Best of the West
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” so began Charles Dickens’s masterpiece, A Tale of Two Cities.
FREE ARTICLEWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
Mystic, vibrant, violent, feminist—Akram Khan’s newest work is all this and more. The hour-long piece stars Khan himself alongside Ching-Ying Chien and Christine Joy Ritter, and takes its inspiration from Karthika Naïr’s 2015 collection of poems Until the Lions, a reinterpretation of the Mahabharata, the ancient Sanskrit epic. This postmodern narrative layering—in which mythology is reframed through a modern literary lens and then channeled through a prism of contemporary dance, itself informed, in this case, by kathak tradition—lends a rich complexity to the work, one that’s felt in many aspects, from the stratified music to the mosaic sequencing.
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Akram Khan and Ching-Ying Chien in “Until the Lions.” Photograph by Jean Louis Fernandez
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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” so began Charles Dickens’s masterpiece, A Tale of Two Cities.
FREE ARTICLEElphaba (Cynthia Erivo) steps down the steps, rests her hat on the floor and takes in the Ozdust Ballroom in Wicked. She elevates her arm, bringing her bent wrist to her temple.
Continua a leggereThe Sarasota Ballet does not do a “Nutcracker”—they leave that to their associate school. Instead, over the weekend, the company offered a triple bill of which just one ballet, Frederick Ashton’s winter-themed “Les Patineurs,” nodded at the season.
Continua a leggereI couldn’t stop thinking about hockey at the New York City Ballet’s “Nutcracker” this year, and not only because the stage appeared to be made of ice: there were a slew of spectacular falls one night I attended.
Continua a leggere
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