World-class review of ballet and dance.
Last week the New York City Ballet premiered the newest Ratmansky work. This week, the new… Balanchine? The company’s latest program is full of offbeat revivals: two B-sides from the house’s founder and a Jerome Robbins deep track too. It was must-see viewing for ballet nerds, who were out in full force. If I may speak for our kind, it didn’t disappoint. Though I do wonder if the casual ballet-goer was as entertained.
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Inspired by a real-life incident years ago, when police bust in on Joseph Toonga after a neighbour complained about noise, and he had to prove he was a dance student to them and had done nothing wrong, “Born to Manifest” is a brutal and brittle concrete slab of dance. Toonga's choreography sits neatly alongside the cultural signifiers of black culture, where racially-motivated police brutality isn't merely alluded to but represented in an unflinching way in hip-hop, film and literature. I'm reminded of tracks like Public Enemy's “Fight the Power,” Ruthless Rap Assassins' “Justice” and Childish Gambino's “This Is America.” It's...
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Michael Keegan-Dolan’s first production with his company Teaċ Daṁsa was a version of “Swan Lake” reworked into a critique of the Catholic church. With “MÁM,” the Irish dancemaker continues to probe the keystones of Irish culture, this time with a more impressionistic lens. The new work glides through a fog of cigarettes and dance halls, intimacy and anguish, craggy sea cliffs and whispers of holy ghosts. Its scope is cosmic and targeted at once, hitching the profundities of existence to the minutiae of everyday life. Mám means ‘mountain pass,’ but it can also refer to an obligation or a handful...
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Black History Month was ushered in with a bang when members of Lula Washington Dance Theatre shredded the stage—in a good way—at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing arts last weekend. At least technically speaking, as the 10 exceptional performers proved indefatigable, joyous and a solid reason to continue to support the art form that celebrates the body in motion—in this case, from an African-American perspective.
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The New York City Ballet presented its first premiere of the year Thursday night: Alexei Ratmansky’s “Voices.” This piece marked a welcome departure for Ratmansky. Erenow he has essentially worked in two modes: emotionally resonant, peasant-inflected abstraction or grand-scale historical reconstruction. “Voices” is neither, though it contains elements of both (like folksy accents for Megan Fairchild, and challenges of classical ballet technique—for almost everyone). Its closest antecedent, perhaps its inverse, is his “Serenade after Plato’s Symposium”—a set of solos for seven men which was choreographed for ABT in 2016. But that piece was more conventional, with steps that hewed closely...
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I must have been fifteen: A little old, already, for the content, and yet the spectacle held my attention more than MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which my mother had brought me to a few seasons before, driving us four hours from our Section 8 neighborhood in flat, brown Fresno, through the skyscrapers of San Francisco to the gilt War Memorial Opera House. The ballet this time was Michael Smuin’s “Peter and the Wolf.” The company was American Ballet Theatre. There were dancers dressed like animals. Costumes of bright orange and green, copious plumage. An easy-to-follow story, made all the more...
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Just a few beats after the curtain went down on English National Ballet’s roundly admired run of “Le Corsaire,” the company threw itself into another shiny production: a gala to celebrate its platinum anniversary. In 1950, ENB was an upstart troupe with a makeshift title (London Festival Ballet). Even with two marquee names attached—Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin, darlings of the Ballets Russes—the road to success was riven with financial pitfalls. Fast-forward 70 years, though, and ENB’s an immutable presence on the British stage, still rocking starpower on the mantle, with Tamara Rojo doubling up as artistic director/lead principal since...
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It is surely a measure of the dire American moment. In 20 years of watching the San Francisco Ballet, I cannot remember a single occasion when artistic director Helgi Tomasson has so much as alluded to societal tensions. But there he was pre-curtain at the opening gala of his company’s 87th season, explaining he had chosen to launch the evening with an excerpt from George Balanchine’s “Stars and Stripes” because “it has a way of reminding us in challenging times that despite our differences we are all Americans and art can bring us together.”
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An austere wind-chill cuts though the very heart of Christopher Hampson's new adaptation of the classic fairytale, “The Snow Queen.” This new piece, created for Scottish Ballet's 50th anniversary, immediately eschews any notions of cosy familiarity with Hans Christian Andersen's tale, sanding down the twee sentimentality, while adding bold new elements of cunning. In this incarnation, with its tweedy, grey anytown location, populated by the poor and the needy, magic is used to nefarious ends, all the while ultimately retaining romance and sparkle. It starts with playful sibling rivalry, becomes a chase scene in unknown territory, before landing in a heart-warming, traditional...
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The Joyce Theater presented two festive tap shows this December: Dormeshia’s soulful “And Still You Must Swing” as well as a three-week residency by Dorrance Dance—featuring the premiere of a tap “Nutcracker Suite” to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s funky arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s ubiquitous holiday score. Dorrance’s programming changes weekly, but each show closes with the new “Nutcracker.” This comes to 21 performances, far more than most regional ballet companies and even American Ballet Theatre (with 12). Could a tap company loosen ballet’s yearly stranglehold on this Christmas classic?
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“New Work for Goldberg Variations,” a collaboration between the pianist Simone Dinnerstein and the choreographer Pam Tanowitz, opened its weeklong run at the Joyce Theater Tuesday night. It is by far the best thing I’ve seen by Tanowitz. Her deconstructivism perfectly suits Bach’s score, which is itself a study in fragmentation: Bach took one aria and then reworked its elements through thirty different variations. I cannot think of a piece more apt for Tanowitz’s tinkering.
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“Radio & Juliet:” my uncertainty towards this work started with the title. Set to the music of Radiohead and based around scenes from Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, the name felt ominously uninventive—but then titles are rarely a strong point in dance.
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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