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Long Wait for the Train
REVIEWS | Di Faye Arthurs

Long Wait for the Train

Pacific Northwest Ballet finally made good on its long-planned tour to New York City this week, exactly two years after its intended run. Covid was still, unfortunately, plaguing the troupe: many last-minute principal replacements were announced in both the dancing ranks and those of the PNB orchestra—who were also, impressively, along for the tour. Poor, lovely Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan danced in two pieces while taking a mask on and off depending on whether she was in proximity to other dancers’ faces. (What a lot to keep track of! Did she have a mask waiting in every wing?) Despite these pandemic remnants,...

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Harlequin and Clown
REVIEWS | Di Gracia Haby

Harlequin and Clown

In Alexei Ratmansky’s revival of Marius Petipa’s lost classic “Harlequinade,” we have the familiar characters Pierrot and Pierette, Harlequin and Columbine. Known from paintings, figurines, pantomimes, other ballets, sweets, and from the commedia dell’arte. With a chorus of characters, young and old, coloured by collective, ever-changing memory over the centuries, the Australian Ballet presents “Harlequinade” a co-production with American Ballet Theatre. This merry romp, a light-hearted play, a confection for the senses. True to history, “Harlequinade’s” appeal lies in its quick-change movements of the familiar, stock characters and the quick-change movements of the story. In his pre-curtain address, on opening...

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Character Study
REVIEWS | Di Victoria Looseleaf

Character Study

Who is Marta Carrasco? Her bio says that she’s a “celebrated Catalan artist who moves between theater, dance and the visual arts as a performer, dancer, choreographer and director.” She also formed her own company in 1995 and has taken home a fistful of awards, including the National Dance Prize of Catalonia and several Max awards. But in what was billed as Carrasco’s farewell performance at Los Angeles Theatre Center, in a mind-blowing 11-day run presented by the Latino Theater Company, Carrasco delivered a gut-punch to the soul in her never less than astonishing, “Perra de Nadie.”

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Everything Everywhere All at Once
REVIEWS | Di Faye Arthurs

Everything Everywhere All at Once

George Balanchine famously said, “there are no mothers-in-law in ballet.” Well, fifteen minutes into “Of Love and Rage,” Alexei Ratmansky’s new full-length production for the American Ballet Theater, there was one mother-in-law pacing the stage and two fathers-in-law in a reconciliation dance. By the intermission, the leading lady Callirhoe (Catherine Hurlin, exquisite) had been married twice, impregnated, threatened into a coma (huh?), buried alive, and abducted by pirates. In Act II she was nearly kidnapped twice more. She was saved only by the deus ex machina intrusion of a war that required the services of all the men in the...

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Gibney Up Close
REVIEWS | Di Cecilia Whalen

Gibney Up Close

At the end of Yin Yue's “A Measurable Existence” on June 15, Marla Phelan and Kevin Pajarillaga walked stoically forward and back, one downstage and one upstage, standing in a glow of orange lighting. The piece is a feat of clever partnering and energetic contemporary phrase work that is intricate and challenging. In New York Live Arts' intimate space, we can see even the beads of sweat that drip off of the dancers' chins. Performing up close can be risky; but the Gibney dancers up close are perhaps even more remarkable than afar, as we witness in immediacy their precision,...

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Serious Play
REVIEWS | Di Gracia Haby

Serious Play

Remember me. Remember me. The comfort that floats behind the heartache of Henry Purcell’s Lament from “Dido and Aeneas,” When I am laid in the earth: remember me.  Be now, in the present, remember me. So begins “Kunstkamer,” originally commissioned in 2019 for the 60th anniversary of Netherlands Dans Theater, and presented for the first time outside of the Netherlands by the Australian Ballet.

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Giselle Retold
REVIEWS | Di Faye Arthurs

Giselle Retold

I have often wondered why few troupes revive the classic story ballets the way Orson Welles restaged Shakespeare—as when he boldly set “Macbeth” in Haiti, or when he put an anti-fascist spin on “Julius Caesar” right on the cusp of WWII. The answer probably lies in funding difficulties: ballet is a hard enough sell that people don’t like to mess with the sacred cash cows. Against the odds, the English National Ballet’s 2016 production of “Giselle,” which had its NY premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, dares to be timely. Of all the narrative stalwarts, “Giselle”—which depicts...

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Sevillana
REVIEWS | Di Marina Harss

Sevillana

It’s been three years since American Ballet Theatre last stepped onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, three years since it rolled out its well-worn productions of evening-length story ballets. The Met season is a kind of hit parade, and the current run is no different: It begins with the festive pseudo-Spanish extravaganza “Don Quixote” and ends with Kenneth MacMillan’s tear-jerker “Romeo and Juliet.” With, in the middle, no less than twelve performances of “Swan Lake.” The exceptions to this succession of super-familiar works are Ratmansky’s new “Of Love and Rage,” which opens next week, and a mixed bill...

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Twinkle Twinkle, Little Stars
REVIEWS | Di Faye Arthurs

Twinkle Twinkle, Little Stars

It’s hard to explain the School of American Ballet’s annual Workshop performances to outsiders. Workshop is a year-end ballet recital, but when the students’ families gather in the lobby afterwards to shower their children with flowers and tell them that they were wonderful—and just like real ballerinas—they are speaking the truth. This year, the advanced levels at SAB danced the Fourth Movement and Finale from George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” a feat that many professional companies cannot pull off. It is a technically demanding piece that requires at least forty bodies, including twelve men who can do triple pirouettes. Many...

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Beyond the End
REVIEWS | Di Rachel Howard

Beyond the End

In the chaotic, dirty heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, in a fuchsia building that once housed a porn palace, stands a venue named CounterPulse. I’m always curious what’s going on at CounterPulse because the place seems to welcome subversion with an edge of sexiness, because it prioritizes racial equity in a way that goes way beyond lip service, and because you never know when you’re going to discover something mind-blowing there. That all proved true again in early June, when I was lured to the culminating performances of CounterPulse’s ARC Edge residency by Audrey Johnson, a beguiling dancer in...

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Forget Me Not
REVIEWS | Di Veronica Posth

Forget Me Not

Pina Bausch’s penultimate work, “Sweet Mambo” premiered in 2008, following its counterpart “Bamboo Blues.” The two pieces were created in an attempt to explore how a single starting point—identical set design—could lead to two distinct pieces, developed by two different casts. “Sweet Mambo” was recently reconstructed by Alan Lucien Øyen, and performed in Wuppertal by the original cast, with the exception of Naomi Brito, company member since 2020/21, who danced the role originated by Regina Advento.

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Body Language
REVIEWS | Di Karen Hildebrand

Body Language

From the moment Doug Varone’s “Somewhere” opens on the figure of Hollis Bartlett leaning into a lateral arabesque, and we hear the sound of a certain unmistakable finger snapping, it’s clear that the GPS for this particular somewhere is the misty pre-dawn of an empty NYC tenement street in Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story.” During a week that celebrated 35 years of performance, Doug Varone and Dancers presented a program of four works that map the evolution of a master story teller.

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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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