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Chunky Move
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Dance, for the time being

Organs, teeth, flesh, bone. Part indestructible, part fallible. That the body is a marvellous tool none would deny. All this and more one knows and during a thirteen-day festival expects to see in someway put to the test. The body and its limits. The body and its brilliant workings. It can bend. It can turn into liquid silk. It can roll and it can convulse. It can operate as if possessed. Faces can be blank. They can be expressive. Fun can be poked, and the mirror proves always a fascination. Literally, in the sense of Anouk van Dijk’s new work...

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Ashley Dyer
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Where There's Smoke . . .

There are some nights when the weather plays its role as if part of the performance. This was the case one very hot eve, when I went to see Ashley Dyer’s “Life Support” at Dancehouse in Carlton North, on the first day of Dance Massive 2013. The idea of being trapped within a room that slowly grows airless as smoke fills and chokes, on such a close night seemed to work hand in glove. Waiting in the foyer, already a claustrophobic air. People fanned themselves with their Dance Massive programmes or whatever came to hand in futile bid to cool...

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Joffrey
DANCE FILM | Par Deborah Jones

Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance

Robert Joffrey had not long started ballet classes when he was tapped to be a supernumerary in a Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo production of “Petrushka,” touring to Joffrey’s home town of Seattle. A few weeks later he was in the audience for another performance. It wasn’t America’s seasonal, perennial favourite (and lifeboat for almost every US company), “The Nutcracker,” nor was it the war-horse “Swan Lake;” it was Kurt Jooss’s fabled anti-war ballet “The Green Table”—a heady experience for an 11-year-old.

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Pierrot Lunaire
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

The Shock of the New

The history of art, music, ballet, opera, and literature is one dotted with the curious, bewildered, shocked receptions of the audience when faced with the new and the challenges this in turn presents. Springing to mind in a flash, the famous response “The Rite of Spring” received at its premiere on a warm spring evening in Paris in the year 1913. Igor Stravinsky’s rejection of conventional melody coupled with the abstract and convulsive dance movements of Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography presented the audience with a ‘prehistoric vision, confused, awe-inspiring, but true.’[note]Prince Peter Lieven, The Birth of the Ballet-Russes, trans. L. Zarine...

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Swan Lake
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Becoming Odette

It is circles I see, and always have, whenever I listen, and often I do, to Piotr Illyich Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” For me, one stimulates the other, and the composition upon every visit sets to the business of drawing its familiar beloved circles, from the large and sweeping to the tightly coiled. Melodic circles that anyone can hum or whistle, or with finger tap out on the table; such a union of the senses is what “Swan Lake” is for me. That is what I hear in the music, and see in the choreography, a melody and a romanticism impossible...

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Nederlands Dans Theater
DANCE FILM | Par Gracia Haby

Move to Move

“Muscular preambles ripple beneath the skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate. Something is being decided. A breeze of emotion underlines the mouth with clouds. The orography of the face vacillates. Seismic shocks begin. Capillary wrinkles try to split the fault. A wave carries them away. Crescendo. A muscle bridles. The lip is laced with tics like a theatre curtain. Everything is movement, imbalance, crisis.”—(One of the great silent film directors) Jean Epstein (1897-1953)

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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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