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World Premieres
REVIEWS | Par Merilyn Jackson

World Premieres

Five years into his appointment as artistic director, former American Ballet Theatre star, Ángel Corella challenges the Pennsylvania Ballet’s cadre to surpass themselves each new season. Adding demi-soloist and first soloist last spring gives him 23 dancers above the corps and a freer hand in casting for each ballet. The result is a faster, sleeker look on the entire company from corps to principal dancer.

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Cindy Van Acker
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

One by One

The sky turns red to the sailors’ delight, caused by the setting sun dispatching its light through a high concentration of dust particles: good weather will follow. I ascend the stairs of Dancehouse for my second taste of swiss.style, with grass on my heels, my Quarries Park “Trophy”-marker.

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trophy
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Taking Sides

“Ping.” “Tink.” “Chick-o-wee.” In the late afternoon, Quarries Park, Clifton Hill, is a wonderful chorus of bird calls and a whirl of neighbourhood activity. The sun doesn’t set for another two hours yet. The golden light where everything appears rimmed by a halo or to glow softly is approaching. In anticipation, the high-pitched trills and the soft churring “kreeeark” of birds. And at the foot of the park, a knot of people gathers for Rudi van der Merwe’s “Trophy,” presented by Dancehouse as part of swiss.style, a focus on dance from Switzerland for the first ten days of November. In...

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the royal ballet
REVIEWS | Par Sara Veale

Sixties Swing

The Royal Ballet’s first mixed bill of the 2019/20 season is a snapshot of 1960s British ballet and the polar places it went. Sandwiched between a spare modern creation and a frothy classical revival are bouncy character variations set to a turn-of-the-century orchestral work—slightly mismatched courses, sure, but an interesting snapshot of the company’s mid-century catalogue, plus a chance to see the Royal’s robust solo talent in action.

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Sydney Dance Company
REVIEWS | Par Claudia Lawson

A Step in Time

Sydney Dance Company’s second program marking their 50th anniversary year is “Bonachela/Obarzanek.” This double bill celebrates the company’s history as laid out by its dancers and choreographers, and also the cultural contribution SDC has made to the contemporary dance scene in Australia and around the world.

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New Ventures
REVIEWS | Par Sara Veale

New Ventures

Birmingham Royal Ballet is on a creative commissioning spree. Set on widening its audience at home and away, the company has been funnelling resources into a range of choreographic initiatives and collaborations, and its shows are looking sharper for it.

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Emanual Gat
REVIEWS | Par Lorna Irvine

Hypervigilant

There is an itchy sense of restlessness to Emanuel Gat's ephemeral piece with Scottish Dance Theatre, a heightened kind of hypervigilance with a dozen dancers onstage always looking over their shoulders. They appear primed to pounce at any time, all too aware of lurking predators. It's there in Gat's lighting design, which is hugely evocative of twilight corners. It's woven into the alertness of eyes, the scratchy shapes of arachnid hands twitching in the air and protective hunches on haunches, the groups of two or three, rearing up like horses on hind legs. This “fight or flight” stance is a...

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The Day
REVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

The Day

“I remember the day.” So begins Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang’s crowdsourced lament, a eulogy for the lost, an encomium for those still with us, a sorrowful remembrance of a bygone world, one forever changed when some 3,000 lives perished on that horrific Tuesday in September. Making use of a single day as metaphor to cut to the heart of humanity, the 2016 Lang composition, “the day,” was commissioned by contemporary cellist Maya Beiser as a prequel to Lang’s 2003 opus, “world to come,” which was composed in response to 9/11, with “The Day” receiving its West Coast premiere over...

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La Fresque Ballet Preljocaj
REVIEWS | Par Sara Veale

Into the Fold

There’s a mythic quality to Angelin Preljocaj’s “La Fresque,” both in theme and aesthetic. The 2016 production, recently shown in the UK for the first time, is inspired by a medieval Chinese saga about Chu (Marius Delcourt), a man who delves into a mural and marries its subject before being booted back to reality. There are pounding drums and starry skies, hair coiled to evoke ancient deities. We see pilgrims scaling mountains, seraphim swinging from the heavens, Spartans squaring off for battle. The folkloric angle is right up Preljocaj’s alley: other works with his Aix-en-Provence-based company include “Snow White” and...

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Bodies of Water
REVIEWS | Par Lorna Irvine

Elements

There is an ineffable poignancy, a sense of subtle melancholy even, to this immersive and moving piece, “Bodies of Water” created by Saffy Setohy, Aya Kobayashi, Nicolette Macleod and Joanna Young for family audiences. It is dancers Setohy and Young who perform, and invite the audience into a quiet, dark but cosy space for interaction and dance. Tables are festooned with little clay pots created across Scottish communities over the course of a year. As pairs, we too are invited (with eyes closed) to create little makeshift pots of clay, something to contain water. 

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New York City Ballet
REVIEWS | Par Oksana Khadarina

Cloaked in Darkness

George Balanchine’s unconventional, even shocking, “Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir,” revived for this fall season by New York City Ballet, shows the choreographer at his most avant-garde and unexpected and allows the audience to appreciate once again the extraordinary range of Balanchine’s creative genius and his daring musical choices.

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Rob Heaslip
REVIEWS | Par Lorna Irvine

A Deathly Pallor

The scenography here, from the ever-inspiring designer Alison Brown, is truly striking: black confetti on a clinical white floor; spiky masked not-quite-human creatures, elusive faces turned away, eerie white bound furniture, which is decorative as well as functional. Brown's black and white flimsy costumes act as sheaths (called winding sheets in ancient Celtic culture) both encasing and exposing the slender bodies underneath. This is “Endling,” Rob Heaslip's disquieting Gaelic meditation on death and the ritual of condolences and care. The sounds, created by composer Michael John McCarthy, range from birdsong to guttural, slurping sounds, drones to choppy electronica, and there...

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