Modern Mashup
Modern dance audiences should learn how to roar. Until then, companies must collaborate with indie rock stars if they want to take bows with fans on their feet screaming.
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Experiments in Time and Space
Eleanor Sikorski, Flora Wellesley Wesley and Stephanie McMann, the charming dancers behind the London-based trio Nora, routinely invite guest choreographers to create new work on them. The approach is useful for showcasing their versatility as performers, particularly their flair for theatre, but makes it difficult to identify stylistic through-lines in their rep. Previous pieces shown at the Lilian Baylis have been hugely disparate, their moods ranging from jovial to irreverent to tranquil. With its abstract, contemplative tenor, the troupe’s newest work, “Where Home Is,” by Deborah Hay, adds another contrasting number to the mix.
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The Eve Project
Janet Eilber, the Martha Graham Company’s artistic director, appeared in the audience with a microphone to give helpful pre-show program notes during her troupe’s run at the Joyce this month. This was a good idea, not only because she is supremely elegant in voice and bearing—she should record books on tape or host an arts talk show—but also because the programs were challenging and a little hand-holding goes a long way. The current season is titled “The EVE Project” in honor of the upcoming centenary of women’s suffrage. Every program explored the power of women and, remarkably, all of the...
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Fractured Beauty
We are inside the Sydney Opera House for what is perhaps the most anticipated Australian Ballet performance of the year—opening night of the Australian Ballet’s contemporary triple bill for the 2019 season, “Verve.”
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The Big Picture
It wasn’t exactly Coachella, but the crowds—if not all of the performances—were inspired. Most inspired of all, perhaps, was the producer and champion of dance in Los Angeles, Deborah Brockus. An unsung hero who is not only a choreographer, artistic director and teacher, the fiery redhead is also an indefatigable impresario who continues to make sure that local dance troupes are seen on stages throughout L.A.
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Are We Not Men?
The small group of dancers that comprise BalletBoyz, in decidedly flammable-looking and garish shellsuits (scourge of fashionistas everywhere in late ’80s-early ’90s Britain) flex, clench fists, and strike up archery poses. It's all about the posturing, here. This provocative, playful piece, “Them,” a collaborative, improvised piece by the company, is all gestural, indicative and suggestive of the shapes teenage boys throw when trying to win over their peers. It's not about mating, or anything cumbersome like that; rather, it is a bonding process between ‘bros.’
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The Dancer Decides
To give an idea of Cunningham—the heightened attention his dances afford, at the base of which is a faith that every atom of life counts, though it may skitter by too fast to be counted—I sometimes turn to Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The farmer is behind his plough, the shepherd has turned from his flock to gaze abstractedly at a leafy tree, the merchant ship rushes toward the bright horizon with the wind bowling the sails, when Icarus drowns. In Cunningham, Icarus would go unnamed—no myth to add import to a boy’s drop into a smudge of...
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Five Decades of Dance
Sydney Dance Company celebrates its 50th anniversary this year with a program of three vibrant and divergent works. The celebratory performance is titled Season One: Bonachela/Nankivell/Lane, somewhat quirkily, neither alphabetical nor the order in which the works are performed. Oddities aside, it features brand new dances by Rafael Bonachela, who is celebrating ten years as the company's artistic director; a new work by Gabrielle Nankivell who previously choreographed “Wilderbeest” to great acclaim for SDC; and finally “WOOF” by Melanie Lane. “WOOF” was commissioned for Bonachela’s choreographic development program New Breed in 2017, and on opening night it made its mainstage...
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Taking Flight
Wings have long held a special significance in ballet. In “Swan Lake,” Odette’s feathery port de bras become a devastating symbol of her captivity; in “La Sylphide” the titular sylph loses her wings, and her life, in an ill-fated embrace. Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s “Broken Wings” is one of the latest ballets to harness this freighted imagery, albeit more loosely. Created in 2016 for English National Ballet and reprised as part of ENB’s new “She Persisted” bill, the production is a vibrant tribute to the painter Frida Kahlo, capturing the existential heartbreak she suffered when a bus crash at the age...
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In Safe Hands
Having retired as a dancer from Scottish Ballet in 2017, artist-in-residence choreographer Sophie Laplane always delights in anything she turns her hands to. Her new world premiere, created to mark the company's fifty year anniversary, “Dextera,” is really rather special, characterised by her typically wicked wit and imagination.
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Editrix Royale
When Queen Victoria died in 1901, her youngest daughter, Beatrice, took it upon herself to ‘edit’ her late mother’s diaries for the public—a deed once deemed “the greatest act of censorship in history.” For better or worse, Beatrice revised the unsavoury aspects of Victoria’s memoir and excised others altogether, shaping the triumphant biography that lives on today. This process of transcription—in particular, the dilution that occurs when we reinforce attenuated versions of truth—drives Cathy Marston’s new production for Northern Ballet, a metanarrative that filters Victoria’s life story through the dual lens of her own recorded memories and Beatrice’s revamp. It’s...
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The Poetry of Apollo
“Apollo” is about poetry, poetry in the sense of a brilliant, sensuous, daring, and powerful activity of our nature . . . Balanchine has told this metaphysical story in the concrete terms of classical dancing, in a series of episodes of rising power and brilliance. Extraordinary is the richness with which he can, with only four dancers, create a sustained and more and more satisfying impression of the grandness of man’s creative genius . . .”[note]Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)[/note] So wrote Edwin Denby, eloquently and incisively describing the very essence of George...
Continua a leggereFeatured Reads
Firebird Rising
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.
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Rare Birds
It 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.
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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.
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Jack of Hearts
As 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.
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School Report
One 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.
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