World-class review of ballet and dance.
Scottish Ballet has a long history of adapting literary works for the stage, and not just the usual fairy tales and Shakespeare plays either; texts by writers as uncharted (in the ballet world anyway) as Friedrich Rückert, Dylan Thomas, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Arthur Miller have all served as source material for the Glasgow-based company over the years.
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“Dance is a fragile thing—it only exists in the moment you do it, and then it’s gone.” So Robert Cohan reminded us when he took to the stage at the end of this gala, organised to celebrate his 90th birthday and honour his many achievements on stage and in the studio. The American choreographer—who trained with Martha Graham and famously went on to partner her in some of her biggest works—has a devoted following the world over, but he’s especially beloved in the UK, where the dance scene would look distinctly different had he not teamed up with Robin Howard...
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Thirteen performances in thirteen days: my exhaustive, intense, yet not-nearly-enough, Dance Massive 2015 experience. Dance Massive remains a celebration and exploration of the body in movement and in stillness; the body shown on a screen, through a screen, and in response to a screen; the body pushed, and the body pulled; the body grounded, and the body weightless; the body as a tool for communication, as a vessel, and equally as a red herring; the body vs. the machine, and as a machine; the body’s very matter decomposing right before my eyes in glorious time lapse. This is all fodder...
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Adrift on a makeshift raft, forsaken by a rescue boat on the horizon, flanked by the corpses of their fellow comrades, hope wavered, and was near extinguished. In the inky waters, mayhem, mutiny, and cannibalism ensured. Théodore Géricault’s romantic nineteenth-century painting (in the collection of the Louvre), The Raft of the Medusa (1819), based on the accounts of a handful of actual survivors, depicts the shipwreck of a French naval frigate off the coast of Senegal in 1816. Above all, it illustrates “a synthetic view of human life abandoned to its fate. The pallid bodies are given cruel emphasis by...
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David Bintley's “Carmina burana” has roots that go way beyond 1995, the year he took over as Birmingham Royal Ballet's artistic director and created this spectacle of a piece. The ballet is inspired by Carl Orff's cantata Carmina burana, which the German composer cobbled together in the 1930s from a slew of 13th-century poems and plays discovered in a Bavarian monastery in the early 1800s. Fast-forward to 2015 and we've got BRB remounting the work for the first time in five years.
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“It’s human to feel vulnerable; it’s honest to feel lonely. I don’t see these emotions as negative so much as critical and introspective.” So responded Hagit Yakira when, during an audience discussion following the performance of her 2013 work “…in the middle with you” last week, a viewer enquired about the distress the piece’s characters face as they grapple with that thorniest of existential concerns, the human condition. Yakira's answer explains the meditative, rather than brooding, tone that prevails in this dance theatre work, which examines how we transition emotionally from suffering to release. The work is at once abstract...
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Pam Tanowitz is a choreographer of conflicted interests. “When I talk about narrative and non-narrative, I feel like I want it both ways,” she said in an interview with the Joyce Theater in 2013. She cites George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham as her two greatest influences, artists whose methods and techniques lie at opposite poles of virtually every spectrum. She comes from a background in contemporary (and mostly Cunningham) style, but says that she enjoys working in ballet. This interest has sometimes gone awry. In 2012 she presented the stuffy “Untitled (Blue Ballet)” at the Kitchen, with a cast drawn...
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Their cheeks had the satin frost-glow of the moon;Their eyes the fire of Sirius.They circled, and droned a monotonous tune,Abandoned to love delirious.–George Meredith, Phantasy, 1861
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(Pay attention to what it is, just as it is.)Each person is in the best seat –John Cage[note]lines 3, 31 of 2 Pages, 122 Words on Music and Dance, 1957[/note]
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This triple bill weaves together works by three seminal twentieth-century choreographers: Jiří Kylián, John Neumeier and William Forsythe. As critic Sarah Crompton points out in the programme notes, each of these so-called ‘modern masters’ spent the early years of his career at the Stuttgart Ballet, where a hotbed of artistic innovation bloomed under the direction of the late John Cranko, who encouraged his dancers to create their own works during his reign as director in the 1960s. Together the works on display form a splendid retrospective on the ballet scene of the late twentieth century, and mark English National Ballet’s...
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In real estate, the prevailing axiom is “location, location, location,” with Heidi Duckler, whom the Los Angeles Times once dubbed the “reigning queen of site-specific dance,” proving the dictum formidable. Whether choreographing in and around laundromats, shuttered hospitals, bowling alleys or parking lots, Duckler continues to mine magic in her choice of venue, tapping a collective vein that, in the process, invariably unlocks complex emotions.
PlusWatching 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,...
PlusThe 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.
PlusAfter 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.
PlusAn “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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