World-class review of ballet and dance.
This may be the Chinese year of the dog, but in music, 2018 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein, the conductor, composer, pianist, lecturer, broadcaster and writer who died at age 72 in 1990. In politics, Hollywood and in some concert halls, this year is also shaping up to be the year of the woman, with marches, protests and the #MeToo movement still going strong, and the rise of the female conductor becoming, er, somewhat more apparent.
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English National Ballet has launched the New Year with two double bills anchored by August Bournonville’s beloved “La Sylphide.” Over the course of a two-week run, the Romantic staple—a flutter of forest sprites and lively Highlanders—is alternately paired with Kenneth Macmillan’s “Song of the Earth” and Roland Petit’s “Le Jeune Homme et la Mort,” both of which dedicate a principal role to Death.
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Has there ever been a sexier dance than the tango? From its origins in the 1880s in the River Plate, the border between Argentina and Uruguay, through the slums and bordellos to ballrooms—becoming a worldwide phenomenon during the Depression and extending far beyond the jazz era—its legacy still endures. It's simply a classic genre, because its romance, fire and passion are timeless.
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“What is dance now?” artistic director Helgi Tomasson asked in the middle of San Francisco Ballet’s gala, making a pitch for the massively ambitious Unbound Festival that will crown this company’s 85thseason with 12 world premieres by 12 international choreographers unveiled in four days. If we may recast Tomasson’s question a bit more specifically, to “What is ballet now?” this was a perfect question for the moment.
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In an essay, “Grandmother Spider,” writer Rebecca Solnit describes a painting by Ana Teresa Fernandez. The painting shows an image of a woman, hanging out laundry, entirely covered by the sheet she's pinning to the line; only visible her fingertips and below the ankle. She's wearing heels, “as if to go dancing,” Solnit suggests. I was reminded of the photograph Elena Lobsanova, principal dancer of the National Ballet of Canada, taken by Karolina Kuras, where Lobsanova is similarly concealed, and revealed by fabric; revealed in outline, as woman, as artist. Yet, this woman wears pointe shoes; she is dancing.
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Long before statistics and news, murder ballads were a staple of European folk songs and traveled here with immigrants. Dylan, Joan Baez and a lot of Appalachian singers sung them. One of the most famous in the 1950s was “Tom Dooley.” But I remember hearing somewhere along the way, “Oh, listen to my story, I'll tell you no lies, How John Lewis did murder poor little Omie Wise.” It’s the folktale of the early 19th Century murder of Naomi Wise. You can hear the tune and others deconstructed in Bryce Dessner’s original score, Murder Ballades, recorded by Eighth Blackbird. Resident...
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The late rock icon Jimi Hendrix would have approved: Cool “purple haze”—as well as hot crimsons and other miasmas of color emanating from Ligia Lewis’ tour de force work from 2016, “minor matter”—proved mind-altering both visually and viscerally. Programmed as part of the Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA, the dance won a 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Production and is the second part of Lewis’ trilogy, “Blue Red White.”
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Not often does a production flow so seamlessly that a viewer can legitimately forget that the scenes unfolding onstage are live, and not simply a three-dimensional animation playing for the hundredth perfect cycle. Yet in the case of Shanghai Dance Theatre’s balletic dance drama “Soaring Wings: Story of the Crested Ibis,” the audience is indeed swept away to this heightened level of fantasy, in thanks not only to its imaginative sets, lighting, and costuming, but through the joyous expressiveness of its performers as well.
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“It always wants something more of me,” Belinda McGuire said to me with a wry smile a few days before the opening of her solo performance, “Waltz Slaughterhouse Requiem.” Something true of dance, I thought, and perhaps especially true for solo work. McGuire's performance of her own choreography, a personal reflection, “Slaughterhouse/Requiem” was highly original and impressive, and is one of my highlights of the year in dance.
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Sturm und Drang—2017 saw the dance world roiling with it, both on and off the stage. Israel’s culture minister hit the headlines for refusing arts funding to performances involving nudity; Palestinian-Syrian refugee Ahmad Joudeh made a prominent debut with the Dutch National Ballet after fleeing death threats from Islamic State; discord boiled over in Moscow as Kirill Serebrennikov, the director of the Bolshoi’s long-awaited “Nureyev” was placed under house arrest on what many suspect are trumped-up charges intended to punish him for celebrating the life of a gay man on stage—a conspicuous challenge to Putin’s ban on so-called ‘homosexual propaganda.’...
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If ever there were a time when art was needed, this is it. The year that began—and continues to this day—with a Twitter-happy and some would say, deranged lunatic sitting in the Oval Office could only, at every twist and turn, benefit from the grace, beauty and power of art. That the #MeToo movement has also encompassed wide swaths of politics, Hollywood, journalism and yes—even the dance world—is both emboldening and sad.
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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