Youthful Ideals
Artistic Director Miyako Yoshida’s “Giselle” for the National Ballet of Japan excavates emotional freshness within the familiar landscape of the 1841 Romantic classic.
PlusWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
“Tanz” opens on a ballet class like none I’ve ever attended. Onstage are two portable barres and four dancers in rehearsal clothes stretching and warming up. Eighty-three-year-old ballerina Beatrice Cordua teaches from a wheelchair, naked. “The toes are the tongue of the foot,” she declares as the dancers tendu at the barre. “You should take your clothes off,” she suggests. “Muscle is beauty. Muscle is movement.” Soon the stage is filled with curvy, tattooed female flesh. A series of grand tendus reveals glimpses of vulva that challenge my sense of modesty. A familiar floor stretch leaves nothing to the imagination.
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Artistic Director Miyako Yoshida’s “Giselle” for the National Ballet of Japan excavates emotional freshness within the familiar landscape of the 1841 Romantic classic.
PlusAt a baseline, good art should move you. At its peak, it can change you. I did not expect to come out of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s season closer, Re-Act, a changed person, but that’s exactly the effect the performance—and particularly one work, Daniel Charon’s “From Code to Universe”—had on me.
PlusThe body as vessel; the body as memory container; the body as truth-teller. All of these corporeal permutations were on view at the UCLA Nimoy Theater last Thursday, when Eiko Otake and Wen Hui performed their haunting, elegiac and deeply meaningful work, “What is War.”
PlusIf ballet and politics were ever a thing, Houston Ballet principal Harper Watters is, perhaps, one of its staunchest advocates.
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Great review! I’m sorry I couldn’t get to this show!