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Many Ways to Listen
REVIEWS | Par Marina Harss

Many Ways to Listen

The 1971 ballet “Goldberg Variations,” by Jerome Robbins, has a reputation for being long, and, for that reason, one of the choreographer’s “difficult” ballets. Robbins used all thirty of the keyboard variations Bach developed on a simple, mournful theme. With the exception of three in G minor they are in a single key, G major. Almost perversely, Robbins kept all the repeats. The music is played at a more leisurely pace than in most keyboard recitals. And in the first half of the ballet, there are few large ensembles or showy steps. “Goldberg” is a ballet that asks us to...

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Beauty in Blackness
REVIEWS | Par Karen Greenspan

Beauty in Blackness

There was a celebratory spirit in the packed house on opening night for Shamel Pitts’ and Tribe’s New York Live Arts season. As people located their seats, energetic jazz riffs played over the sound system and projected white specks of light floated in a circular formation on the black stage floor simulating the cosmic phenomenon of a black hole. At long last, the final instalment of Pitts’ “Black Trilogy,” titled “Black Hole: Trilogy and Triathlon,” was having its pandemic-delayed New York premiere.

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Let's Dance
REVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

Let's Dance

As it approaches the 30-year mark, New York-based Complexions Contemporary Ballet, which was co-founded in 1994 by Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson (both former Alvin Ailey dancers), the troupe is at the top of its game—and then some, if that’s even possible. But seeing is believing, and watching the 15-member company on Friday night at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, proved an enlightening experience on multiple levels. (The troupe will also be at the Irvine Barclay Theatre April 29.)

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Raucous and Wrenching
REVIEWS | Par Candice Thompson

Raucous and Wrenching

Presenting a curious combination of repertoire and new work on April 9th, Martha Graham Dance Company’s 96th season continued this spring as part of the City Center Dance Festival, which also featured Paul Taylor, Ballet Hispanico, and Dance Theatre of Harlem. Including a Martha Graham classic, a world premiere from UK-based choreographer Hofesh Shechter, and the New York premiere of a dance that actually merged archival choreography from Graham with contemporary choreographers, the evening showcased the undiluted power of the Graham technique, as well as its limits, particularly when applied to new, looser-limbed movement vocabulary.

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Sex and Insensitivity
REVIEWS | Par Lorna Irvine

Sex and Insensitivity

With the dust settling on the recent infamous UK royal family allegations around Prince Andrew, Scottish Ballet's artistic director Christopher Hampson and director Gary Harris' adaptation of the controversial Kenneth MacMillan ballet from 1978 feels timely indeed. Based on a true story which shocked society to the core, the plot centres on the wanton destruction in the royal court of Austria in 1889 caused by the Crown Prince Rudolf, his many mistresses, wife, and his ultimate demise. It's a wild study in toxic masculinity in general.

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Identity Embraced
REVIEWS | Par Candice Thompson

Identity Embraced

During the artist talkback after #QueerTheBallet’s April 5th show, as part of the Joyce Theater’s season at the new Chelsea Factory, artistic director Adriana Pierce proposed a thought exercise: consider the gendered nature of the pointe shoe, particularly in reference to partnering. The person not on pointe is able to be more grounded, and that stability and connection to the floor necessarily confers agency to that dancer. That agency is then often utilized in an unequal relationship with the dancer in pointe shoes, who has less friction with the floor and is set up best to be manipulated (turned, lifted,...

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War & Peace
REVIEWS | Par Cecilia Whalen

War & Peace

In his piece, “The Green Table,” which the Paul Taylor Dance Company presented for one-night-only at the 92Y on April 6th, Kurt Jooss depicts a group of ten nasty gentlemen at a conference. They discuss the world situation, lightly jumping on and off the table, making presentational gestures, and offering mixed applause for one another's bright ideas. Dressed in black suits and disgusting, balding masks with distorted faces, the gentlemen are a farce of politicians and diplomats who seem to start wars for sport. Jooss created “The Green Table” in 1932 reflecting on the disastrous Great War as his native...

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Springy Pizzazz
REVIEWS | Par Sara Veale

Springy Pizzazz

All hail the marching ensemble, a brigade of bouncing hips and outstretched arms, palms flexed and chins thrust to the sky! With its pop soundtrack and bold rearrangements of the classical lexicon, English National Ballet’s “Forsythe Evening” celebrates bravura in ballet, pairing two recent works from William Forsythe that emphasise the accessible side of the art form—the spectacular feats and showboating performances that create excitement in any audience.

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A Touchstone of Sanity
REVIEWS | Par Merilyn Jackson

A Touchstone of Sanity

Although seemingly an evening of classical ballet, Philadelphia Ballet’s mid-March run at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, “Bold, Brilliant, Balanchine” was a program where history, politics, race, gender issues and global affairs coalesced merely by virtue of the loaded times we live in. Artistic Director Ángel Corella conceived the program which opened with Georges Bizet’s “Symphony in C” some time ago, yet his choices deeply relate to current events. Among the threads to follow are how the concert’s three ballets depend on the creative talents of women (it was Women’s History Month after all) and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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Dancing in Time
REVIEWS | Par Róisín O'Brien

Dancing in Time

Time is of the essence at the Royal Opera House this spring. It hazily drifts past in Kyle Abraham’s “The Weathering;” it brutally constrains the dancers in Crystal Pite’s “Solo Echo;” and in Christopher Wheeldon’s “DGV: Danse à grande vitesse,” journeys and travel through the eras come to the fore.

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Connecting the Dots
REVIEWS | Par Rachel Howard

Connecting the Dots

Recently, when a fellow San Francisco-based critic told me how much he had “resented” watching dance on screen during the pandemic, I had to say that for me there had been an upside: getting to know Pacific Northwest Ballet.

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Light, Color, Joy
REVIEWS | Par Candice Thompson

Light, Color, Joy

Mark Morris Dance Group delighted the audience at Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday, March 24th, with the return of “L’Allegro, Il Penseroso il Moderato.” The performance was a reminder of the reassuring effects of good repertory: coming once again, like spring, to revive us with light, color, and joy.

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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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