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Glimpsing Nureyev
Nureyev and Friends, a recent tribute event at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, opened with an introduction from Charles Jude, the longtime protégé of Rudolf Nureyev at the Paris Opera Ballet.
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Counting on It
Listening to John Cage’s “Three Dances (for prepared piano)” is a wonderfully contradictory experience. The composer disrupts our auditory expectations by placing an assortment of small objects such as erasers, screws, and bolts, among the piano strings. A musician plays the piano in the typical manner, but instead of a harmonic tone, we hear more percussive sounds of kettle drums, timpani, xylophone, tin cans, even bells. One can imagine how an artist like Lucinda Childs, who was part of the Judson Dance Theater radicals in the ‘60s, might be attracted to such a composition. The choreographer is perhaps best known...
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Balanchine Inside Out
It is always exciting when the New York City Ballet kicks off a season with an all-Balanchine program. However, the Spring Season’s opening quartet of Balanchine ballets—all strong in their own right—didn’t hang together as well as some other combos.
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Precision in Programming and Practice
Moreso than many Balanchine offshoot companies, the Dance Theater of Harlem—founded by the New York City Ballet principal dancer Arthur Mitchell in 1969—keeps the Balanchine ethos at the forefront of its programming.
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Youthful Ideals
Artistic Director Miyako Yoshida’s “Giselle” for the National Ballet of Japan excavates emotional freshness within the familiar landscape of the 1841 Romantic classic.
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Forever Changed
At a baseline, good art should move you. At its peak, it can change you. I did not expect to come out of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s season closer, Re-Act, a changed person, but that’s exactly the effect the performance—and particularly one work, Daniel Charon’s “From Code to Universe”—had on me.
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What is War
The body as vessel; the body as memory container; the body as truth-teller. All of these corporeal permutations were on view at the UCLA Nimoy Theater last Thursday, when Eiko Otake and Wen Hui performed their haunting, elegiac and deeply meaningful work, “What is War.”
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Harper Watters, On his Toes
If ballet and politics were ever a thing, Houston Ballet principal Harper Watters is, perhaps, one of its staunchest advocates.
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Light on their Feet
It was sensory overload at the Marciano Art Foundation last weekend when six members of LA Dance Project performed side-by-side, around, and, at times, seemingly in tandem, with Doug Aitken’s film, Lightscape.
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Tidal Movements
Three dancers drip down a wall like paint. Their backs press against the background as they slowly bend their knees, oozing down a blank canvas. This is a scene from John Jasperse's latest work, “Tides,” which had its premiere as part of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival April 10-13.
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Box Office Ballet
In its 92nd season—its second programmed by still relatively new artistic director Tamara Rojo—San Francisco Ballet kept playing with box office strategies.
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Teenage Angst and Institutions
Watching 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,...
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The Me of Today
The 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.
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America, F**K Yeah
After 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.
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Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup
An “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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