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Animals & Angels
REVIEWS | Par Faye Arthurs

Animals & Angels

“Animals & Angels,” the new pas de deux by #QueertheBallet founder Adriana Pierce, is so pretty and easygoing you almost forget how radical it is. The piece is under five minutes long and features two women, Cortney Taylor Key and Audrey Malek, wafting joyfully around an airy white loft. They beam affectionately at each other as Joy Oladokun sings the opening line of her song, “Animals & Angels:” “Would you like some coffee with a side of cream?” Suitably, Key has a on a cream-colored shirt with latte brown high-waisted pants, Malek sports the inverse. It’s all so pleasant and...

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Bangarra's SandSong
REVIEWS | Par Claudia Lawson

Bangarra's SandSong

Astoundingly impactful, Bangarra’s “SandSong: Stories from the Great Sandy Desert” is a work that needs to be seen by all Australians.

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Prelude to Anarchy
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | Par Lorna Irvine

Prelude to Anarchy

There is no genuflecting here. Joan Clevillé's new film for Scottish Dance Theatre, The Life and Times, is as close to the classic lush period cinema of Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman, with all of the integral anarchy, mischief and darkness as it's possible to create, without getting too controversial or explicit (neither director was a stranger to controversy, or well-crafted filth).

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Happy Days
INTERVIEWS | Par Valentina Bonelli

Happy Days

Alessandra Ferri celebrates her 40-year long career with a revival of “L’Heure Exquise,” which premiered at the Ravenna Festival, at Alighieri Theatre in June. Maurice Béjart first staged his own version of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days for Carla Fracci and Micha van Hoecke in 1998, and the performance is studded with references and full of memories, both personal and artistic, which the Italian étoile is enthusiastic to recall. This revival is also the occasion for Alessandra Ferri to bring back to life a lively character, Winnie, the last one in her gallery of beloved heroines: Juliet, Manon, Carmen, Blanche,...

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In the In-between
REVIEWS | Par Rachel Howard

In the In-between

The “Five Minute Call” proceeds a bit differently for this final offering in Pacific Northwest Ballet’s unprecedented digital season. In the pre-curtain video montage created by principal dancer Dylan Wald, we see the dancers pulling off false eyelashes and packing up—including sealing an era-defining face mask back inside a Tupperware container—then walking out of the dressing room to their post-performance lives. Except suddenly the footage runs in reverse. The eyelashes and costumes go back on, the dancers are back on the stage. Here we are in the heightened “already-but-not-yet” experience of our moment: We feel we are already past the...

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Rain Dances
REVIEWS | Par Faye Arthurs

Rain Dances

When I attended a performance at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park last summer, it was a picture-perfect day. Though I went during the thick of the Covid pandemic, a gentle breeze rustled the sunny fields framing the beautiful dancing and I could almost forget about the raging virus. This year, Mother Nature had other plans. My original ticket was for the Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend, which was correctly predicted to be a rainout, so I was encouraged to attend the same program on Saturday instead. The show went on, though it poured up until a few hours before and...

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A Life in Dance
BOOKSHELF | INTERVIEWS | Par Marina Harss

A Life in Dance

Gavin Larsen was a professional dancer for eighteen years, first with Pacific Northwest Ballet, then with Alberta Ballet and Suzanne Farrell Ballet, and finally and most significantly, for Oregon Ballet Theatre. She was never famous, but she had a good career, a career any dancer can be proud of. She has just written a memoir, Being a Ballerina, the Power and Perfection of a Dancing Life, published by the University Press of Florida. It is a quietly engrossing book, the reading of which feels like peeking through the keyhole into a life in dance. It is not a life to be...

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Vision of Change
INTERVIEWS | Par Josephine Minhinnett

Vision of Change

Toronto-based choreographer and dancemaker Esie Mensah says that she likes to “poke people with her art.” You’ll know what she means if you’ve seen any of her previous creations, such as A Revolution of Love, in which a crew of Black female dancers take over Fort York National Historic Site in celebratory Afro-fusion movement.

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Mixed Moments in Montreal
REVIEWS | Par Josephine Minhinnett

Mixed Moments in Montreal

It has been over a year since theatres closed due to Covid-19 and against my own logic, I am holding a ticket to see Canada’s first in-theatre dance program since the start of the pandemic: Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in “Echoes,” a 70-min mixed program of eight pieces, contemporary and classical, to include two new works by Canadian choreographers Hélène Blackburn and Andrew Skeels.

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Follow
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | Par Lorna Irvine

Follow

Part of thinking about dance is thinking about bodies, the space they inhabit and the intimacy involved in creation: this is surely as true for critics as makers. So it is with Jasmin Vardimon Company's enigmatic Canvas, which interrogates such themes. In the middle of the pandemic, we are all becoming increasingly mindful of the space we take up, how to not get in the way of others, and how to be sensitive and recalibrate where we walk, queue, run, and travel (if possible). Just a hand placed in the wrong way is dangerous, just invading someone else's path is...

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Take Me Somewhere
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | Par Lorna Irvine

Take Me Somewhere

The beloved festival of performance, provocation and boundary pushing, Take Me Somewhere, curated by artistic director LJ Findlay-Walsh, would of course have been a live experience at Glasgow's Tramway this May, but with the city still in lockdown, it is in a virtual format online for the first time. A real genre crusher, TMS proves dance and live art can mesh easily together, as evinced by so many of the artists that are programmed as part of this year's line-up. Two such artists are featured here, both with very different pieces captured and live streamed on film. It can often...

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A Rite of Spring for our Time
REVIEWS | Par Candice Thompson

A Rite of Spring for our Time

Andrea Schermoly’s Rite of Spring, a dance film created for Louisville Ballet and currently streaming until May 31st, opened to the sound of the wind blowing and an ominous sci-fi text reading: “Post apocalypse, a seeded band of humans struggle to survive on a frozen planet. Battling a viral plague, they await a sign of hope.”

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