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A Winter's Tale
DANCE FILM | Di Sara Veale

Unpathed Waters

I can still recall the intrigue I experienced when a trailer I saw at the cinema last autumn turned out to be an advertisement for a live screening of the Royal Ballet’s “The Nutcracker.” The prospect of attending the beloved Christmas production remotely—that is, viewing it from seats other than the velvety crimson ones of the Royal Opera House—was, and is, a fascinating compromise indeed. Unlike TV relays or DVD viewings, customary alternatives for catching the troupe's performances, a live screening has the distinct selling point of preserving, in real time no less, the crucial “out” portion of a night...

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Mouth to Mouth
REVIEWS | Di Victoria Looseleaf

Mouth to Mouth

Scott McCabe hops on one leg, his other limb elevated and tucked behind his ear at 6 o’clock (think Stephen Colbert dancing with the Rockettes to Daft Punk as part of his Colbchella week); David Maurice cuts a Nijinsky-esque swath as he leaps through the air; and Danielle Agami, clad in red-trimmed, high-waisted black satin boy shorts and a solitary stiletto boot, whip in hand, her breasts adorned with palm tree-like, er, pasties, could be a terpsichorean dominatrix—or a distant cousin to Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.

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Love is Blind
REVIEWS | Di Gracia Haby

Love is Blind

Dance is music and music is dance and none more so than in “Love is Blind” by choreographer Russell Dumas. What we hear moulds what we see, and what we see moulds what we hear. As befits the black ink setting where faces are glimpsed and bodies are cloaked, this work teasingly and beautifully poses more questions than it seeks to answer, as it looks to renegotiate the terms of engagement of dance and music. This is a work that “investigates the intricate relationship between sight and sound and the somewhat surprising way that hearing trumps seeing.”

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Into the Unknown
REVIEWS | Di Gracia Haby

Into the Unknown

In similar fashion to a time capsule, I am writing down what I think Nat Cursio’s “The Middle Room,” presented by Theatre Works as part of the inaugural Festival of Live Art (FOLA), might be before I see it so as to compare it to the experience of after—Robots in the home and flying cars by 2010! Really? You can’t be serious? In writing down what I expect, as surmised from interviews and descriptions of the performance; I am laying open my anxieties and smallness where the interactive is called for. The name alone—Festival of Live Art—fills this quiet mouse...

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Manon
REVIEWS | Di Gracia Haby

Lavish Farewell

All bathed, all drowned in a golden light. Like Carle Van Loo’s 1737 painting, Halt in the Hunt, our stage palette is set. Rusty browns and sandy ochres give way to earthy greens. This is nature, human nature, with all its lust for power and pleasure, its poverty and its rat-catchers, harlots, and spinsters jostling side-by-side. Our eye, like in that of the painting, is drawn to those of import in blue (des Grieux, our romantic, besotted and well-intentioned student-cum-hero) and red (Monsieur GM, “an old voluptuary, who paid prodigally for his pleasures”[note]Abbé Prévost, History of Manon Lescaut and of...

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L.A. Dance Project Ace Hotel
REVIEWS | Di Victoria Looseleaf

Reflections

Dance, architecture and Hollywood came together in a big way when L.A. Dance Project began its residency (performances are also scheduled for the fall) at the new Ace Hotel. And no, this was not a site-specific work danced on the rooftop by the troupe Benjamin Millepied founded in 2012 as an artist collective along the lines of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, but a bona fide concert presented on stage of the hip hotel’s theatre.

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A Month in the Country
FEATURES | Di Stephanie Jordan

A Month in the Country

In the following essay, Stephanie Jordan elucidates the method and meaning of the music selected for Frederick Ashton's “A Month in the Country” It comes from Following Sir Fred's Steps - Ashton's Legacy, the published proceedings of the conference on the choreographer and his work, held at Roehampton University in 1994, and edited by Stephanie Jordan and Andrée Grau. This essay is expanded upon in Stephanie Jordan's 2000 publication, Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet (London: Dance Books), pages 245-64.

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Blizzard
INTERVIEWS | Di Penelope Ford

Serendipity and Seagulls

I was introduced to Melbourne-based choreographer Nat Cursio via her work, “Blizzard,” created and performed at the lovingly restored utility-turned-arts-venue, the Substation, in Newport, Melbourne. It made the whole building sing. “Private Dances II” is the work of Nat Cursio as curator; the second piece I inhabited for a brief moment. Each has the effect of building a world around you, as the audience—although one feels slightly more privileged than the ordinary dance-goer with a Cursio work. Her upcoming work, “The Middle Room” is a piece for a single viewer (“participant”) at a time, set in her very own apartment....

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Harry
REVIEWS | Di Victoria Looseleaf

And all that Jazz

Ballet and jazz can make for some interesting, if occasionally odd bedfellows. Throw in some cookware and neo-Pina Bausch gestures, and a program could turn raucous, joyful and, well, neither balletic nor jazzy. At least that was the case when BJM took to the stage of the Wallis, Southern California’s newest entry into the performing arts arena, where, happily, its 500-seat Bram Goldsmith Theater is a welcome—and spectacular—venue for dance (theater and music also co-exist here in the heart of Beverly Hills).

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Casse-Noisette Compagnie
REVIEWS | Di Victoria Looseleaf

Through the Snow, Glitter

This is decidedly not your mother’s “Nutcracker!” Sure, there’s that big, beautiful Tchaikovsky score—played by the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra under the deft baton of Nicolas Brochot—as well as a little girl called Clara (an enchanting Anjara Ballesteros), who dreams that her toy soldier will one day be her main squeeze (Stéphan Bourgond). But as for Drosselmeyer, this is where any resemblance to those many “Nutcrackers” of Christmas Past ends.

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The Inkomati (dis)cord
REVIEWS | Di Apollinaire Scherr

Fault Lines

“The Inkomati (dis)cord”—a world-travelling collaboration between dance-theatre artists Boyzie Cekwana of Soweto and Panaibra Canda of Maputo, Mozambique—ends on a bright, sardonic note, with a multilingual game of “Telephone.” The words travel down a bench of performers—from Portuguese, Mozambique’s official language, to Sena, one of its native languages, back to Portuguese, and finally to South African English, all of which, including the English, appears in English surtitles on a screen behind the action. As for the story, a woman’s dangerous border-crossing becomes, by the end of the line, a bid for a boob job and a bucket of KFC.

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Diana Vishneva
REVIEWS | Di Victoria Looseleaf

Woman in a Room

Every era has its balletic superstars. From the early 18th century rivals, Marie Sallé and Marie Camargo, through the Romantic period’s Marie Taglioni (the world’s first “La Sylphide”), who was so adored that a male fan allegedly ate her slipper, ballet has mostly been about feminine mystique, beauty and allure. The beginnings of the 20th century saw those ideals embodied in Anna Pavlova, whose “Dying Swan” captivated the world and who may have been the first ballerina to embrace branding, endorsing beauty products and department stores, as well as gracing the pages of fashion magazines.

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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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