World-class review of ballet and dance.
It’s been 30 years since Alvin Ailey’s death, but his company looks eager as ever to spread the gospel he wrote: a hip, harmonious union of modern dance and black vernacular styles. Ailey’s eminent legacy infuses every piece the troupe performs, even recent commissions like those on show in this UK tour. Where he led, his dancers continue to follow, finding vibrant new ways to honour the lives and experiences of black America.
Plus
Deborah Hay, a torchbearer of America’s 1960s postmodern dance movement, usually deals in minimalism, which means her work rarely feels embellished, emotive or particularly intense; you’re unlikely encounter explicit themes or narratives. The story is the body and how it moves through space in different iterations—how motions can reach beyond the recognised borders of skill and performance in search of something reflective. The idea of liminality is fundamental to Hay’s choreography, which is usually devised using esoteric questions relating to time, perception and place.
Plus
From many languages, one song; from “the beginning of day,”[note]David Unaipon, Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker (eds.), Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines (Carlton: Miegunyah Press at Melbourne University Press, 2001), 217[/note] shared knowledge, respect, and understanding; from an unbreakable connection to land and community, come together, with purpose, invites Bangarra Dance Theatre. Come together for “30 years of sixty five thousand” to mark the company’s 30th anniversary. Come together to learn, dig deep, acknowledge, and say thank you. “With roots in the world’s oldest continuing culture, “Bangarra: 30 years of sixty five thousand” carries the spirit of Bangarra into...
Plus
I have long wished to swim through the other-worlds created by Georges Méliès, and Stanton Welch’s “Sylvia,” a co-production between Houston Ballet and the Australian Ballet, gives me the opportunity to do just that; to submerge myself in a fantastical landscape that delights in the play of model making and storytelling; in how we tell a story and the story itself. Theatrical and larger than life.
Plus
Like Baz Luhrmann before him, Matthew Bourne’s contemporary reworking of “Romeo and Juliet” adds a coat of grit to fair Verona. Gone are the marbled columns and wrought-iron balconies of the Capulet court; it’s all sheetrock and cold metal bars at the Verona Institute, a juvie-asylum hybrid where disaffected teens are doped into submission. Absent too are the feuding families. Romeo’s parents are shellacked politicians, eager to hand their son over for medicated safekeeping, while Juliet’s are absent from the picture altogether. A legion of tyrannical guards stand in the way of our star-crossed lovers, commanded by a nightmarish Tybalt...
Plus
Though Battery Dance Festival has had many names and neighborhoods through nearly 40 years running, shifted by floods and unnatural phenomena altering the geography of the city, its home here, along the waterfront in Battery Park against the New York Harbor, brings the sublime into the space. The sun, in particular, backgrounding the seven dances on the first day of the weeklong free festival, arcs through the acts of the show, giving a program from companies from around the globe some grandeur and structure. It’s beautiful, and free, so its flaws can be forgiven.
Plus
It's the screaming that resonates around the auditorium. The blood curdling, hellish shrieks that chill to the bone. Such shrill cries to the gods to intervene. Ululations to despair and emptiness, entirely bereft of hope, rise up and circle the space. Is there anything more heart-rending, to see someone cry, and feel powerless to intervene? Crying, we enter the world. Screaming, we leave.
Plus
By late summer in NYC the big hometown ballet troupes have followed their well-heeled supporters to their summer playgrounds in Vail, Nantucket, the Hamptons, and Saratoga Springs. What a treat then to have stars of the Royal Ballet present four different programs at the Joyce Theater in the doldrums of August. Kevin O’Hare, the company’s artistic director, curated the opening lineup and also invited current principals Lauren Cuthbertson and Edward Watson as well as former dancer/current designer Jean-Marc Puissant to arrange the other three—an interesting and generous idea. The first two bills ran last week, and though they were rather lightweight that...
Plus
Leaving Venice after nearly two weeks of watching dance at the 13th Biennale Danza, our water taxi hurtled over the wakes of other boats darting from the airport. The Adriatic, a dancing sea of oscillating currents, provided an exhilarating ride along its shallowest tip. I would miss the dance, our lovely flat above a narrow canal and filled with musical toy-like gondolas each morning, the people and conversations. Maybe not so much being lost among the narrow, shaded alleys, the only escape from the brutal heat. The Biennale, and all of Europe, endured a few days of the “Sahara Wave.”...
Plus
While the global village keeps getting smaller, thanks to Google, YouTube, Instagram and the like, the real world of dance, happily, is growing larger. At least that’s the way it seemed during the 39th edition of the Montpellier Dance Festival. Founded in 1980 by dancer-choreographer Dominique Bagouet, who died of AIDS at age 41 in 1992, this annual celebration in the glorious south of France has been directed by Jean-Paul Montanari since 1983.
Plus
Philadelphia’s contemporary ballet company, BalletX continues to reach for, and often achieves, its ambition to commission new works, sometimes seven or eight in a season. To its credit, many commissions go to women choreographers, as underserved in the dance world as in the real world.
Plus
For the first time in its 72-year history, the Holland Festival invited two artists to program its prestigious multidisciplinary three-week arts celebration that unfolded over various venues around Amsterdam—and both hail from Africa: The visual artist William Kentridge is from South Africa and the choreographer Faustin Linyekula is Congolese. It’s no surprise, then, that the internationally acclaimed dancer/choreographer, Gregory Maqoma, was asked to perform with his Vuyani Dance Theatre.
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.
Plus
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.
Plus