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Garden Blue
REVIEWS | Par Oksana Khadarina

Colorful Dances

American Ballet Theatre’s fall season brought back Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room”—an exhilarating cornucopia of energy, movement and sound, rightly regarded as one of Tharp’s greatest hits. It was a thrill to see this piece entering the company’s repertory after more than a decade-long hiatus. The dance, which Tharp created for her own company—Twyla Tharp Dance—in 1986, with its over-the-top trappings, may look a bit worn and quaint after all these years. But as the spirited performance of this Tharpian classic revealed—the piece still has a “wow effect” on the viewers; it still delivers a full-bodied invigorating punch and...

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Sankofa Danzafro
INTERVIEWS | Par Merli V. Guerra

City of Others

In the realm of dance and social change, Sankofa Danzafro is making its powerful choreographic voice well-heard, one continent at a time. The Afro-Colombian company, founded by Rafael Palacios in 1997 on the Pacific coast of Colombia, brings its internationally acclaimed 2010 production “The City of Others” to the Celebrity Series of Boston, to be performed in New England Conservatory’s (NEC) newly completed Plimpton Shattuck Black Box Theatre on November 3 & 4. Performed by a cast of 20 dancers, “City” addresses social issues of wealth disparity, gender identity, sexual orientation, and racism in Colombia in an impactful mix of dance, music and...

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Medusa
REVIEWS | Par Sara Veale

Of Monsters and Men

Think Medusa and you think snake-haired monster. But there’s a human side to the myth of the petrifying Gorgon: her rape at the hands of Poseidon, a detail that’s routinely forgotten, even though it’s this act of violence that prompts Athena to curse Medusa into beasthood in the first place. Acting out of jealousy, Ovid recounts, Athena “transformed Medusa’s beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone.”

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Gustavo Dudamel
REVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

A Vivid Duet

Under the commanding, yet nuanced conducting of Gustavo Dudamel, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, currently celebrating its 100th birthday in grand style—including commissioning dozens of new works and offering numerous city-wide events—sounded splendid in Prokofiev’s “Romeo & Juliet.” Composed in 1935, the 130-minute score is one of ballet’s iconic pieces of music (played for the first time in its entirety by the Phil), with Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers continuing to live—and die—on stage, television and the silver screen. (Steven Spielberg will be remaking the 1961 film with the famed Bernstein score, though one has to wonder why.)

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111
REVIEWS | Par Lorna Irvine

Framing

It could be a wry joke about these politically fraught times of Brexit. Dancer Joel Brown, flexing and exercising on the floor, grins, remarking that it's wonderful to have an Estonian dancer (Eve Mutso) and an American (himself) performing together in Scotland. Yet, it's absolutely true, and a wonderful example of the unifying nature of choreography. Multiculturalism itself almost seems like an act of resistance these days.

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Common Ground
REVIEWS | Par Rachel Howard

On Common Ground

Let’s make one thing clear upfront: To see a LINES Ballet performance is to partake in wonders beyond measure, to have one’s senses reawakened by the dignity of humanity’s vulnerability, and this is as true now as it has been over many high points of the San Francisco company’s 35 year history. To watch Shuaib Elhassan pause in a pirouette, open-chested and generously alive, in startling harmony with the forces of physics, is life-affirming. To fill your eyes with this miracle while, playing live at the back of the stage, the Kronos Quartet’s richness fills your ears—this is rapture. So...

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William Forsythe
REVIEWS | Par Sara Veale

Confident and Composed

As a dancemaker, William Forsythe is often described in brassy terms: a neoclassical powerhouse, a rule-breaker who deconstructs classical ballet and flips it on its head. He’s known for his ultra-modern choreography and penchant for friskiness, both of which fuel his latest work, though not in the in-your-face way you might think. “A Quiet Evening of Dance” explores the calm side of mighty, the dynamism that comes with confident, composed choreography and performance.

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Germaine Acogny
REVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

Chosen One

At 74, Germaine Acogny, the Paris-based, Sénégalese matriarch of contemporary African dance, still has the power to astonish, making the solo, “Mon Élue Noire” (My Black Chosen One): Sacre #2,” choreographed for her by Ballet du Nord director, Olivier Dubois in 2015 and set to Stravinsky’s musical shocker, “Le sacre du printemps,” equally electrifying—and surprisingly relevant. From the score’s hauntingly familiar solo bassoon opening to the closing chord, which Stravinsky himself disparagingly referred to as “a noise,” this dance, first choreographed by Nijinsky in 1913 for the Ballets Russes and tackled by scads of terpsichores since, jolts with a singularity...

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Queensland Ballet
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

But a Dream

As soft as a white rabbit’s fur: Edwin Landseer’s Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Titania and Bottom (1848–51). In a down of fur, the painting hanging in the National Gallery of Victoria depicts Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, besotted with Bottom, who has recently been reshaped into an ass, from William Shakespeare’s comedy of misplacement. A fairy queen and an ass, two of opposite realms entwined and for all to see in the fairy dell, accompanied by the requisite fairy folk and white rabbits. In an engraving of Titania and Bottom by Henry Fuseli they too, are encircled by...

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Skeleton Song
DANCE FILM | Par Penelope Ford

Skeleton Song

“Skeleton Song,” by UK-based singer and composer Ana Silvera, is the second song from her BASCA-nominated song-cycle Oracles, released by Gearbox records. Written following an intense period of grief, Oracles was Silvera’s way to transmute her emotions into a cathartic work of art: “I wrote Oracles in a state of absolute urgency and emergency—it felt like I had been buried in the ground myself, and writing this music was a small pocket of air, my chance to breathe again,” Silvera notes. The dance film/video clip was a unique collaboration between Kate Church (dancer, director, choreography) and  Alice Williamson (co-direction, costume and choreography), shot by DOP...

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RED
REVIEWS | Par Lorna Irvine

Dance as Revolution

This Scottish debut, fusing documentary with performance, is at once a celebration of feminine power, and deconstruction of the “model” ballets performed around the time of China's Cultural Revolution. Beijing-based choreographer Wen Hui, formed Living Dance Studio with filmmaker Wu Wenguang in 1994, becoming China's first independent dance theatre company. And this witty and inventive study of both the implications of the Communist regime, and what is expected of female dancers, is also incredibly powerful in its own subtle and understated way—never didactic for its own sake.

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Jewels
REVIEWS | Par Oksana Khadarina

Shine On

After attending the premiere of George Balanchine’s “Jewels,” on April 13, 1967, dance critic Clive Barnes described it in the New York Times as “too beautiful for words,” musing on the fact that at the time of its premiere the ballet had no title: “I can only presume that Mr. Balanchine must have taken one look at the extraordinary thing he created and at once found himself at a loss for words.”

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Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Rachel Howard
Starry Nights

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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