Greek Myth or Graham Myth?
The Martha Graham Dance Company performed two of its Greek myth-themed works at Philadelphia’s Suzanne Roberts Theatre over the weekend.
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Ragamala Dances an Epic for Our Time
The Ragamala Dance Company returned to New York’s Joyce Theater with a visual feast for the eyes and stimulating food for thought with their new production “Children of Dharma.”
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An Inventive Nutcracker
For me, an undeniable highlight of Christmas 2024 was watching Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl with my family.
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Notes for the New Year
My favorite books of 2024 offer dance history from the artist’s point of view. Perhaps there is nothing too unusual about this, and yet, something about this trend feels special as we step with trepidation into the first days of 2025.
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High Hopes
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s annual December residency at City Center featured four world premieres. I caught two: Hope Boykin’s “Finding Free” and Lar Lubovitch’s “Many Angels.”
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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.
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A Bug Menagerie
The 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.
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Hard (Nut) Facts
I 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.
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Other Delights
Last week, during the first Fjord Review Dance Critics’ Festival, Mindy Aloff discussed and read from an Edwin Denby essay during “The Critic’s Process” panel.
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A Sweet Nutcracker
There are “Nutcrackers,” and then there’s American Contemporary Ballet’s “The Nutcracker Suite.”
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The Other Side
Is it as traditional as there being “The Nutcracker” or the British pantomime on at Christmas time, for there to be an alternative offering?
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Song and Dance
To paraphrase that great song from “A Chorus Line,” the Los Angeles-based BodyTraffic gave a concert that might best be summed up as, “Dancers 10, Choreographers, well, 3.”
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Teenage Angst and Institutions
Watching 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,...
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The Me of Today
The 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.
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America, F**K Yeah
After 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.
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Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup
An “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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