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Close to the Sun
Jake Mangakahia, soloist with the Australian Ballet, embodies the one who dared fly too near the sun in the award-winning dance film, Icarus. Inspired by the Greek myth, Icarus is the first film project from Australian multi-media arts group Lumyth. The film, which was released online on May 30, has been officially selected for the 2020 Phoenix Dance Film Festival. I spoke with Lumyth co-founders, Candice MacAllister and Sage Fuller, about the creation of Icarus.
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Stories from Soviet Ballet
St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater offers an exceptional online season during the time of Covid-19, streaming from its website, Mariinsky.TV, a wide selection of performances—ballets, operas, and classical music concerts—from its illustrious repertory, all impeccably recorded and presented.
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Edge of a Wild Sea
The next episode from Royal New Zealand Ballet’s “Live in Your Living Room” series diverges from their previous content. Up until now, the company has broadcast filmed productions such as “Romeo and Juliet,” or dress rehearsal recordings, “Cinderella” from their archives. This time, however, they decided to share something completely different. Instead of presenting a finished product—a performance with everything perfectly rehearsed and every detail finalised—RNZB chose to broadcast a documentary that focuses upon the rehearsal process. This episode shows how complicated and turbulent the creative process can be.
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A New Firebird
As the coronavirus pandemic brought live performances to a halt, many ballet companies around the world turned to online platforms to present their work and to engage with their audiences, bringing dance performances straight into our living rooms. In fact, these trying times created an unprecedented opportunity for people all over the world to enjoy a wealth of ballet productions, new and old, which the majority of viewers would never be able to see otherwise.
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Notes from Quarantine
Like everyone else in the world, I’ve been trying to stay healthy, yet also connected to my work and passions during this abysmal pandemic. It’s a conundrum: I’m a dance critic now, but there are no live dance shows to review. This problem is small beans, of course, in the grand scheme of things. People are dying. People are starving. Life as we knew it has been irrevocably altered. The truly brave and selfless work of all those deemed essential is both humbling and awe-inspiring; I cannot thank these people enough for their intrepid commitment to the human race. But...
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The River
For dancers, moving beyond our comfort zones—the places we know to be familiar and safe—often involve pushing the physical limits of the body, training to extremes to create a new normal. But sometimes going beyond comfort zones can also be an inward action, having the bravery to be vulnerable and let go, trusting the body to move towards its places of intuition and feeling. This is what the Dublin-based Flora Fauna Project has been encouraging everyday people from their community to do.
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Desert Island Dances
Hua Hsu wrote in March for the New Yorker a quarantine-inspired piece about the BBC radio show “Desert Island Discs.” The program, which began during World War II as “part of the BBC’s broader effort to make life during wartime slightly more bearable” as Hsu puts it, presents interviews with cultural icons from various fields who are each asked to prepare a list of eight tracks that they would bring with them were they to be stranded on a desert island. Hsu uses “Desert Island Discs” to further his own investigation of the role of music in our lives and...
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Violent Delights, Violent Ends
When it comes to restaging canonical works, the process is extraordinarily complex. A myriad of difficulties can emerge depending on how much or how little a new work differs from the original ballet. Every aspect of the restaging—from form to characterisation and plot—does not exist in isolation; the theatrical elements are irrevocably tied to and haunted by the canonical predecessor. How a choreographer, then, approaches a restaging is uniquely singular them and their creative practice.
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Will to Power
Benedicte Bemet is one of those dancers you never forget. From even the junior ranks, she has been a crowd favourite, combining technical prowess while radiating her sheer love of dance from the stage. Her trajectory to principal dancer at the Australian Ballet seemed guaranteed. However, it hasn’t been all smooth sailing.
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[Web]Site-Specific
The crowd is the first thing I notice in the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s 2016 performance of “Figure Eights” as part of a performance at Seattle Art Museum. The audience clusters behind the row of six dancers, who are all dressed in casual white shirts and loose, white pants. The audience claps and takes pictures, sits stage-side, heads in their hands, on their phones.
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Love is Not Blind
Memory is not linear. Have I told you this before? I saw this production of see Graeme Murphy’s “Romeo & Juliet,” filmed on Wednesday 21st September, 2011 at Arts Centre Melbourne with Orchestra Victoria, before I wrote my first piece for Fjord Review.
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Teenage Angst and Institutions
Watching 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,...
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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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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.
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America, F**K Yeah
After 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.
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Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup
An “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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