World-class review of ballet and dance.
We are inside the Sydney Opera House for what is perhaps the most anticipated Australian Ballet performance of the year—opening night of the Australian Ballet’s contemporary triple bill for the 2019 season, “Verve.”
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It wasn’t exactly Coachella, but the crowds—if not all of the performances—were inspired. Most inspired of all, perhaps, was the producer and champion of dance in Los Angeles, Deborah Brockus. An unsung hero who is not only a choreographer, artistic director and teacher, the fiery redhead is also an indefatigable impresario who continues to make sure that local dance troupes are seen on stages throughout L.A.
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The small group of dancers that comprise BalletBoyz, in decidedly flammable-looking and garish shellsuits (scourge of fashionistas everywhere in late ’80s-early ’90s Britain) flex, clench fists, and strike up archery poses. It's all about the posturing, here. This provocative, playful piece, “Them,” a collaborative, improvised piece by the company, is all gestural, indicative and suggestive of the shapes teenage boys throw when trying to win over their peers. It's not about mating, or anything cumbersome like that; rather, it is a bonding process between ‘bros.’
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To give an idea of Cunningham—the heightened attention his dances afford, at the base of which is a faith that every atom of life counts, though it may skitter by too fast to be counted—I sometimes turn to Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The farmer is behind his plough, the shepherd has turned from his flock to gaze abstractedly at a leafy tree, the merchant ship rushes toward the bright horizon with the wind bowling the sails, when Icarus drowns. In Cunningham, Icarus would go unnamed—no myth to add import to a boy’s drop into a smudge of...
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Sydney Dance Company celebrates its 50th anniversary this year with a program of three vibrant and divergent works. The celebratory performance is titled Season One: Bonachela/Nankivell/Lane, somewhat quirkily, neither alphabetical nor the order in which the works are performed. Oddities aside, it features brand new dances by Rafael Bonachela, who is celebrating ten years as the company's artistic director; a new work by Gabrielle Nankivell who previously choreographed “Wilderbeest” to great acclaim for SDC; and finally “WOOF” by Melanie Lane. “WOOF” was commissioned for Bonachela’s choreographic development program New Breed in 2017, and on opening night it made its mainstage...
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Wings have long held a special significance in ballet. In “Swan Lake,” Odette’s feathery port de bras become a devastating symbol of her captivity; in “La Sylphide” the titular sylph loses her wings, and her life, in an ill-fated embrace. Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s “Broken Wings” is one of the latest ballets to harness this freighted imagery, albeit more loosely. Created in 2016 for English National Ballet and reprised as part of ENB’s new “She Persisted” bill, the production is a vibrant tribute to the painter Frida Kahlo, capturing the existential heartbreak she suffered when a bus crash at the age...
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Having retired as a dancer from Scottish Ballet in 2017, artist-in-residence choreographer Sophie Laplane always delights in anything she turns her hands to. Her new world premiere, created to mark the company's fifty year anniversary, “Dextera,” is really rather special, characterised by her typically wicked wit and imagination.
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When Queen Victoria died in 1901, her youngest daughter, Beatrice, took it upon herself to ‘edit’ her late mother’s diaries for the public—a deed once deemed “the greatest act of censorship in history.” For better or worse, Beatrice revised the unsavoury aspects of Victoria’s memoir and excised others altogether, shaping the triumphant biography that lives on today. This process of transcription—in particular, the dilution that occurs when we reinforce attenuated versions of truth—drives Cathy Marston’s new production for Northern Ballet, a metanarrative that filters Victoria’s life story through the dual lens of her own recorded memories and Beatrice’s revamp. It’s...
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“Apollo” is about poetry, poetry in the sense of a brilliant, sensuous, daring, and powerful activity of our nature . . . Balanchine has told this metaphysical story in the concrete terms of classical dancing, in a series of episodes of rising power and brilliance. Extraordinary is the richness with which he can, with only four dancers, create a sustained and more and more satisfying impression of the grandness of man’s creative genius . . .”[note]Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)[/note] So wrote Edwin Denby, eloquently and incisively describing the very essence of George...
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Let’s be frank: “I Married an Angel” is a terrible musical. It has mediocre songs, a cockamamie plot, a bad book, and seriously dated jokes. But I think everyone involved in the current Encores! revival knew that going into it. The reason for its resurrection overlooked these factors. City Center’s 75th anniversary season includes many tributes to George Balanchine, who choreographed the original “Angel” production for his first wife Vera Zorina. In a kismet confluence, Broadway choreographer Joshua Bergasse helmed this incarnation and made the dances for his new wife, the New York City Ballet principal Sara Mearns, in her...
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Catherine Hurlin, a soloist with American Ballet Theatre, and Siphesihle November, a corps de ballet dancer with the National Ballet of Canada, each won the 13th International Competition for the Erik Bruhn Prize held on Saturday, March 23, at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.
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It is the smell of composted ingredients I notice first as I make my way along the passage. A blend of animal manure, rainforest mulch, leaf mould, washed river sand, and loam, giving off that warm garden smell. A mound of steamy soil, piled high in the Magdalen laundry[note] Magdalen laundries, Abbotsford Convent, accessed March 22, 2019 [/note] of the Abbotsford Convent; a soil mix for holding moisture in a space still damp from its history. Soil might be a source of nutrients for growth, but in the dirt and dust and sadness of the laundry, its steam is overpowering...
Continua a leggereWatching Matthew Bourne's reworked version of the “star-cross'd lovers,” I was briefly reminded of Veronica, played by Winona Ryder, in the dark 1988 comedy by Daniel Waters and Michael Lehmann, Heathers, and her line, “my teen angst bullshit has a body count.” Yes, this is the darker side of Bourne's repertoire,...
Continua a leggereThe choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.
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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.
Continua a leggereAfter a week of the well-balanced meal that is “Jewels”—the nutritive, potentially tedious, leafy greens of “Emeralds,” the gamy, carnivorous “Rubies,” and the decadent, shiny white mountains of meringue in “Diamonds”—the New York City Ballet continued its 75th Anniversary All-Balanchine Fall Season with rather more dyspeptic fare.
Continua a leggereAn “Ajiaco” is a type of soup common to Colombia, Cuba, and Peru that combines a variety of different vegetables, spices, and meats.
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