Blow Up

Waterbeds may have been a 70’s fad, but what about inflatable furniture? For a mere $74.95 (with free shipping, who knew?), Amazon offers the sofa of your dreams, one designed with a “waterproof-flocked top surface and a vinyl bottom that provides an incredibly comfortable sitting surface for any occasion.” For Lionel Popkin, a former Trisha Brown dancer and a choreographer who has mined his Hindu/Jewish roots, memorialized Ruth St. Denis and sautéed onions and curried zucchini in a range of works that satisfied, amused and, if not necessarily provoked, left indelible imagery nonetheless.

What Would Sia Do?

Performer Lucy Gaizely and her ‘tween’ fourteen year old son Raedie sit on stage, clad in flesh-coloured leotards and classic Sia blonde bob wigs. Both are huge fans of the husky voiced Australian singer-songwriter and record producer Sia Furler. Both have a rebellious streak, and a tendency (by their own admissions) to run off at the mouth. Both have soulful eyes, and mischievously twitching mouths. Both are at the juncture in their lives where they are acutely, excruciatingly, embarrassing to each other, often in public.

Humanity Restored

At the end of Batsheva Dance Company’s “Last Work,” a man sits with his back to us and his legs spread, apparently masturbating. Then he rotates to face us and we see he is cleaning a machine gun. Meanwhile, club music pounds, a frenzied crowd runs in circles, lights flash, streamers fly. Ian Robinson drags out a microphone and starts lashing it to the floor with masking tape. Then he screams.

The Sum of its Parts

Beauty, Streamlined

George Balanchine had a special place in his heart for “The Sleeping Beauty.” It was a ballet that he always wanted to stage but never had the means—and the space—to do it properly; and he refused to do it on the budget. “He would put it on only if he could produce it on a scale comparable to “The Sleeping Beauty” whose enchantment he would never forget, the one he had appeared in as a boy in St. Petersburg, where the company had numbered some two hundred dancers and the stage had been grand enough for the most spectacular effects,”...

Space to Explore

In 2015, choreographers Akram Khan, Hofesh Shechter and Lloyd Newman drew ire from the UK dance community for criticising the quality of British contemporary dance training, claiming in a joint statement that UK-trained students “more often than not lack rigour, technique and performance skills.” The following week saw headlines abound, forums buzz with debate and Dance UK chairman Farooq Chaudhry step down from his post after chiming in to question whether UK dance schools are truly “serving their students.”

Belle Redux

“Belle Redux,” choreographed by Ballet Austin artistic director Stephen Mills and premiered by the company in 2015, is a dark reboot of the 18th-century French fairytale “La Belle et la Bête” (Beauty and the Beast). The two-act ballet was commissioned by the 3M corporation as part of a program to fund innovation in the arts (as part of his research, Mills met with 3M researchers and engineers), so it’s no surprise that it is unlike Mills’s other story ballets. Those ballets, including “Taming of the Shrew” (2004), “Hamlet” (2000), and “Cinderella” (1997), are updated and streamlined versions of the classics, but...

A Language for Life

Sambas, waterslides, live chickens on stage—nobody does dance theatre like Pina Bausch. The late choreographer’s Wuppertal-based company has just wrapped up a tour of “Masurca Fogo,” created during a three-week residency in Lisbon in 1998 as part of her World Cities series, a collection inspired by the cultures of various urban locales, from Rome to Budapest to Los Angeles.

Love, Lust and Death

Rambert are a formidable, ambitious company indeed. Who else could dance to soundtracks as diverse as Scanner, Arnold Schoenberg and South American pan pipes, all on the same bill?

Flowing fabric and ink

It is always an exhilarating experience to leave a dance concert eagerly chatting in agreement with those around you about that one favorite piece. Yet it is perhaps the sign of an even stronger concert when those around you are instead in amicable disagreement, each passionately arguing why his or her favorite piece was the “one.” So was the case with Jessica Lang Dance, presented by Celebrity Series of Boston at the Boch Center Shubert Theatre last week. Highlighting six works from 2006-16, the concert offered a satisfying range of visual intrigue—from the purity of a Bach-accompanied solo with an...

Sadler's Wells Sampled

For the past decade, Sadler’s Wells has kicked off each year with “Sampled,” a two-hour tasting menu of the London dance house’s diverse programming. The show is aimed at new and existing audiences alike, and features snippets from both past commissions and upcoming premieres. Eight performances were on offer for 2017, including ballet, tap and tango numbers, plus a smattering of pre- and post-show music, demonstrations and workshops. The line-up wasn’t as strong as in previous years, but it was high-spirited and suitably varied, celebrating the range of dance styles Sadler’s promotes.

A Bowie Kaleidoscope

“The Bowie Project,” the brainchild of Austin-based choreographer Andrea Ariel, whose other credits include the choreography for the film Waiting for Guffman and a three-part dance-theatre series on the floating garbage patch in the North Pacific Gyre, was an exercise in personae, layering, fragmenting, and improvisation. The performance, which incorporated three dancers, the David Bowie tribute band Super Creeps, and three members of New York’s Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble, utilized Soundpainting, a “composing sign language” invented by musician Walter Thompson. Working with Thompson, Ariel adapted and expanded the vocabulary of music-focused conducting gestures—they look a bit like the gestures one...