World-class review of ballet and dance.
It was a joyous return to the stage after a long, hard 23-month slog through a global pandemic, and it was only fitting that the Brooklyn-based Ronald K. Brown/Evidence opened the CAP UCLA season at Royce Hall on Saturday night. The losses have been—and continue to be—profound, now including the many dead from Russia’s despicable war on Ukraine, making the performance a powerful and healing statement in the name of art.
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In this moment of intense human suffering, I find that my reaction to art and beauty is complicated by conflicting emotions. The need for beauty and connection is strong, but so is the mental refusal of anything that rings false or comes across as too easy. When human frailty is so glaringly present, art that reflects that frailty becomes all the more precious.
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As jazz music was evolving in the early 20th century, people were moved by it and moved to it. Early jazz dances like the Charleston and the Lindy Hop emerged as a response to swing music and, like their musical counterpart, celebrated energetic improvisation using vocabulary rooted in West African and African American aesthetics. In the 1940s, the music took a sharp new turn: the art form moved into the era of bebop, the modern, virtuosic and up-tempo style that critics complained “you can't dance to.” While bebop musicians cleverly retorted that maybe “you can't dance to it,” the critics...
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Sasha Riva and Simone Repele, Italian dancers with parallel careers with Hamburg Ballett and Geneva Ballet, now a choreographic duo, chose the novel and the movie The Danish Girl as a subject for their new work: “Lili Elbe Show.” After a preview last summer in Montepulciano (a beautiful village in Tuscany), the piece for five dancers, with revised choreography, staging and with new costumes by Francesco Murano, premiered in February in Rovereto and Trento, headlining inDanza.22. As explained by the choreographers themselves, it was not easy to approach such a story, but they believe that this is the right moment...
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The sole is stamped with the maker’s mark, the size, and the width of the shoe. The sole is attached to the last with a staple gun, then using the relevant sized upper, the shoe is pulled over the last, the toe is pinned, and the upper is stapled to the seat of the last. This is followed by a combination of paste, hessians and cards to build up the block, depending upon the dancer’s specifications. This is how Freed of London make their bespoke pointe shoes, and this behind-the-scenes process is how Prue Lang’s “Castillo” begins.
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Sara Mearns has never been afraid of hanging up her pointe shoes for the night: In recent years, she’s thrived in the work of Merce Cunningham, Jodi Melnick, Isadora Duncan, Honji Wang, Martha Graham and others. But Mearns’ latest project, a weeklong engagement at New York City’s Joyce Theater, will be a new test of her capacity to work outside of what she calls “the ballerina bubble.”
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On Tuesday evening February 22, 2022, Israeli dance ensemble L-E-V brought “Chapter 3: The Brutal Journey of the Heart” to the dance-obsessed audiences of New York’s the Joyce Theater. Founded by co-artistic directors Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, L-E-V traces a lineage from Batsheva Dance Company, where Eyal was both a dancer and later associate artistic director and house choreographer, and Tel Aviv nightlife, where Behar has been both a party producer and curator. “Chapter 3” held both of these influences in close proximity while also showcasing very talented dancers in Eyal’s ultra-specific, dance language.
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On February 27th, at a matinee performance, New York City Ballet’s Gonzalo García retired after fifteen years at the company, following ten at San Francisco Ballet. He’s 42—a respectable retirement age for a dancer, and he surely has his share of aches and pains. His retirement comes just as three young men in the company have been promoted to principal status. A wave of change has arrived at City Ballet.
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As we blink from the stupor of the near-hibernation of New Year and slowly come around to (supposedly) changing seasons, Northern Ballet have provided some incredible work on film to watch as storms batter the United Kingdom. Here is a round up of some of the most interesting ones to catch online. The artistry is superb, inventive and all have completely distinct visions in their ouevre.
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Principal dancer Teresa Reichlen bade the New York City Ballet adieu last weekend after 22 years. She had been slated to retire with Peter Martins’s full-length “Swan Lake,” but thanks to the Omicron variant of Covid she had to settle for Balanchine’s one-act “Swan Lake” instead. At 37 years old, she did not exactly retire young. But physically, her departure seemed premature. The fact that she was planning to dance the full-length “SL” speaks for itself. Most principals exit long past their ability to get through that gauntlet. But Reichlen was always something of an outlier.
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When Jacques Heim, who founded DIAVOLO | Architecture in Motion™, in Los Angeles in 1992, he married his abiding love for dance with his passion for architecture. In the process, Diavolo became one of L.A.’s pre-eminent dance companies, one that also toured internationally for some two decades. But the global pandemic changed the ways in which all choreographers, dancers, artistic directors and presenters thought about dance, and Heim, born in Paris in 1964, was no exception.
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“There is only the dance” T.S. Eliot wrote in 1936 in “Burnt Norton,” the first poem in his seminal late work, Four Quartets. Yet there has only been an actual dance set to this quartet since 2018, when choreographer Pam Tanowitz became the first person granted permission by the Eliot estate to choreograph to the text. The resulting work had its NYC premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week. The Four Quartets really speak to dance lovers, as was evidenced by the large crowd of balletomanes at BAM. (I confess they among my favorite poems.) Dramaturge Gideon Lester...
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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