World-class review of ballet and dance.
Remember me. Remember me. The comfort that floats behind the heartache of Henry Purcell’s Lament from “Dido and Aeneas,” When I am laid in the earth: remember me. Be now, in the present, remember me. So begins “Kunstkamer,” originally commissioned in 2019 for the 60th anniversary of Netherlands Dans Theater, and presented for the first time outside of the Netherlands by the Australian Ballet.
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I have often wondered why few troupes revive the classic story ballets the way Orson Welles restaged Shakespeare—as when he boldly set “Macbeth” in Haiti, or when he put an anti-fascist spin on “Julius Caesar” right on the cusp of WWII. The answer probably lies in funding difficulties: ballet is a hard enough sell that people don’t like to mess with the sacred cash cows. Against the odds, the English National Ballet’s 2016 production of “Giselle,” which had its NY premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, dares to be timely. Of all the narrative stalwarts, “Giselle”—which depicts...
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It’s been three years since American Ballet Theatre last stepped onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, three years since it rolled out its well-worn productions of evening-length story ballets. The Met season is a kind of hit parade, and the current run is no different: It begins with the festive pseudo-Spanish extravaganza “Don Quixote” and ends with Kenneth MacMillan’s tear-jerker “Romeo and Juliet.” With, in the middle, no less than twelve performances of “Swan Lake.” The exceptions to this succession of super-familiar works are Ratmansky’s new “Of Love and Rage,” which opens next week, and a mixed bill...
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On June 16th, San Francisco’s Margaret Jenkins Dance Company will premiere perhaps its most ambitious work yet, “Global Moves.” An indoor/outdoor site-specific work moving between more than a dozen “stations” at the Presidio Theater, with its view across the Presidio National Park, “Global Moves” extends its horizons far beyond the Pacific Ocean. For nearly two years, Jenkins has been working with India’s Tanusree Shankar Dance Company, China’s Cross Move Lab, and dancers emeritus from Israel’s Kolben Dance Company. She has collaborated with these dancers separately since 2006, but this is the first work to draw the creators from all four...
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It’s hard to explain the School of American Ballet’s annual Workshop performances to outsiders. Workshop is a year-end ballet recital, but when the students’ families gather in the lobby afterwards to shower their children with flowers and tell them that they were wonderful—and just like real ballerinas—they are speaking the truth. This year, the advanced levels at SAB danced the Fourth Movement and Finale from George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” a feat that many professional companies cannot pull off. It is a technically demanding piece that requires at least forty bodies, including twelve men who can do triple pirouettes. Many...
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Dana Mills is an activist and political theorist who has written extensively on dance, history, and politics. Her first book from 2016, Dance and Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries, examines a range of historical dances within their political contexts. Her new book, Dance and Activism: A Century of Radical Dance, which was published in January of this year by Bloomsbury Press, further explores the role of dance in social justice.
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In the chaotic, dirty heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, in a fuchsia building that once housed a porn palace, stands a venue named CounterPulse. I’m always curious what’s going on at CounterPulse because the place seems to welcome subversion with an edge of sexiness, because it prioritizes racial equity in a way that goes way beyond lip service, and because you never know when you’re going to discover something mind-blowing there. That all proved true again in early June, when I was lured to the culminating performances of CounterPulse’s ARC Edge residency by Audrey Johnson, a beguiling dancer in...
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To watch Paul Michael Henry dance is to experience something that exists in a liminal space. He creates primordial work which is nonetheless rooted in the issues of our time. So it is with “Shrimp Dance,” a unique, mesmerising piece which interrogates the depletion of the shrimp population and the wider implications for our ecosystem, using Butoh performance, live music and multimedia.
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Pina Bausch’s penultimate work, “Sweet Mambo” premiered in 2008, following its counterpart “Bamboo Blues.” The two pieces were created in an attempt to explore how a single starting point—identical set design—could lead to two distinct pieces, developed by two different casts. “Sweet Mambo” was recently reconstructed by Alan Lucien Øyen, and performed in Wuppertal by the original cast, with the exception of Naomi Brito, company member since 2020/21, who danced the role originated by Regina Advento.
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From the moment Doug Varone’s “Somewhere” opens on the figure of Hollis Bartlett leaning into a lateral arabesque, and we hear the sound of a certain unmistakable finger snapping, it’s clear that the GPS for this particular somewhere is the misty pre-dawn of an empty NYC tenement street in Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story.” During a week that celebrated 35 years of performance, Doug Varone and Dancers presented a program of four works that map the evolution of a master story teller.
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Born in Buenos Aires, Gaston Core is a choreographer, theatre-maker, curator and director. Trained as a performer in his native Argentina, Core moved to Barcelona in 2001 where he continued his work as a director and theatre-maker. In 2012, Core became the director of the experimental theatre space, the Sala Hiroshima Project. There he focused on the production and exhibition of the most innovative trends in the international contemporary performing arts scene. His choreographic work, “The Very Last Northern White Rhino,” the first in a trilogy, recently toured in Europe. Veronica Posth spoke with Gaston Core about collaboration, creating for stage, and...
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When Trisha Brown's “Foray Forêt” begins, dancers look like shadows against a purple backdrop until the stage fades in to light. We see intricate, gentle, movements: slight inclines of the head, swinging arms, brief transfers of weight between the group. They are done with great precision, sometimes independently and sometimes remarkably synchronized. “Foray Forêt” was choreographed in 1990, and Brown said she was trying to tap into her subconscious to create simplified, intimate gestures. It was one collaboration of many with Brown's good friend and creative partner Robert Rauschenberg (he did the visual design and the costumes) and was recently...
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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