World-class review of ballet and dance.
The Telstra Ballet Dancer Award is an annual competition that recognises rising talent within the Australian Ballet. Each year, a handful of nominees have the chance to win the Rising Star, or People's Choice Award, accolades respectively accompanied by a purse of $25,000 and $15,000. Telstra has been a longtime partner of the Australian Ballet and has sponsored the award for two decades, seeing many a prizewinner and nominee rise to principal rank.
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Tennessee Williams' most spiky love triangle, the ultimate study in late 1940s Southern American melodrama, is an interesting piece to adapt in the twenty-first century. Tackling issues around abuse, class and consent would undoubtedly be a challenge for any dance company. To that end, Scottish Ballet brought in an intimacy coach—ensuring all of the dancers feel comfortable, dealing with portraying the darker themes of sexual violence, addiction, suicide and domestic violence.
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Hovering over her on all fours, the man looks into the woman as if he's caught his own reflection. Cradled on the floor, she has nestled her feet into his chest. Slowly, without breaking eye contact, the man begins an ascension to standing. The woman extends her legs, and it looks like he is floating, drawn upward by some mystery in the clouds. This striking scene comes from emerging choreographer Annie Rigney's “Galithea,” which was selected for presentation at the Joyce Theater in 2021 as part of the 92NY Harkness Dance Center's Future Dance Festival.
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How many ways to think about “Sleeping Beauty”? In the first written Italian and French versions, the plots outline the fate of a young girl as the object of family jealousy, trickery and, after being drugged asleep, ravishment. By the mid-19th century, the Brothers Grimm toned down the storyline, romanticized and adapted it as a story fit for children. Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Tchaikovsky, and Marius Petipa’s 1890 landmark ballet further refashioned it. But another few generations of scholarly research recognized the darker undertones and representations of girls in the fairy tale tradition. Apart from handsome swains or huntsmen who save damsels like...
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In a world in the midst of war, emerging from its post-pandemic slumber, themes and acts of unity, contact and harmony are more than welcome. The differences that make us human are also, dichotomously, the magic that brings us closer together. The subtle nuances of language, the freckles on your skin, the color and glorious hues of your eyes, the food you eat and the mannerisms and peculiarities that identify you as you, are the uncompromising glue that holds us together.
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It’s a bit shocking to see un-ironically religious art onstage in our age, and all the more so as Lent turns a corner toward Holy Week. The world premiere of Jessica Lang’s “Let Me Mingle Tears with Thee” at Pacific Northwest Ballet was not timed to the church calendar, though. Lang has been working with Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater,” from 1736, for at least a decade, with ever deepening responsiveness. Her latest visual manifestation of this score for harpsichord, strings, and two voices capped a winner of a mixed bill that also unveiled a world premiere by Alejandro Cerrudo, in a...
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San Francisco Ballet is riding high this season, cruising onward from a new works festival that yielded some real keepers; a “Giselle” freshly energized by new artistic director Tamara Rojo’s coaching; and a mixed bill that scored a hit with the stage premiere of Myles Thatcher’s youthful “Colorforms.” Recently retired artistic director Helgi Tomasson handled all this programming before he stepped down, and it was surely smart of him, box-office-wise, to schedule Christopher Wheeldon’s family friendly “Cinderella” to coincide with spring break. A packed Wednesday night house was clearly delighted by the whole spectacle. I regret, then, to confess an...
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The style Kyle Abraham has honed over the years is unmistakable: a silken coordination of the body in which ripples and undulations pass through skin and sinew; an expressive use of the back; hands that touch, and really feel; impulses that start here but find their way there, and then there; a deep sensitivity to music coupled with an intelligent response to lyrics; a penchant for melancholy, leavened with sass. Abraham has a way of revealing his dancers to us without depriving them of mystery or coolness; he builds an atmosphere of intimacy, but something is held in reserve.
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“It’s amazing!” she gushed. “I’m loving every minute. It’s been busy, exciting and there’s a lot of momentum.”
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The good news is that companies are touring again. It seems like an age since New York received regular visits from large troupes from Europe and Russia. Seeing the National Ballet of Canada at City Center this weekend, back in the city for its first visit since 2016, brought home just how much the world has changed, and not for the better, in the last few years, through a global pandemic and, now, a shattering war that has divided the world into two camps.
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On one of the first warm days of late March, Fifth Avenue pedestrian traffic was teeming outside the Guggenheim, ubiquitous Mister Softee truck idling at the curb. Down the avenue, people posed for photos on the steps outside the Met and Central Park resembled the Seurat painting that inspired “Sunday in the Park with George,” while a crowd of some two hundred seventy dance lovers found their way down a ramp to the Guggenheim’s circular theater to sit in the dark for one of two sold out presentations on Bronislava Nijinska’s ballet from 1923, “Les Noces,” presented by Works &...
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I’ve long been preoccupied with the blurry boundary between arts and sports. To my mind, the Rose Adagio balances in “Sleeping Beauty” and Odile’s 32 fouettés in “Swan Lake” are akin to the triple axels in figure skating competitions. It was fitting, then, that Ailey II’s New York Season, which opened last week at the Ailey Citigroup Theater, fell during March Madness. As anyone with a busted bracket knows—and that’s most people this year—stats and seeds can amount to nothing in that wild window that is a live performance. Oddly enough, most young dancers get very little performance experience until...
PlusLong 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.
PlusIt 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.
PlusAs 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.
PlusOne 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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