New School
San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House is a grand, gracious theater, so it was a big deal to see the San Francisco Ballet School hold its end-of-year performances in that hall for the first time since at least 1985.
Continua a leggereWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
SFDanceworks performs only a short run once a year, but it fills a big void in San Francisco. Unlike Chicago or New York, we in the Bay Area have no Hubbard Street, no Gibney Company or Cedar Lake (RIP) to offer works by Ohad Naharin or Alejandro Cerrudo or other internationalist contemporary dance makers. When it comes to avant-gardism, our local behemoth, San Francisco Ballet, serves only an occasional dash of what you might call the Nederlands Dans Theater or NDT-adjacent aesthetic. (Though this is poised to change next year, with a commission from Aszure Barton on SF Ballet’s horizon.) Enter SFDanceworks. Founded in 2016 by former SF Ballet soloist James Sofranko, a Juilliard grad, the company is driven by its dancers’ hunger for exploration. And that hunger was evident throughout the company’s sixth summer season.
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San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House is a grand, gracious theater, so it was a big deal to see the San Francisco Ballet School hold its end-of-year performances in that hall for the first time since at least 1985.
Continua a leggereAt its heart, “Sylvia” is a ballet about the resistance to love—a theme that continues to resonate deeply, as the human spirit often recoils from love, driven by fear, pride, a need for control, or the weight of duties and moral constraints.
Continua a leggereSince the 1970s, the Paris Opera Ballet has cultivated a distinctive tradition of nurturing its own dancers as emerging choreographers.
Continua a leggereIn John Cranko’s world, “if ballet only consisted of dance steps, it wouldn’t be worth dedicating your whole life to it,” and this sense of devotion is at the heart of Joachim A. Lang’s German-language film, John Cranko (2024).
Continua a leggere
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