World-class review of ballet and dance.
As Highways Performance Space continues its 35th anniversary celebration, executive director Leo Garcia and artistic director Patrick Kennelly presented two special programs, each honoring titans of the post-modern dance world
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I can only imagine the challenge it might be for a creator to approach the cavernous 55,000 square foot drill hall of Park Avenue Armory in its raw state.
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’Tis the season, so it would be churlish to pick holes in Christopher Hampson's glorious confection, adapted from Peter Darrell's iconic work.
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Like two cicadas advancing, springing instep with each other, Tra Mi Dinh and Rachel Coulson manifest from the shadows of the deep stage of the new Union Theatre.
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“I can’t even stand it,” exclaimed Tina Finkelman Berkett about the Perenchio Foundation grant that her dance troupe, BodyTraffic, recently received.
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Beneath a tree also over a century old is where I meet dancer and artist Eileen Kramer, and where the 60-minute loop will end. And it feels fitting, on the heels of her recent death on November 15, 2024, at 110-years-of-age, to start here, at effectively the end of Sue Healey’s screening of On View: Icons.
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Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s Fall Series will entertain you. Deftly curated, with choreographers ranging from Aszure Barton to Bob Fosse, Hubbard’s dancers ably morph through this riveting programme of showmanship.
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Like the productions he creates, Jack Lister is three things: enigmatic, polished, and intentional. He is both artist and observer, subject and spectator; his innate polarity creates a unique, yet candidly earnest, profile.
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Even at his most straightforward, Paul Taylor often imbued his dances with a sardonic wit. Whether invoking darkness or light, he did so with a wink.
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Talk about Gesamtkunstwerk! Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s “SCAT!...The Complex Lives of Al & Dot, Dot & Al Zollar,” is just that—a total work of art: operatic in scale, replete with stellar musicians and singers, and the glorious dancers of Urban Bush Women, the troupe that Zollar founded in 1984, is also storytelling at its best.
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Of all of Shakespeare’s plays, “Hamlet” might seem the hardest to adapt into dance. Its long soliloquies and a titular character stymied by indecision do not immediately scream movement potential.
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Complexions Contemporary Ballet turned 30 this year, and their two-week residency at the Joyce Theater was a party.
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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