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BalletX takes Flight
REVIEWS | Par Merilyn Jackson

BalletX takes Flight

Pago Pago, Samoa, January 11, 1938: Pan American Captain Edwin Musick piloted the inaugural airmail flight from Hawaii to New Zealand in December 1937. Beginning the return flight to Honolulu and home to Seattle, his plane caught fire, exploding midair. No remains of the seven onboard were found among the wreckage located later that day. The previous year, Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific along with navigator Fred Noonan who had earlier navigated the China Clipper on its first flight between San Francisco and Honolulu, piloted by Musick.

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Consumer Durables
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | Par Lorna Irvine

Consumer Durables

What makes German choreographer/performer Frauke Requardt's work so special is that she never uses spectacle for its own sake—there are always enough ideas to accompany her own vivid, inventive choreography, which scratches both itches of live art and contemporary dance at once.

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Anatomy Of Dance
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | Par Lorna Irvine

Anatomy Of Dance

London-born dancer Matthew Hawkins has always been a singular force of nature, so it makes sense for him to collaborate with the iconoclastic Scottish musicians Red Note Ensemble and lithe, soulful French dancer Soraya Ham. For this film, Iconnotations, the setting is the beautiful Greyfriars Kirk in the “old town” side of Edinburgh, a spacious and ornate parish church. It has been previously performed in St. Magnus Cathedral in Orkney, the island where Maxwell Davies lived laterally. The main piece, Vesalii Icones, features a musical score from late English composer Peter Maxwell Davies from 1969, which is filled with so...

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Bringing the World
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | Par Cecilia Whalen

Bringing the World

Battery Dance Festival returned to the stage last week in celebration of its 40th anniversary, presenting six days of international dance live and livestreamed from the spectacular Robert F. Wagner park in lower Manhattan. The festival ran Aug. 12th through 20th and featured 56 total performances, including 16 dance films which opened the first three days of the festival online.

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BAANDing Together
REVIEWS | Par Faye Arthurs

BAANDing Together

Five NYC-based dance companies (Ballet Hispánico, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem) joined forces to put on 5 outdoor shows in the Damrosch Park area of Lincoln Center this past week. NY Senator Brian Benjamin, who co-introduced the performance, said that Covid-19 “created a lot of trauma in our lives, but it also provided opportunity for collaboration.” We are not yet on the other side of this plague, but even in the midst of the Delta surge there are already signs of rebirth. Much has been made of how...

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Spirit
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | Par Lorna Irvine

Spirit

“Your body is a repository of memory,” says the voiceover in Retrace-Retract, Gregory Maqoma's film which is part of the Dancing In The Streets series for the Edinburgh International Festival, focusing on the issue of home. ”I am your compass. . . The spirit will guide you.” Threaded throughout this beautiful, inspiring film, directed and choreographed by Maqoma, is the poetry of Jefferson Tshabalala, which interrogates issues around poverty, inequality and strategies for survival; but also of selfhood and spirituality. These particular streets—Soweto's bustling streets in South Africa—are the backdrop. They signify the return to the source, the retracing of...

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The Chandelier
REVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

The Chandelier

In real estate, it’s all about location, location, location. And so it’s been with Los Angeles-based site-specific goddess, Heidi Duckler, who founded her eponymous troupe in 1985. The intrepid choreographer has staged more than 200 works in places as far flung as Australia, Russia and Hong Kong and in such disparate—and iconic—L.A. locations as an abandoned jail (“C’opera,” from 2006, which took place at the Police Academy), “Governing Bodies” (2010), set at City Hall and, more recently, “Hildegard Herself,” a gorgeous 2019 work inspired by 12th-century abbess, composer and mystic Hildegard von Bingen, performed at the 1925 Gothic Revival-style St....

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Testimonials
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | Par Lorna Irvine

Testimonials

I am scratched, punched, kicked and bruised watching Mele Broomes in her extraordinary film Wrapped Up In This. I am compelled by the multitudes within the stories, I feel consumed by its power. I'm disgusted by the real life accounts of racism endured by the womxn Broomes interviewed whilst researching this piece, whose voices are heard as it develops. Yet, it is not without hope, it grows and amplifies. It is utterly visceral and political. It feels radical, revolutionary in its intent. It is discourse, dance, and demonstration all wrapped up at once.

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Cue Landscape
REVIEWS | Par Candice Thompson

Cue Landscape

As I walked in the blazing early evening sun to the subway this past Monday evening, I wondered how the performers of Andrea Miller’s “You Are Here” would fare in such heat. As if to immediately put my mind to rest, the show began with instant catharsis as the dancers plunged into the large rectangular pool upon entering Lincoln Center’s Hearst Plaza. In unison, they stomped and hopped their way through the water, clasping their own hands together, arms slashing to a driving beat. The steps had a folk dance feel, and their motions felt intentional, grounded, almost sacred. A...

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Tahoe Dance Camp
REVIEWS | Par Rachel Howard

Tahoe Dance Camp

A recent Dance Data Project survey reports what everyone in the ballet world knows: Women are grossly under-represented in ballet leadership. Just one of the top 10 largest ballet companies in the U.S. is led by a woman, and only 30 percent of the top 50 companies are. Retiring ballerinas, we know, are far more likely to become ballet mistresses and school faculty than artistic directors.

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Dances at Dusk
REVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

Dances at Dusk

To say that it was a joy to see live dance again after some 16 months is an understatement. And seeing San Francisco-based Alonzo King LINES Ballet in the final offering of the Music Center’s al fresco “Dance at Dusk” series, proved to be the cherry on the quasi-post-pandemic cake. Although we are not out of the Covid woods yet—Los Angeles has reinstated its indoor mask mandate and the Delta variant is on the rise—being socially distanced in pods of four on the Jerry Moss Plaza, made for a perfect blend of art, community and, well, safety.

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Humans Remain
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | Par Lorna Irvine

Humans Remain

In 1975, Laura Mulvey first came up with the term “the male gaze,” where the assumption, particularly within the media, was that those consuming and watching most art forms were male, or male identifying, hence the need for women being represented as mere window dressing and sexually appealing objects. This was largely ubiquitous in film, art, pop videos and on fashion runways—even in dance productions. However, with strides being made in contemporary society in recognising that gender is largely a construct, and that it's no longer about male and female, but rather than gender can also be trans, fluid and/or...

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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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