World-class review of ballet and dance.
The American Ballet Theatre Studio Company aired performances of new works and excerpted classics over two nights this week, for free on YouTube. Actually, the shows were billed as two halves of one Winter Festival performance, separated by a 23-hour intermission. I appreciated the digestibility of this scenario, for watching ballet online is not the same as watching it in person—it is much harder to focus on a computer screen than a massive stage.
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Come for the choreographers, stay for the dancers. A collaboration between Sadler’s Wells and BBC Arts, Dancing Nation presents a selection of new and restaged works from emerging and established artists across the UK over 3 hour-long episodes. Most of the pre-recorded performances were filmed on grand stages across the UK (including the Sadler’s Wells main stage), but some pop up in the foyer or, in the case of Oona Doherty’s seminal work Hope Hunt & The Ascension into Lazarus, explode onto the streets of Belfast.
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Dance Camera West (DCW), the festival dedicated to the intersection of cinematography and choreography, was co-founded in Los Angeles in 2001 by Lynette Kessler and Kelly Hargraves, proving that the art form has come a long way since Thomas Edison hand-tinted the swirling skirts of modern dance pioneer Loie Fuller in the film version of the 1905 Danse Serpentine. And while the festival has undergone several directorial changes since its inception, Hargraves once again became its executive and artistic helmer since 2018.
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Someday we will recognize the dance pieces created during the pandemic, conceived for the camera, performed by a few dancers, innervated by a sense of instability. It is the case with the new “I wonder where the dreams I don’t remember go,” staged by Yoann Bourgeois for NDT1, filmed without audience and streamed on demand in two performances on the website’s company. A piece that in the past we would have called a “video dance.” The French artist, trained as a circus acrobat and raised as a contemporary dancer, is quite in demand in Europe as a choreographer since his...
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As Tokyo and its surrounding areas prepare to go into a second lockdown, it's unclear what the immediate future of ballet and live events will be in the Japanese capital. Only last month, ballet, dance, opera and other performing arts had made a welcome return and the outlook was bright as companies regrouped and held performances around the city playing to sold out or near sold out venues.
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Blessed be the diplomats and the grant writers! Seven years ago, Silicon Valley-based dancer and choreographer Philein Wang applied to the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and secured a $50,000 grant for a series of U.S.-China exchanges and tours. This year, confronted with anti-Asian racism in the U.S. and the police killing of George Floyd, she saw both a need and an opportunity and reached out to the State Department again.
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The sputtering stop-start of lockdown measures in the U.K. has wiped most of the 2020 dance season from the calendar, including a few live holiday performances that were optimistically (and, in hindsight, unrealistically) scheduled this autumn, like a bill of world premieres from English National Ballet. But it’s the year of make-do, and few companies have the leadership and resources to salvage so much from the wreckage as ENB, who swiftly rejigged those new works into a series of pay-per-view films for homebound audiences. It might be an emergency stopgap, but the digital programme works hard to capture the versatility...
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Solos and site-specific works were the dance world’s prevailing themes in 2020, for obvious reasons: people couldn’t touch each other or congregate. But the term site-specific can mean two different things. Sometimes it refers to a live event attended by a real, albeit limited, audience. For example, the LA Dance Project put on a series of drive-in shows, the Kaatsbaan summer festival offered spaced-out picnic blanket-seating, and Troy Schumacher and company are currently staging walk-through “Nutcracker” performances at the Wethersfield Mansion. But site-specific also refers to a dance choreographed for a particular place, which is then filmed and broadcast to...
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It's not just little girls who dream of escaping into ballet. Created for the screen by Christopher Hampson and set and costume designer Lez Brotherston and filmed by directors Jess and Morgs, The Secret Theatre comes across as a Victorian toybox full of rich, endless surprises. When a young boy, played with exuberance and wonder by Leo Tetteh, finds his way into an empty theatre, he is taken on an adventure into the heart of Christmas ballet, where dancers cast spells before his eyes. Here, Scottish Ballet bring the viewer not one, but two, magical ballets for the festive season, as...
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Shakespeare wasn't a man unfamiliar with pandemics. He lived through the plague and his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon was decimated by it, leaving thousands dead. It's timely, then, that Megumi Nakamura and Yasuyuki Shuto's beautifully produced and choreographed “Shakespeare The Sonnets” hit the New National Theatre Tokyo stage for two performances in late November 2020.
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It is difficult not to be effusive about Sydney Dance Company’s first live performance since Covid emerged. For the first time in nine months the audience is being ushered into Sydney's Carriageworks. It’s like so many performances, the lights are dimmed, there is chatter, but there are differences. Some people wear masks, and there is a spare seat on either side of each audience member. The occasion is not lost on the audience, excitable gratitude and disbelief seems to hang in the air. The Welcome to Country, recognizing the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of...
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Let’s be blunt: This is a year of desperation “Nutcrackers.” To deliver even one-fifth the joy of a live “Nutcracker” during these darkest pandemic days (and, I fear, to attract an even smaller share of the usual audience)—this must be counted a triumph.
Continua a leggereTwo performers crawl in on hands and knees wearing neon green, hooded coveralls—the lightweight papery kind made for working in a sterile environment—and clusters of balloons pinned to their backs.
Continua a leggereWill Rawls makes boundaries visible by defying them. Known for the disciplinary and topical range of his projects, the choreographer, director, and performer approaches issues of representation in “[siccer],” a multi-part, multi-site work co-presented by L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival. A live performance at Performance Space New York...
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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).
Continua a leggereZvidance premiered its new work “Dandelion” mid-November at New York Live Arts. Founded by Zvi Gotheiner in 1989, Zvidance has been a steady presence in the New York contemporary dance scene, a reliable source of compositional integrity, and a magnet for wonderful dancers.
Continua a leggereCleveland native Dianne McIntrye received a hometown hero's welcome during her curtain speech prior to her eponymous dance group thrilling the audience in her latest work, “In the Same Tongue.”
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