World-class review of ballet and dance.
Ballet has long been imbued with a mysterious air. It’s a closed-off world, one that—despite many hopefuls—admits only a select few. Audiences are led to believe that what goes on behind its closed doors is a kind of magic. And when the curtain closes, the beauty they’ve experienced remains.
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Richmond Ballet’s pairing of George Balanchine’s “Serenade” and Ma Cong’s one-act “Firebird” encapsulates the beauty and quintessential oddness of ballet. The drama and simplicity of “Serenade’s” opening startled the audience into eager applause. The Richmond Ballet dancers built a community before our eyes and graciously welcomed us in. As the dance shifted through its four sections with many entrances and exits and varying numbers, I felt sad to see the corps go and a little thrill when they returned. This is not to dismiss the performance of accomplished soloists, guest artist Kristina Kadashevych in particular dancing with assurance the combination...
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Some choreographers integrate visuals, text and moods seemingly effortlessly. Colette Sadler is one such artist, as she has long created singular work which straddles performance art, visual art and dance. So it is with her gorgeous and meditative riposte to Daphne's punishment from Apollo, “Oracle Leaves.” In the original myth, while attempting to escape Apollo's brutal advances, Daphne is transformed into a tree. This piece pushes back, embracing an alternative vision, with a rebellious spirit at its core. It is a long, langorous stretch of limbs, a slow-burning beauty. Once you become attuned to its sparse setting, slow pace and...
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It seems like not too long ago that audiences ventured with Clara through the Land of the Sweets and now Cincinnati Ballet takes us yet on another journey, this time with Alice and her adventures in Wonderland. Septime Webre’s take on the iconic tale by Lewis Carroll is a feast for the senses both young and old can enjoy—vibrant sets and costumes, humor, an inspiring score by Matthew Pierce, and just enough touches of the classic story without being a total regurgitation (familiar characters like the Mad Hatter, King and Queen of Hearts, and White Rabbit all make their appearances). What’s more,...
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What makes a choreographer great? This has been the question plaguing the dance world for the last thirty or so years. Is it their feeling for music, the originality of their combinations, the world they create?
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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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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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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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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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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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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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“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:
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.
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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.
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.
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