World-class review of ballet and dance.
In this era, when we think of dance and the body, we often overlook the material accoutrements and technologies that support and enhance performance. Fortunately, there are many dancers, choreographers, companies and performers who explore the body and its ‘mechanical’ extensions.
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It's being mooted that Tokyo, and Japan as a whole, escaped the full brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic and its catastrophic effect on the world's population and global economy. The number of cases is relatively low when compared to Europe and the US, and the number of deaths or serious cases decreasing daily. When Yuriko Koike, Governor of Tokyo, introduced a lockdown in the spring of 2020 the city became a wasteland for a few months with most people working from home and bars, restaurants and retail stores either closed, operating on limited opening hours or completely empty.
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On September 10th, the Bolshoi Theater opened its 245th ballet season with a surprising premiere. “Four Characters in Search of a Plot” ("Четыре персонажа в поисках сюжета") featured four young international choreographers, making their debut with Russia’s esteemed ballet troupe. Commissioned were an hour-long piece,“The Ninth Wave” by Bryan Arias (Puerto Rico) and three 15-minute works, “Just” by Simone Valastro (Italy), “Fading” by Dimo Milev (Bulgaria) and “Silentium” by Martin Chaix (France).
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Despite what the world is suffering this year, two of Europe’s most prestigious international summer dance festivals commit to go forward with drastically truncated, yet vital and imaginative programs. Berlin’s Tanz im August, under the artistic direction of Virve Sutinen, and the Venice Biennale’s Festival Danza under Marie Chouinard’s curatorial leadership will open in late August and mid-October respectively. Each artistic director spoke with me via Skype and Zoom recently about the hardships and angst of redesigning their festivals during this brutal pandemic. This month, we feature Tanz im August and how they pivoted from cancellation to a ten-day online...
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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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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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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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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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Who knew that the performance of American Ballet Theatre's world premiere, “Of Love and Rage,” that I was privileged to see at Segerstrom Center for the Arts on March 5 would be the last live dance concert I would share with some 3,000 thrilled theater-goers. Yes, that’s a rhetorical question, but since the world irrevocably changed in a matter of weeks because of Covid-19, the novel coronavirus, all dance troupes, performing arts organizations and any place people gather—whether for culture, entertainment, dining, drinking and/or to experience nature—have effectively shut down.
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The ink is barely dry on year-end top ten lists, yet the first months of the new year bring no respite from heady contest. In sports (the Super Bowl), cinema (the Golden Globes through the Oscars), and politics (the primaries), winter in America is rife with competition. Why should the ballet world be any different? In the span of roughly a month, NYC dancegoers had to choose between three major productions of that classic synecdochical of the art form: “Swan Lake.” Actually, there were four—but in this review I won’t cover the St. Petersburg Ballet Theater’s two shows at BAM....
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On a Wednesday afternoon in Toronto, I watched two former dancers, husband-wife duo Alisia Pobega and Louis-Martin Charest, work alongside a group of serious sixteen- and seventeen-year-old ballet dancers from Canada’s National Ballet School. Pobega crouches in one corner of the studio with half of the students rallied around her, speaking in low tones. Charest is on the opposite side of the room with his back to the mirrors, his dark hair barely perceptible above a crowd of ballet bodies clothed in leotards, loose t-shirts, and sweatpants. He draws the students in closer. They lean towards him, straining to hear....
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The Joyce Theater presented two festive tap shows this December: Dormeshia’s soulful “And Still You Must Swing” as well as a three-week residency by Dorrance Dance—featuring the premiere of a tap “Nutcracker Suite” to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s funky arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s ubiquitous holiday score. Dorrance’s programming changes weekly, but each show closes with the new “Nutcracker.” This comes to 21 performances, far more than most regional ballet companies and even American Ballet Theatre (with 12). Could a tap company loosen ballet’s yearly stranglehold on this Christmas classic?
Continua a leggereWatching 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,...
Continua a leggereThe 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.
Continua a leggereAfter 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.
Continua a leggereAn “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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