All that Glitters
George Balanchine’s “Jewels” will turn 50 next year. It was, and still is, a ballet like no other; a perfect night at the theater and a great introduction to the art of Balanchine.
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The Good WIFE
Crawling with hipsters, scenesters and lipstick lesbians, the funky warehouse in L.A.’s up-and-coming neighborhood, Frogtown, recently served as a performance space for WIFE’s apocryphal “Enter The Cave.” The hometown female trio—Jasmine Albuquerque, Kristen Leahy and Nina McNeely—had presented the first act of “Cave” at the Hammer Museum last June to what can only be called adoring throngs.
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The Classical Farewell
It feels as if Carlos Acosta has been saying a rather long farewell to classical ballet—his 2015 farewell performance “A Classical Selection,” marked his departure from the Royal Ballet, along with his own production of “Carmen”—but this, it seems, is Acosta’s true farewell to classical dance. While Acosta will not be retiring from dance entirely (he will continue to dance in contemporary works and pursue a role as choreographer and director), his emotional curtain call proved just how much saying ‘farewell’ to classical dance means to a man who has become an icon of the ballet world.
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Fuzzy Logic
Tonight's little surprise, a small bonus routine, comes in the form of dancer and choreographer Jack Webb's incredible new work “Drawn to Drone,” performed by soloist Christopher Harrison and with a hypnotic soundscape by Webb himself. Using two white chairs only, Harrison enters the space, methodically strips down to underwear and sits on the lined-up chairs, tentatively stretching and contorting his limbs, which seem to move independently of his body. His arms and legs raise up in slow motion, and the focus is entirely concentrated on the geometric shapes he creates. He seems like an astronaut on a space flight...
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Classical, Revisited
I had the fortune to sit next to two very charming and chatty longtime Smuin fans for the company’s San Francisco run of its fall triple-bill. David and Dan, let’s call them, are in my experience representative of the 16-dancer troupe’s loyal base. They relish connoisseurship of the Bay Area arts in general, and just that week also attended the San Francisco Opera and American Conservatory Theater. For more than a decade they subscribed to front-row dress circle seats at the San Francisco Ballet—“until the board ousted Michael Smuin for that boring new director”—Helgi Tomasson. Under Tomasson, they said, “suddenly...
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Enigmatic Ode to Nature
The premiere of the new ballet season celebrated the Paris corps de ballet with a triple bill dedicated to its century-long grandeur. Yet the traditional défilé—a grandiose opening—looked at odds with the following minimalist pieces. Versatility or schizophrenia? The 300-year old company still suffers from identity disorders. Tino Seghal's “Sans Titre” (untitled piece) was the most obvious warning sign of such disarray. One can only hope that erratic mixed bills will soon be gone with the wind.
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Hidden Drama
New York City Ballet’s spectacular bill “Balanchine x Vienna” presented during the company’s fall season at David H. Koch Theater in New York comprised three ballets: the effervescent “Divertimento #15,” the astringent and haunting “Episodes,” and the theatrically engrossing “Vienna Waltzes.” This stylistically diverse program revealed various facets of the choreographer’s genius, giving us Balanchine the classicist, the modernist and the showman. As the title suggests, the program also paid homage to Vienna, featuring music of five composers—Mozart, Webern, Johann Strauss II, Franz Lehár and Richard Strauss—whose life and career had close ties to the city that for centuries has...
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Living Doll
On a Tuesday night, I fancied myself carved from the pages of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. I cast myself as Gwenda Reed from “Sleeping Murder.” The year was 1951, and I pinned a bakelite Bluebird of Happiness brooch to my coat lapel. I swapped The Duchess of Malfi for “Coppélia” because this was fantasy, and made for the Palais Theatre in St Kilda. And true to the liberties of daydream, 1951 rolled into both 1962, when the Australian Ballet first performed “Coppélia”during its inaugural season, and 1979, when founding artistic director Peggy van Praagh and former theatre director George Ogilvie...
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It’s the Time of the Season
Frederick Ashton’s sun-soaked “La Fille mal gardée” isn’t the most obvious choice for a fall production, but its cheery pastels and verdant setting are, I can attest, an excellent antidote to the autumnal dusk starting to settle over London.
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Corps Strength
Ballet Austin opened its season with a triple bill titled to announce the company’s upcoming monthlong, 150-city tour of China—its first performances in that country. Two works the company will tour, artistic director Stephen Mills’s “Wolftanzt” and “Liminal Glam,” sandwiched Lar Lubovitch’s “Dvořák Serenade.” Taken as a whole, the program was a study of ensemble: How does an ensemble hang together? In what ways is it threatened? Because Ballet Austin is an unranked company, such questions are especially intriguing.
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Shadow Play
This performance of Alexander Whitley’s “Pattern Recognition,” which premiered at London’s Platform Theatre in April, was the kick-off to a five-leg autumn tour around the UK. The London-based choreographer has teamed up with digital designer Memo Akten to create a 50-minute contemporary work that uses motion-responsive technology to explore themes of consciousness, memory and fragmentation in the digital age. The technology comes in the form of eight chunky floor lamps that sense and track the dancers’ movements, responding with their own illuminated patterns. The lights, the programme makes clear, “are not pre-programmed but are driven only by the movement of...
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Ritual & Rhythm
A fast ticking rhythm counteracts the slow, hyperextended movements of a solo dancer. Her back to the audience she moves with creeping extensions, her articulate body creating enticing distortions. Eventually a man enters and parades in circles around her, the statuesque stillness of his slow walks the antidote to her rippling, insect-like contortions.
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Teenage Angst and Institutions
Watching 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,...
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The Me of Today
The 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.
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America, F**K Yeah
After 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.
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Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup
An “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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