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Water on the Water
REVIEWS | Di Faye Arthurs

Water on the Water

Leave it to Mark Morris to debut his new piece, entitled “Water,” right alongside the East River, at the very tip of Pier 1 in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The score was by Handel, whose “Water Music” was composed for King George I in 1717 and meant to be played on a barge during a royal joyride along the Thames. Uncharacteristically for Mark Morris, the music for this debut was recorded and not live. But the extra percussion added by the helicopters, coast guard boats, ferries, and jet skis was most definitely in-the-moment, and heavy on improv. Despite these distractions, “Water”...

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Deep Dive
REVIEWS | Di Cecilia Whalen

Deep Dive

To look at the ocean can be deceiving. With feet planted in the sand, facing the horizon, we think we know where we are; the tide signals for how long. To look into the ocean is a different story: Looking in offers no sense of start and stop, no sides to stand on, no tide nor time. Looking in confronts us only with an endless sense of motion encompassed by a larger unknown. Bill T. Jones's long-awaited “Deep Blue Sea,” a work massive in both size and depth and presented at the Park Avenue Armory in New York through October...

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Return to Form
REVIEWS | Di Faye Arthurs

Return to Form

It was a historic event. The New York City Ballet performed at the David H. Koch Theater on Tuesday, September 21st for the first time in 18 months. The audience was entirely vaccinated, entirely masked, and even more revved up than a Fall for Dance crowd. Dance legends were scattered all around, Edward Villella sat prominently in the first row. It was a cathartic evening. The outpouring of love for the dancers and the musicians was immense. Each ballet received three curtain calls and a standing ovation. Confetti fell from the rafters at the end. It was wondrous to behold. Was...

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Swell, Magnifique!
REVIEWS | Di Lorna Irvine

Swell, Magnifique!

Gene Kelly, what can ya say? A class act. Timeless and evergreen, he is still notching up homages on films and television; and millions of hits on YouTube to subsequent new generations, twenty-five years after his passing. A legend of Hollywood, from the time of wise guys and sassy dames: he was a singer, dancer, actor—the triple threat, the epitome of an all-rounder.

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BalletX takes Flight
REVIEWS | Di Merilyn Jackson

BalletX takes Flight

Pago Pago, Samoa, January 11, 1938: Pan American Captain Edwin Musick piloted the inaugural airmail flight from Hawaii to New Zealand in December 1937. Beginning the return flight to Honolulu and home to Seattle, his plane caught fire, exploding midair. No remains of the seven onboard were found among the wreckage located later that day. The previous year, Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific along with navigator Fred Noonan who had earlier navigated the China Clipper on its first flight between San Francisco and Honolulu, piloted by Musick.

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Consumer Durables
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | Di Lorna Irvine

Consumer Durables

What makes German choreographer/performer Frauke Requardt's work so special is that she never uses spectacle for its own sake—there are always enough ideas to accompany her own vivid, inventive choreography, which scratches both itches of live art and contemporary dance at once.

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Anatomy Of Dance
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | Di Lorna Irvine

Anatomy Of Dance

London-born dancer Matthew Hawkins has always been a singular force of nature, so it makes sense for him to collaborate with the iconoclastic Scottish musicians Red Note Ensemble and lithe, soulful French dancer Soraya Ham. For this film, Iconnotations, the setting is the beautiful Greyfriars Kirk in the “old town” side of Edinburgh, a spacious and ornate parish church. It has been previously performed in St. Magnus Cathedral in Orkney, the island where Maxwell Davies lived laterally. The main piece, Vesalii Icones, features a musical score from late English composer Peter Maxwell Davies from 1969, which is filled with so...

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Bringing the World
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | Di Cecilia Whalen

Bringing the World

Battery Dance Festival returned to the stage last week in celebration of its 40th anniversary, presenting six days of international dance live and livestreamed from the spectacular Robert F. Wagner park in lower Manhattan. The festival ran Aug. 12th through 20th and featured 56 total performances, including 16 dance films which opened the first three days of the festival online.

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BAANDing Together
REVIEWS | Di Faye Arthurs

BAANDing Together

Five NYC-based dance companies (Ballet Hispánico, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem) joined forces to put on 5 outdoor shows in the Damrosch Park area of Lincoln Center this past week. NY Senator Brian Benjamin, who co-introduced the performance, said that Covid-19 “created a lot of trauma in our lives, but it also provided opportunity for collaboration.” We are not yet on the other side of this plague, but even in the midst of the Delta surge there are already signs of rebirth. Much has been made of how...

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Spirit
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | Di Lorna Irvine

Spirit

“Your body is a repository of memory,” says the voiceover in Retrace-Retract, Gregory Maqoma's film which is part of the Dancing In The Streets series for the Edinburgh International Festival, focusing on the issue of home. ”I am your compass. . . The spirit will guide you.” Threaded throughout this beautiful, inspiring film, directed and choreographed by Maqoma, is the poetry of Jefferson Tshabalala, which interrogates issues around poverty, inequality and strategies for survival; but also of selfhood and spirituality. These particular streets—Soweto's bustling streets in South Africa—are the backdrop. They signify the return to the source, the retracing of...

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The Chandelier
REVIEWS | Di Victoria Looseleaf

The Chandelier

In real estate, it’s all about location, location, location. And so it’s been with Los Angeles-based site-specific goddess, Heidi Duckler, who founded her eponymous troupe in 1985. The intrepid choreographer has staged more than 200 works in places as far flung as Australia, Russia and Hong Kong and in such disparate—and iconic—L.A. locations as an abandoned jail (“C’opera,” from 2006, which took place at the Police Academy), “Governing Bodies” (2010), set at City Hall and, more recently, “Hildegard Herself,” a gorgeous 2019 work inspired by 12th-century abbess, composer and mystic Hildegard von Bingen, performed at the 1925 Gothic Revival-style St....

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Testimonials
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | Di Lorna Irvine

Testimonials

I am scratched, punched, kicked and bruised watching Mele Broomes in her extraordinary film Wrapped Up In This. I am compelled by the multitudes within the stories, I feel consumed by its power. I'm disgusted by the real life accounts of racism endured by the womxn Broomes interviewed whilst researching this piece, whose voices are heard as it develops. Yet, it is not without hope, it grows and amplifies. It is utterly visceral and political. It feels radical, revolutionary in its intent. It is discourse, dance, and demonstration all wrapped up at once.

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Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Faye Arthurs
Home and Away

It is always interesting when multiple theme steps emerge over the course of a mixed repertory evening, but it is uncanny on one featuring five different ballets, each with a different choreographer and composer, covering a twenty-year span (2005-2025).

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