World-class review of ballet and dance.
What is the friction between words and movement? What does one give us that the other doesn’t? If there is an intelligence in movement and physicality that cannot be expressed through words, do we look down on that intelligence?
Continua a leggere
Many choreographers today are looking for ways to engage the audience beyond the stage. Site-specific work and film are just some of the ways dance artists are keeping their work both fresh and lasting. Glance from the Edge is an international collaboration between Bulgarian co-directors and choreographers Kosta Karakashyan and Stephanie Handjiiska, American director of photography Kevin Chiu and composer Jude Icarus. After wrapping the principal photography, the team sat down to debrief together about the inspiration, process and goals for the project.
Continua a leggere
John Lam, principal dancer of Boston Ballet, and director Shaun Clarke collaborated on the dance film, Movement in Structure, which premiered in Boston in March 2019. Set to music by Lucas Vidal, and filmed at the Cyclorama at the Boston Center for the Arts, Movement in Structure calls attention to our physical relationship with space. In the interview below, John Lam discusses his artistic and personal motivations for creating dance on film.
Continua a leggere
Xin Ying, principal dancer of Martha Graham Dance Company, has been making improvised dances wherever her work takes her. The simply framed videos quickly became a highlight of Instagram. Often set in tourist hubs, busy streets and danced to ambient sound, her swift, modern movement strikes a contrast with the pedestrian setting. Originally from China, Ying moved to New York almost a decade ago to pursue her dream of becoming a modern dancer.
Continua a leggere
Edifice Dance Theatre’s new dance film Salomé uses a hybrid ballroom and contact improvisation vocabulary to explore a wide range of human emotions. The company, in collaboration with director Rogério Silva, take Oscar Wilde’s version of the mythical Salomé, the young seductress who requests and is granted Jokanaan’s head on a silver platter, and offer a haunting dance film adaptation featuring sinuous partnering and Silva’s trademark camera work.
Continua a leggere
“Skeleton Song,” by UK-based singer and composer Ana Silvera, is the second song from her BASCA-nominated song-cycle Oracles, released by Gearbox records. Written following an intense period of grief, Oracles was Silvera’s way to transmute her emotions into a cathartic work of art: “I wrote Oracles in a state of absolute urgency and emergency—it felt like I had been buried in the ground myself, and writing this music was a small pocket of air, my chance to breathe again,” Silvera notes. The dance film/video clip was a unique collaboration between Kate Church (dancer, director, choreography) and Alice Williamson (co-direction, costume and choreography), shot by DOP...
Continua a leggere
In a hot spring in the Netherlands, steam rising from the water, a man begins to dance. It’s night, and the sky and water are dark. The man, rugged and fortyish, swims towards the filmmaker recording him on a mobile phone. The man unfolds his arms in mock-grace, spinning with arms raised above him in a rounded fifth position. Swimmers shout over the warm roar of the waves. Muffled classical music plays from what sounds like a gramophone. The man spins and springs out of the water belly-first—a hairy, barrel-chested merman surfacing from the sea.
Continua a leggere
In the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale The Red Shoes, a young girl is given an auspicious gift: a pair of slippers, stitched with a curse. Once she slips on the red shoes, she can’t stop dancing. The shoes carry her out into the dark forest, and into an open grave. In the fairytale, she is doomed to dance until a kind executioner cuts off her feet. In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 film by the same name, the young dancer (Moira Shearer) throws herself from an open window.
Continua a leggere
There's something about the formalisms of the ballet world that gives one an almost racy feeling when its backstage doors open up. One of the great strengths of Ballet 422, directed by Jody Lee Lipes and produced by Ellen Bar (the latter a former soloist with NYCB; the two are married): all that takes place backstage remains unadorned. There are no back-stories, no interviews, and we're left not knowing the names of some of the dancers. Then again, ballet is about "showing and not telling," Bar told me over the phone. A dance doesn't come with footnotes or appendixes attached;...
Continua a leggere
“I didn’t make this film to figure out my relationship to my mother. I did it because I wanted her to know when she left this world that what she had done in her life would not just disintegrate and disappear. I also promised my mother before she died,” explained Maria Ramas, daughter of ballerina/teacher, Mia Slavenska, “that I would complete the process that she had started. Telling her story would be a coherent record and her view of her art.”
Continua a leggere
I can still recall the intrigue I experienced when a trailer I saw at the cinema last autumn turned out to be an advertisement for a live screening of the Royal Ballet’s “The Nutcracker.” The prospect of attending the beloved Christmas production remotely—that is, viewing it from seats other than the velvety crimson ones of the Royal Opera House—was, and is, a fascinating compromise indeed. Unlike TV relays or DVD viewings, customary alternatives for catching the troupe's performances, a live screening has the distinct selling point of preserving, in real time no less, the crucial “out” portion of a night...
Continua a leggere
Long 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.
Continua a leggereIt 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.
Continua a leggere
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.
Continua a leggereAs 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.
Continua a leggereOne 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.
Continua a leggere