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Murder Ballades & Other Dances
REVIEWS | Di Merilyn Jackson

Murder Ballades & Other Dances

Long before statistics and news, murder ballads were a staple of European folk songs and traveled here with immigrants. Dylan, Joan Baez and a lot of Appalachian singers sung them. One of the most famous in the 1950s was “Tom Dooley.” But I remember hearing somewhere along the way, “Oh, listen to my story, I'll tell you no lies, How John Lewis did murder poor little Omie Wise.” It’s the folktale of the early 19th Century murder of Naomi Wise. You can hear the tune and others deconstructed in Bryce Dessner’s original score, Murder Ballades, recorded by Eighth Blackbird. Resident...

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No Minor(ity) Matter
REVIEWS | Di Victoria Looseleaf

No Minor(ity) Matter

The late rock icon Jimi Hendrix would have approved: Cool “purple haze”—as well as hot crimsons and other miasmas of color emanating from Ligia Lewis’ tour de force work from 2016, “minor matter”—proved mind-altering both visually and viscerally. Programmed as part of the Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA, the dance won a 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Production and is the second part of Lewis’ trilogy, “Blue Red White.”

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Flight Pattern
REVIEWS | Di Merli V. Guerra

Flight Pattern

Not often does a production flow so seamlessly that a viewer can legitimately forget that the scenes unfolding onstage are live, and not simply a three-dimensional animation playing for the hundredth perfect cycle. Yet in the case of Shanghai Dance Theatre’s balletic dance drama “Soaring Wings: Story of the Crested Ibis,” the audience is indeed swept away to this heightened level of fantasy, in thanks not only to its imaginative sets, lighting, and costuming, but through the joyous expressiveness of its performers as well.

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Dancing through 2017
REVIEWS | Di Penelope Ford

Dancing through 2017

“It always wants something more of me,” Belinda McGuire said to me with a wry smile a few days before the opening of her solo performance, “Waltz Slaughterhouse Requiem.” Something true of dance, I thought, and perhaps especially true for solo work. McGuire's performance of her own choreography, a personal reflection, “Slaughterhouse/Requiem” was highly original and impressive, and is one of my highlights of the year in dance.

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Dispatch from London: 2017 in Review
REVIEWS | Di Sara Veale

Dispatch from London: 2017 in Review

Sturm und Drang—2017 saw the dance world roiling with it, both on and off the stage. Israel’s culture minister hit the headlines for refusing arts funding to performances involving nudity; Palestinian-Syrian refugee Ahmad Joudeh made a prominent debut with the Dutch National Ballet after fleeing death threats from Islamic State; discord boiled over in Moscow as Kirill Serebrennikov, the director of the Bolshoi’s long-awaited “Nureyev” was placed under house arrest on what many suspect are trumped-up charges intended to punish him for celebrating the life of a gay man on stage—a conspicuous challenge to Putin’s ban on so-called ‘homosexual propaganda.’...

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Dance 2017
REVIEWS | Di Victoria Looseleaf

Reason to Rejoice

If ever there were a time when art was needed, this is it. The year that began—and continues to this day—with a Twitter-happy and some would say, deranged lunatic sitting in the Oval Office could only, at every twist and turn, benefit from the grace, beauty and power of art. That the #MeToo movement has also encompassed wide swaths of politics, Hollywood, journalism and yes—even the dance world—is both emboldening and sad.

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A Final Serenade
REVIEWS | Di Rebecca Ritzel

A Final Serenade

There could be no more auspicious moment for Suzanne Farrell to mark the closure of her ballet company than December 2017. With the New York City Ballet future of her former partner Peter Martins very much in doubt, Farrell sent her dancers out onstage at the Kennedy Center last week to perform works she and Martins had often danced together, works created by the man who cast her out of his company after she rebuffed his proposal.

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Vincent Dance Theatre
REVIEWS | Di Rachel Elderkin

Mankind

There’s something that performer Robert Clark is struggling to articulate. As he muddles through his opening speech in Charlotte Vincent's first all-male work for Vincent Dance Theatre, “Shut Down,” the enormity of the topic he is trying to comprehend becomes apparent. There’s a problem with the image of masculinity—that of the strong, unemotional, alpha male.

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For Now I am Winter
REVIEWS | Di Merilyn Jackson

For Now I am Winter

For the second work of its 2017 fall season, BalletX returned to the newly spruced up Wilma Theater with a reprise of a 2013 commission to internationally in demand choreographer, Nicolo Fonte’s “Beautiful Decay.” Two sets of well-known Philadelphia-based guest dancers alternate during the run. On seeing it the first time with Manfred Fischbeck and Brigitta Herrmann, years ago, and this time with Hellmut Fricke-Gottschild and Brenda Dixon Gottschild in the alternate cast, I find the title even more wincingly uncomfortable.

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Atlas Shrugged
REVIEWS | Di Victoria Looseleaf

Atlas Shrugged

No matter how many bells, whistles and special effects are deployed in a dance, if the choreography isn’t there, the exercise/event borders on being pointless. To wit: the two-act “Tesseract,” a collaboration between filmmaker Charles Atlas and choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, who happen to be very good movers. That this trio also comes with a first-class pedigree—Atlas served as filmmaker-in-residence for Merce Cunningham for a decade from the early 1970s through 1983, and Mitchell and Riener both danced with the postmodern genius during the troupe’s final years—upped the expectation ante while falling short on its deliverables.

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Misty!
REVIEWS | Di Claudia Lawson

Misty!

In 2015 David McAllister, the Australian Ballet’s long time artistic director debuted his first full- length work at the Sydney Opera House: his lavish, and wildly successful, “The Sleeping Beauty.” At the time, the Australian Ballet keenly revealed that more than 70 per cent of the production costs (thought to be in the millions) were raised through 2000-plus philanthropic donations. The financial support was not only obvious, but allowed McAllister’s artistic vision to be fully realized; the stage dripped with beautifully ornate sets, luxurious costumes and intricate detailing—it was a financial and creative success.

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Light & Dark Matters
REVIEWS | Di Rachel Elderkin

Light & Dark Matters

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s death. To celebrate the life and work of the internationally renowned choreographer and former Royal Ballet director, the UK’s leading ballet companies joined together to perform a season of MacMillan’s work.

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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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