With Raised Voices
Stories are embedded in the dances of Gregory Maqoma, the South African choreographer and dancer whose work, “Broken Chord,” is currently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater.
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A Bullseye
“Carmen” has been in the air this year. Especially at the Kimmel Cultural Campus. Almost as a prelude to the Philadelphia Ballet’s “Carmen,” the Philadelphia Orchestra presented choreographer Brian Sanders’ aerial play on Rodion Shchedrin’s 1967 “Carmen Suite” (created for his wife, the Bolshoi’s Maya Plisetskaya) last March at Verizon Hall.
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Layered and Redolent
In 2019, Pam Tanowitz gripped London with “Four Quartets,” an ode to T.S. Eliot that sparked five-star reviews and declarations of her supremacy in the 21st-century dance theatre scene.
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Radical Dance for Now
The Martha Graham Dance Company filled some of the Metropolitan Museum’s most impressive spaces for two full days with pop-up performances of six Graham solos choreographed in the 1930s.
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Quick Quick Slow
Malpaso Dance Company brought a vibrant slice of Cuban life to the Joyce last week: virtuosic dance, live music, humor, and of course, the salsa—an element that was ever-present as a through-line for the evening.
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Serge Laurent, Reflecting on Dance
When a balletomane thinks of gemstones, the name George Balanchine immediately comes to mind, specifically his masterpiece, “Jewels.”
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Gentlemen’s Club
Not for the first time at the Fall for Dance Festival, now in its 20th year, Chippendale’s emerged as the theme of the night. There were 32 male dancers across the three works on the festival’s third program, 31 of whom danced shirtless.
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Match Point
In 1913, a few weeks before the premiere of his revolutionary “Rite of Spring,” Nijinsky created another, smaller ballet for the Ballets Russes.
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A Season of Balanchine
The ballets of George Balanchine are a window into the company he, with the help and support of Lincoln Kirstein, created three quarters of a century ago. The fact that they and the company are still here is a kind of miracle if one thinks of the short afterlife of most ballets. How lucky we are that the two men met, and that Kirstein convinced Balanchine to try his luck in New York.
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Shaun Parker, King-Maker
Shaun Parker's path to artistic director and choreographer of an internationally renowned contemporary dance company is totally unexpected.
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Going Whole Hog
Backdropped in layers of flowy plastic sheeting, an enormous inflatable nut brown sow dominates the stage. Projected video make it appear uncannily as if it’s breathing.
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Sticks and Stones
For remote fans of Pacific Northwest Ballet, the curiosity increases as the calendar days tick further beyond the pandemic: How is the company still offering digital recordings of so much of its programming? And how much longer can the company keep offering these? The dread of losing digital access is felt especially after PNB’s latest streaming wonder, a tribute to the theatrical brilliance of Nederlands Dans Theater, danced with such mirth and fluency that you might suspect the performance had been filmed in Amsterdam rather than in Seattle’s McCaw Hall.
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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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