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James Wilton
REVIEWS | Di Sara Veale

Mortal Coil

There's a strong element of isolation to James Wilton's “Last Man Standing,” a moody two-act work that ruminates on mortality and the existential crises it inspires. The choreography constantly links the six dancers together in tight-grip grasps only to dismantle their connections, a reminder that death is never anything but an individual journey. It's a dark piece to be sure, made even more so by its soundtrack, a tempestuous medley of Tool songs, but the six-strong group (which includes Wilton himself) breathes an indelible radiance into it, lifting the mood out of desperation and into quiet introspection.

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JV2
REVIEWS | Di Sara Veale

On Verve

Last month Hofesh Shechter, Akram Khan and Lloyd Newson—three giants of the UK's contemporary dance scene—issued a damning edict on the quality of British contemporary training, claiming they regularly struggle to recruit home-grown talent “of sufficient calibre.” Their criticism raises some interesting questions about how we measure quality in the contemporary sphere, where technique is not codified as definitively as it is in ballet, and valuable performance skills can range from improvisation to gymnastics to vocals. What makes a good contemporary dancer? Is it strength? Precision? Versatility? Emotion? Intent?

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The Australian Ballet
REVIEWS | Di Claudia Lawson

Triple Ashton

It’s been a huge month for the Australian Ballet. Long time and much loved principal artist Madeleine Eastoe announced her retirement after 18 years with the company. A few weeks earlier, senior artist Reiko Hombo had also announced her departure. The loss of senior ranked artists is a big deal in ballet companies. But with change comes opportunity. Earlier this month, following her debut performance as Giselle, Ako Kondo, was promoted to principal artist—the company’s highest rank. She is just 24 years old. With more promotions inevitable, and a wealth of talent among the more junior ranks, there is the opportunity to witness rising stars...

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Paul Taylor
REVIEWS | Di Madison Mainwaring

Ham and Eggs

Paul Taylor's "Death and the Damsel," one of two premieres during his season at Lincoln Center has been labeled by many critics as a piece about sex-trafficking. There's one scene in particular in which the ingénue (Jamie Rae Walker) is passed between the hands of leather-wearing men, all of them forcing her into the same compromising position. Each throws her over his shoulder before straddling her to the ground and parting her legs in order to look at the crotch between. There's no touching involved, but this restraint almost makes it seem even more unfeeling and inhumane. I've never seen...

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Streetcar Named Desire
REVIEWS | Di Sara Veale

Real Magic

Scottish Ballet has a long history of adapting literary works for the stage, and not just the usual fairy tales and Shakespeare plays either; texts by writers as uncharted (in the ballet world anyway) as Friedrich Rückert, Dylan Thomas, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Arthur Miller have all served as source material for the Glasgow-based company over the years.

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Robert Cohan
REVIEWS | Di Sara Veale

In the Moment

“Dance is a fragile thing—it only exists in the moment you do it, and then it’s gone.” So Robert Cohan reminded us when he took to the stage at the end of this gala, organised to celebrate his 90th birthday and honour his many achievements on stage and in the studio. The American choreographer—who trained with Martha Graham and famously went on to partner her in some of her biggest works—has a devoted following the world over, but he’s especially beloved in the UK, where the dance scene would look distinctly different had he not teamed up with Robin Howard...

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Sue Healey
REVIEWS | Di Gracia Haby

Type Wilderness

Thirteen performances in thirteen days: my exhaustive, intense, yet not-nearly-enough, Dance Massive 2015 experience. Dance Massive remains a celebration and exploration of the body in movement and in stillness; the body shown on a screen, through a screen, and in response to a screen; the body pushed, and the body pulled; the body grounded, and the body weightless; the body as a tool for communication, as a vessel, and equally as a red herring; the body vs. the machine, and as a machine; the body’s very matter decomposing right before my eyes in glorious time lapse. This is all fodder...

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Kristina Chan
REVIEWS | Di Gracia Haby

In the Fold

Adrift on a makeshift raft, forsaken by a rescue boat on the horizon, flanked by the corpses of their fellow comrades, hope wavered, and was near extinguished. In the inky waters, mayhem, mutiny, and cannibalism ensured. Théodore Géricault’s romantic nineteenth-century painting (in the collection of the Louvre), The Raft of the Medusa (1819), based on the accounts of a handful of actual survivors, depicts the shipwreck of a French naval frigate off the coast of Senegal in 1816. Above all, it illustrates “a synthetic view of human life abandoned to its fate. The pallid bodies are given cruel emphasis by...

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Birmingham Royal Ballet
REVIEWS | Di Sara Veale

One for the Corps

David Bintley's “Carmina burana” has roots that go way beyond 1995, the year he took over as Birmingham Royal Ballet's artistic director and created this spectacle of a piece. The ballet is inspired by Carl Orff's cantata Carmina burana, which the German composer cobbled together in the 1930s from a slew of 13th-century poems and plays discovered in a Bavarian monastery in the early 1800s. Fast-forward to 2015 and we've got BRB remounting the work for the first time in five years.

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Hagit Yakira
REVIEWS | Di Sara Veale

I Fly, I Fall

“It’s human to feel vulnerable; it’s honest to feel lonely. I don’t see these emotions as negative so much as critical and introspective.” So responded Hagit Yakira when, during an audience discussion following the performance of her 2013 work “…in the middle with you” last week, a viewer enquired about the distress the piece’s characters face as they grapple with that thorniest of existential concerns, the human condition. Yakira's answer explains the meditative, rather than brooding, tone that prevails in this dance theatre work, which examines how we transition emotionally from suffering to release. The work is at once abstract...

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Pam Tanowitz
REVIEWS | Di Madison Mainwaring

The Boy Should Always Meet the Girl

Pam Tanowitz is a choreographer of conflicted interests. “When I talk about narrative and non-narrative, I feel like I want it both ways,” she said in an interview with the Joyce Theater in 2013. She cites George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham as her two greatest influences, artists whose methods and techniques lie at opposite poles of virtually every spectrum. She comes from a background in contemporary (and mostly Cunningham) style, but says that she enjoys working in ballet. This interest has sometimes gone awry. In 2012 she presented the stuffy “Untitled (Blue Ballet)” at the Kitchen, with a cast drawn...

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Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Rachel Howard
Starry Nights

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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