Turbulent and Extraordinary
The late Alvin Ailey famously set his sights on creating “the kind of dance that could be done for the man on the streets, the people.”
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Contrasting Paths
Few dance companies would dare to put such disparate pieces together. But such is the audacious, experimental spirit of Scottish Ballet.
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Moving Mountains
Batsheva Dance Company, under the artistic direction of Ohad Naharin, who led the troupe from 1990 until 2019 (he’s currently House Choreographer), has been an incubator for dancemaking talent. While the names Danielle Agami, Sharon Eyal, and Hofesh Shechter may come to mind, add to that list Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, who met while members of Batsheva, where they fell in love and subsequently married in 2018.
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The Me of Today
The 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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Border Crossings
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ current exhibition is a dance epic. Full of tragedy and triumph spanning centuries and the globe, “Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance 1900 – 1955” recenters the story of modern dance around historically marginalized artists often left out of the modern dance canon.
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Soul Train
Ah, to be a mere dance writer reviewing a world premiere musical with Broadway aspirations! The sheer luxury of letting myriad small problems of dramaturgy and pacing roll right by as you wait in the midst of a pumped-up, dressed-to-the-nines, celebrity-studded audience for the next ensemble dance number that will bring the house down!
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Bringing dance history to life
For novelists Eliza Knight, Barbara Quick, and Cathy Marie Buchanan, historical fiction became a window into these subtleties, allowing them to use both research and imagination to depict some of the dance world’s most iconic figures.
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Edinburgh Festival Fringe
This year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe recorded its fifth highest attendance in its history, a different reality from the ghostly years of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Real Time
In the Upstairs Studio at Dancehouse, Rosalind Crisp hands me a small card which invites me to “Please sit where you want and move wherever you want.” She motions to the small light fixture on the wall, should I need it, to illuminate the printed text.
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High Flyers
The porous borders of Rafael Bonachela’s “I Am-Ness,” Marina Mascarell’s “The Shell, A Ghost, The Host & The Lyrebird,” and Antony Hamilton’s “Forever & Ever,” when viewed as a collective, make a visionary trance, as Sydney Dance Company’s triple bill “Ascent” inhabits the stage at the Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne.
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A Day at the Beach
What could be better than a performance of Merce Cunningham’s “Beach Birds” on the actual beach? On a rainy Saturday in late August, the clouds parted in time for a committed crowd of dance lovers to make way by subway and ferry to Rockaway Beach, and gather at Beach Street 108, where a band of confident dancers marched across the sand to perch themselves on the rocks of the jetty.
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Firebird Rising
Long 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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Rare Birds
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.
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The Spring is Blooming festival, by Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, now in its fifth year, has become a highlight of the spring dance circuit.
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Jack of Hearts
As the audience come to their feet at the end of this ballet there is a noted difference to be seen on stage. Three women stand with joined hands, taking their call as the romantic leads of a loud and proud lesbian ballet.
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School Report
One of San Francisco Ballet’s greatest assets is its home venue, the Beaux-Arts style War Memorial Opera House, with four rings of seating that require performers to project their energies practically to the exosphere.
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