Firebird Rising
Long before the dancers take the stage, Dance Theatre of Harlem’s season at New York City Center feels like one of the most energizing cultural events of the spring.
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World-class review of ballet and dance.
The curtain for “Vollmond,” one of the final works from the late Pina Bausch, created in 2006, opens on a colossal boulder that calls to mind a craggy sea stone, or maybe a hunk of spacerock. It could be either—the title translates to both ‘high tide’ and ‘full moon,’ and its concerns are as earthly as they are cosmic: love, ire, power, the stratospheric stuff of life. The duality is in step with Bausch’s wider repertoire, posing oblique questions about the human condition, especially the relationships between men and women, although there’s more room for warmth here than in earlier works, more silliness amid the meditation.
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Long before the dancers take the stage, Dance Theatre of Harlem’s season at New York City Center feels like one of the most energizing cultural events of the spring.
PlusWhen we think of countries that have shaped the world of dance our mind will often drift to the United States, Russia, or Germany. But what of Luxembourg?
PlusIn times of rapid change, predicting the road ahead can seem to be a fool’s errand. But on a spring afternoon at Lincoln Center, I feel confident in this assertion: the future of dance is very bright.
PlusThe programme of the Paris Opera Ballet School’s annual show for 2026 is shaped by a return to origins. Compared with recent editions, what stands out is its pronounced tendency to look backwards, less through canonical classics than through the recreation of an idealised past.
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