express the interdependence of opposing yet complimentary forces—life and death, heaven and earth.
Plus
The curtain for “Vollmond,” one of the final works from the late Pina Bausch, created in 2006, opens on a colossal boulder that calls to mind a craggy sea stone, or maybe a hunk of spacerock. It could be either—the title translates to both ‘high tide’ and ‘full moon,’ and its concerns are as earthly as they are cosmic: love, ire, power, the stratospheric stuff of life.
Plus
The United States is surreal at this moment. Dancers in black have been circling the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., performing Pina Bausch’s “Nelken Line” choreography to protest the self-proclaimed dictator making himself chair of the Center’s board. Choreographers are giving up hopes of National Endowment for the Arts funding now that guidelines demand “patriotic” art.
Plus
Los Angeles-based Heidi Duckler, dubbed “Queen of Site-Specific Dance,” and whose Heidi Duckler Dance is celebrating 40 years of transforming spaces through the power of contemporary movement—kudos!—has stepped aside as artistic director, handing the reigns to associate artistic director, Raymond Ejiofor.
Plus
“Tanz” opens on a ballet class like none I’ve ever attended. Onstage are two portable barres and four dancers in rehearsal clothes stretching and warming up. Eighty-three year old ballerina Beatrice Cordua teaches from a wheelchair, naked.
Plus
John Scott Dance's “Begin Anywhere” started in the middle. A dancer walked to the center of the Irish Arts Center's JL Greene Theatre holding a discman, placed it on the floor, and pressed play.
FREE ARTICLE
The story began with an impulse to go back and give something back—to the performing arts traditions of India. Acclaimed British dancer and choreographer of Bangladeshi descent, Akram Khan, long known for dancing between worlds—contemporary dance and classical Kathak, decided to return to his roots.
Plus
I step off the elevator onto the 5th floor of the Whitney Museum and I am awed by the spectacle, vastness, and ground shifting power of the “Edges of Ailey” exhibition. This tribute to Alvin Ailey and his universe—past, present, and future—not only lifts up its larger-than-life subject but it also, like a great ocean wave, raises up and carries forward everything in its wake.
Plus
Marius Petipa’s “Paquita” Grand Pas Classique has been around since 1881. I last reviewed a version in 2023, by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo.
Plus
While Kendrick Lamar performed “Humble,” during his Super Bowl halftime set and was surrounded by dancers clad in red, white and blue—and in the process assumed the formation of the American flag (choreographed by Charm La’Donna)—so, too, did Faye Driscoll use performers who created slews of shapes/sculptures in her astonishing work, “Weathering,” seen at REDCAT on February 8, the last of three sold-out performances.
Plus
Let’s start with the obvious, or maybe to some this notion will be highly disputable, even offensive. OK, then, let’s start with what kept repeating in my head as I walked out of UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, synapses abuzz with the wonders of Twyla Tharp Dance’s 60th anniversary “Diamond Jubilee” program: My God, Twyla Tharp really is the most brilliantly inventive choreographer now alive on the planet.
Plus
In Maldonne, French filmmakers Leila KA and Josselin Carré pose eleven women side by side on a barren stage. They’re dressed in floral patterns that hearken to the 1950s. The camera zooms in to frame their faces—each woman is in a state of distress.
PlusWatching 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,...
PlusThe choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.
Plus
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.
PlusAfter 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.
PlusAn “Ajiaco” is a type of soup common to Colombia, Cuba, and Peru that combines a variety of different vegetables, spices, and meats.
Plus