Iona Kewney: Goddess and Alchemist
It's with great sadness that we learned a couple of nights ago of the untimely passing of dance artist Iona Kewney.
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World-class review of ballet and dance.
It's with great sadness that we learned a couple of nights ago of the untimely passing of dance artist Iona Kewney.
PlusLooking down into the rotunda from the spiral ramp of New York’s Guggenheim Museum can be dizzying. My perch tonight is located two-thirds of the way to the top—and it’s the best view in the house for Lucinda Childs’ Early Works program.
PlusPush and pull are pretty commonplace commands. You can push someone’s buttons, pull someone’s leg. Somehow we always manage to conflate the two when facing a door in a public place.
PlusThe Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory is a yawning, cavernous space. In its depths, even the fiercest applause can be rendered a mere din, sounding hollow and unappreciative.
PlusIn transparent specimen bags, arranged in a circle, float Lemon Myrtle, Warrigal Greens, and Red Bottle Brush.
PlusWhere language falls silent, dance speaks. That is the case for balletic interpretations of Shakespeare’s great works—particularly Lar Lubovitch’s three-act “Othello,” choreographed for American Ballet Theatre in 1997.
PlusLike most new adaptations of existing story ballet classics, the world premiere of artistic director James Sofranko’s “Swan Lake” for Grand Rapids Ballet retained the bones of the original it was based on.
PlusShakespearean purists, leave your expectations at the door. With his rendition of Sergei Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet,” first staged in 2009 to mark the 10th anniversary of K-Ballet Tokyo, Tetsuya Kumakawa plays freely with details from Shakespeare’s tragedy to create a psychological, theatrical study of doomed love.
PlusOnly three years after its premiere at Cork’s Midsummer Festival, Philip Connaughton finds his work of epic proportions, “Trojans,” in the hands of Luail.
PlusFrom charming stagings for children to edgy dance theater, Un Yamada Company, a creative collective based in Tokyo, has built a reputation for consistently innovative productions.
PlusFor much of “Romeo & Juliet Suite,” Benjamin Millepied’s stripped-down take on the Sergei Prokofiev ballet—billed as a gender-bent, “contemporary, site-specific” version of Shakespeare’s classic—I find myself thinking of a different play by the bard. Specifically, the direction in The Winter’s Tale: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” Most of the drama here, after all, happens offstage.
PlusThe 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.
PlusLong 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.
PlusWhen 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?
PlusIn 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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