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The Day
REVIEWS | Di Victoria Looseleaf

The Day

“I remember the day.” So begins Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang’s crowdsourced lament, a eulogy for the lost, an encomium for those still with us, a sorrowful remembrance of a bygone world, one forever changed when some 3,000 lives perished on that horrific Tuesday in September. Making use of a single day as metaphor to cut to the heart of humanity, the 2016 Lang composition, “the day,” was commissioned by contemporary cellist Maya Beiser as a prequel to Lang’s 2003 opus, “world to come,” which was composed in response to 9/11, with “The Day” receiving its West Coast premiere over...

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La Fresque Ballet Preljocaj
REVIEWS | Di Sara Veale

Into the Fold

There’s a mythic quality to Angelin Preljocaj’s “La Fresque,” both in theme and aesthetic. The 2016 production, recently shown in the UK for the first time, is inspired by a medieval Chinese saga about Chu (Marius Delcourt), a man who delves into a mural and marries its subject before being booted back to reality. There are pounding drums and starry skies, hair coiled to evoke ancient deities. We see pilgrims scaling mountains, seraphim swinging from the heavens, Spartans squaring off for battle. The folkloric angle is right up Preljocaj’s alley: other works with his Aix-en-Provence-based company include “Snow White” and...

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Bodies of Water
REVIEWS | Di Lorna Irvine

Elements

There is an ineffable poignancy, a sense of subtle melancholy even, to this immersive and moving piece, “Bodies of Water” created by Saffy Setohy, Aya Kobayashi, Nicolette Macleod and Joanna Young for family audiences. It is dancers Setohy and Young who perform, and invite the audience into a quiet, dark but cosy space for interaction and dance. Tables are festooned with little clay pots created across Scottish communities over the course of a year. As pairs, we too are invited (with eyes closed) to create little makeshift pots of clay, something to contain water. 

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New York City Ballet
REVIEWS | Di Oksana Khadarina

Cloaked in Darkness

George Balanchine’s unconventional, even shocking, “Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir,” revived for this fall season by New York City Ballet, shows the choreographer at his most avant-garde and unexpected and allows the audience to appreciate once again the extraordinary range of Balanchine’s creative genius and his daring musical choices.

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Rob Heaslip
REVIEWS | Di Lorna Irvine

A Deathly Pallor

The scenography here, from the ever-inspiring designer Alison Brown, is truly striking: black confetti on a clinical white floor; spiky masked not-quite-human creatures, elusive faces turned away, eerie white bound furniture, which is decorative as well as functional. Brown's black and white flimsy costumes act as sheaths (called winding sheets in ancient Celtic culture) both encasing and exposing the slender bodies underneath. This is “Endling,” Rob Heaslip's disquieting Gaelic meditation on death and the ritual of condolences and care. The sounds, created by composer Michael John McCarthy, range from birdsong to guttural, slurping sounds, drones to choppy electronica, and there...

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Mozart in Motion
REVIEWS | Di Rachel Howard

Mozart in Motion

I don’t live in Sacramento—state capital of California, the world’s sixth biggest economy—but I half wish I did after catching “Mozart in Motion,” the Sacramento Ballet’s mixed-bill opener for its second season under new artistic director Amy Seiwert. From a corner of Midtown Sac, the year-old, $29 million Sofia Center gleamed with twinkly lights against fashionably angled concrete. Inside, diverse patrons dressed in architect-chic took their glasses of Pinot Gris inside the well-equipped, pine-paneled and burnt-orange upholstered 365-seat theater, one of two performance spaces in the complex. Most appealing of all, when the curtain went up: A company of 21...

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Fall for Dance
REVIEWS | Di Faye Arthurs

Fall for Dance

Sixteen years in, City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival continues to deliver. The shows can sometimes be a mixed bag, but the variety of programming is always interesting and the theater is unfailingly abrim with positive energy. There’s good reason for this: with every seat in the house costing just $15, world class dance companies are as accessible as movie tickets. The entire run is sold out this year, as usual. On opening night the crowd was a balanced blend of young and old, the gussied up and the flip-flop-wearing. The diversity of the entertainers on the stage also translates...

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Tanz im August
REVIEWS | Di Merilyn Jackson

Tanz im Berlin

With the Berliner Festspiel under renovation on Berlin’s western end, artistic director, Virve Sutinen, spread this year’s Tanz im August festival (TIA)—its 33rd—throughout venues in the eastern part of the city. By theater and neighborhood, here are 15 of the shows I took in at this year’s TIA. Each theater has a bar, but not one has so much as a standing or ceiling fan to fend off sweltering heat. So it’s BYOF—Bring Your Own Fan.

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Orphee and Eurydice
REVIEWS | Di Jade Larine

Danced Interludes

On the edge of the Black Forest, Baden-Baden is not only home to Germany’s most renowned thermal springs. It also hosts the Festspielhaus, the largest opera house in the country, an imposing monument overlooking the chic city center. Seeking to turn Baden-Baden into a wider cultural haven, Benedikt Stampa, new artistic director, opened the season with a big name (John Neumeier), a famous opera (Gluck’s “Orphée and Eurydice,” in its Paris version) and a fine company (Hamburg Ballet).

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BodyTraffic
REVIEWS | Di Victoria Looseleaf

Let's Keep Dancing

It was full speed ahead when L.A.’s very own repertory dance troupe, BodyTraffic took to the stage at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts over the weekend to begin its 2019-2020 residency at the Beverly Hills venue. Co-founded by Lilian Barbeito and Tina Finkelman Berkett in 2007, the eight-member company has carved out a name for itself on both national and international stages while also helping to elevate the contemporary dance scene in its home town.

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The Crucible
REVIEWS | Di Lorna Irvine

You Want It Darker

How to dance a dance of contrition? Jealousy, slander, hysteria and fear? Helen Pickett's latest, more fleshed-out adaptation of Arthur Miller's classic The Crucible arrives at an interesting time, culturally, when the two most recent successful TV franchises focus on female protagonists: The Handmaid's Tale and Killing Eve (the former focusing on misogyny and oppression, the latter, psychopathy and sexuality). She pulls the audience into the shadow psyche, by framing the Salem witch trials around the affair between servant Abigail Williams (Claire Souet) and affluent, married man John Proctor (Barnaby Rook Bishop) and consequently, the fall-out in their deeply religious...

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The Chosen
REVIEWS | Di Lorna Irvine

Never Let Me Go

It's perhaps entirely apposite to watch something as glorious as this strange, elegiac piece from artistic director Kally Lloyd-Jones on this week, of all weeks, when the global impetus is on the effects of climate change, and all of our futures. (We are doomed if action isn't taken.) It's all about tension and trust within day-to-day relationships for this “intensely personal” piece choreographed by Lloyd-Jones, in collaboration with the cast.  

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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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