World-class review of ballet and dance.
Even despite countless efforts not to, the concert dance world can feel inaccessible. At its most avant-garde, the form can come off as niche, esoteric, and difficult to understand, especially to those without a background in it. Kyle Abraham’s “An Untitled Love,” turns all these assumptions on their head.
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In 1991, Molly Lynch, who was then director of the Orange County-based Ballet Pacifica, launched an annual three-week workshop, Pacifica Choreographic Project, to provide the company with new works created for her dancers by four guest choreographers. Fast forward to 2004, when Lynch, who’d resigned from Ballet Pacifica the year before, founded the National Choreographic Initiative (NCI). Its mission, however, was essentially the same: to provide emerging and mid-career contemporary ballet choreographers a three-week laboratory to foster new works, with the workshopped dances then performed on stage for an audience.
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A single dancer commands the stage, her arms and legs lithely carving the space as the words of Gloria Anzaldúa’s poem “To Live In The Borderlands Means You,” simultaneously sculpt the air. A ballerina’s nimble fingertips etch lines in the sky as she dances with her partner in an ethereal, heart-wrenching pas de deux. Men in intricately embroidered jackets tap out a percussive and precise zapateado. Women in brightly colored skirts move together with force, muskets in hand. Ballet Nepantla’s “Valentina,” which was presented in an abridged version on July 13 at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival’s Henry J. Leir Outdoor...
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In a season dominated by old standbys, Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet” stands out as one of American Ballet Theatre’s most evergreen. The production fits the company like an old glove, perhaps not as sleek as it once was, but still handsome and well made. The pas de deux—around which the ballet is built—have ingrained themselves in the audience’s collective consciousness. Everyone knows what comes next. Their steps melt into waves, that is, until the moments in which Romeo holds Juliet aloft, or the two dancers face each other in total stillness, barely touching. As if on cue, the audience...
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Big leaps, big smiles, big energy—Carlos Acosta’s new “Don Quixote” for Birmingham Royal Ballet does its darndest to capture the larger-than-life spirit of Petipa’s nineteenth-century classic. There are glittering costumes, merry character dances, silk fans swizzling, flamenco-style. There’s no runaway windmill, like in the 2013 version Acosta mounted for the Royal Ballet, but Tim Hatley’s starburst stage design sports its own wow factors, including a luscious velveteen colour palette.
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A healthy-sized crowd swarmed ODC Theater’s lobby for SFDanceworks’ closing matinee in the Mission District, and word from the box office was that attendance the previous nights had been robust. This was happy news for San Francisco dance fans who appreciate a Nederlands Dans Theater-esque aesthetic: sleek, spine-roiling movement, virtuosic in balletic ways yet weighted, often set to contemporary music with a tinge of the ominous and intellectual.
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The Metropolitan Opera stage, awash in harsh lights and a roughly patterned backdrop, almost felt industrial when the curtain rose on Alonzo King’s “Single Eye.” But as dancers appeared in pale aqua velvet leotards, the stage softened. Then, it began to feel more vulnerable and intimate, as principal dancers Christine Shevchenko and Thomas Forster performed a pas de deux full of gorgeously fluid movements between geometrical positions.
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A ballet as famed and often performed as “Swan Lake” comes with both high expectations and the risk of losing its lustre, making it both a rite of passage and a continuing challenge for dancers at all points of their careers. Audiences were able to see both in action in American Ballet Theatre’s recent 12-show run of “Swan Lake,” where dancers both debuted and revisited the iconic roles of Odette/Odile and Prince Siegfried.
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For years Amar Ramasar was one of the most popular dancers at NYCB, admired for his joyful stage presence and exuberant dancing. He always seemed to be having more fun onstage than anyone, whether he was dancing Phlegmatic in “The Four Temperaments” or the “rhumba sailor” in “Fancy Free.” Choreographers like Justin Peck, Christopher Wheeldon, and Alexei Ratmansky were drawn to him. And colleagues like Sara Mearns and Peck involved him in outside projects like “A Dancer’s Dream,” with the New York Philharmonic, and “Carousel,” on Broadway.
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Sometimes a work of art can be compelling for its strict adherence to the rules of a given form, for the comfort and beauty that can be found in a virtuosity we already know how to gauge. Classical ballet is rife with examples of this sort. Other times, a spirit of rebellion or failure to conform can provide a kind of satisfying spaciousness—an atmosphere in which we are dazzled not just by what our eyes are seeing but by what we might imagine going forward. On Thursday, June 30th, 2022, at the Joyce Theater, Christopher Williams Dances had moments of...
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Returning to Dancehouse’s Sylvia Staehli Theatre for Week Two of the Keir Choreographic Award, let us begin at the end. In a live cross to Carriageworks, Sydney, the 2022 KCA international jury, Daniel Riley (Wiradjuri/Australia), Eko Supriyanto (Indonesia), Laurie Uprichard (Ireland), Lemi Ponifasio (Aotearoa/New Zealand), and Nanako Nakajima (Japan), awards the $50,000 Keir Choreographic Award to Tra Mi Dinh for her questioning of what really is an ending in her work “The ___”.
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Born in 1985 in Leverkusen, Philippe Kratz first encountered dance with the German Tanztheater through pedagogue and choreographer Suheyla Ferwer. He then studied classical ballet at the École Supérieure de Dance du Québec in Montréal and at the Staatliche Ballettschule in Berlin. As a former long-time company member of Italian Aterballetto, he has worked with numerous international dance makers before deciding to deepen his understanding of, and artisanship in, choreography. In 2018 he created and danced “O,” which won Hanover’s choreography competition, as well as a residency with the Australian Dance Theatre. His work often focuses on resilience and its myriad...
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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