Theatre-going
“Empreintes” featuring two new creations by Jess & Morgs and Marcos Morau, reads as a choreographic response to Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
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Objects of Desire
Maurice Béjart would surely have been delighted to see La Seine Musicale’s vast Grande Salle, that striking structure seemingly floating on the river above the Île Seguin, filled for all six March performances of his company’s tour.
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Street to Stage
Penn Live Arts presented Rennie Harris’s “Losing My Religion” last week as part of its America Unfinished Series, marking the country’s semiquincentennial.
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Motherhood
Motherhood has often been idealized as the ultimate fulfillment of being a woman. In fact, in many cultures, motherhood is still understood as a woman's basic mission and an inseparable part of her nature.
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Dividing Lines
A gifted satirist, Jane Comfort’s dance theater productions are razor sharp and wickedly indelible. Take, for instance, the evening length “Beauty” (2012), with its robotic Barbie beauty contest.
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Inside the Somatic Field
On the first weekend of spring, Japan Society presented multidisciplinary, avant-garde artist Hiroaki Umeda and his dance ensemble Somatic Field Project in an evening-length program of his latest cutting-edge dance works.
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Red Scares
American Ballet Theatre typically holds court in NYC twice a year. Their Summer Season at the Metropolitan Opera House features classical narrative full-lengths, and the Fall Season at the Koch Theater showcases edgier, short-form works.
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For Love or Money
Unlikeable humanity in a rapacious society, Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” hits the zeitgeist—again. Recently staged by the National Ballet of Japan, it’s a stunning testimony to the ballet’s relevance across time and space. Fifty years since its creation and set in eighteenth-century France, the production nevertheless holds a mirror to now.
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Disorderly Dance
An ambitious yet flawed work, “Dis-order,” seen last week at the Skirball Cultural Center, was described in the program notes as a “communal ritual, and a family drama that asks what forces move through us when we enact an ancient spring rite, and what is left unspoken when we gather around the table.”
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Intimacy on the Knife-edge
Crystal Pite is a connoisseur of the ensemble, with a forte for spotlighting the humanity of the collective, from the tight-knit flock to the anonymised mass.
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In her Stride, Alicia Graf Mack
Once referred to as the “Rolls-Royce of American dance,” Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, founded in 1958 by Alvin Ailey, continues to live up to that plaudit.
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Dancing the Body Politic
Ranjini Nair wears a few hats. Trained as a classical dancer in her native New Delhi by gurus Seetha Nagajothy, Jayarama Rao, and Vanashree Rao, she later found herself deep within the world of academia.
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Tranquil Intrigue
The title of this dance interpretation of The Tempest highlights a notable departure from canon. In “We Caliban,” Shobana Jeyasingh imagines Shakespeare’s titular native in the collective sense—a tribe, a spirit and a place at once.
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Firebird Rising
Long before the dancers take the stage, Dance Theatre of Harlem’s season at New York City Center feels like one of the most energizing cultural events of the spring.
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It is rare for George Balanchine’s grand, bedazzled “Symphony in C” to open a program. Its champagne-popping finale for 52 dancers tends to be a nightcap.
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Too Good to be True
When we think of countries that have shaped the world of dance our mind will often drift to the United States, Russia, or Germany. But what of Luxembourg?
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Looking Forward
In times of rapid change, predicting the road ahead can seem to be a fool’s errand. But on a spring afternoon at Lincoln Center, I feel confident in this assertion: the future of dance is very bright.
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