World-class review of ballet and dance.
Though it lags somewhat in the middle, this four-part bill is robust and stimulating. The intricate music of London-based contemporary composer Thomas Adès unites the pieces, each of which features the musician conducting from the pit or tickling the ivories on stage. Adès' participation in the programme elevates it greatly, breathing life into his already vigorous notes so that they form an integral and unforgettable element of the performance.
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Jasmin Vardimon is the artistic director of Jasmin Vardimon Company, founded in 1997, and has been an associate artist at Sadler's Wells since 2006. Her career spans more than two decades, and she's received numerous accolades for her contributions to the dance world, including an honorary doctorate from Royal Holloway, University of London, awarded in July 2014.
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Who knew that when modern dance legend Martha Graham teamed up with Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild in 1964 to be artistic advisor of an Israeli dance troupe (Graham held the role until 1975), that the company would not only be going strong 50 years later, but would be at the forefront of contemporary dance. That fact, of course, has to do with the iconoclastic choreographer Ohad Naharin, who has helmed the 34-member troupe since 1990, his full-bodied dancemaking never failing to astonish, mesmerize and awe.
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A day before Halloween, and Anastasia Adani doesn’t have a costume. “We’re going trick-or-treating anyway. I don’t know how I haven’t been fired as a wife and a mother—I’m here all the time,” she says, gesturing to one of three cavernous studios, home to her creative agency, A Plus Creative. Ms. Adani is the visionary behind the short film Lost in a Dream, featuring principal dancer Svetlana Lunkina. The film, evoking the ethereal, fairy-tale romanticism of the ballet, was made in collaboration with the National Ballet of Canada, and Toronto-based fashion designer David Dixon.
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When it was founded in 2012 by Benjamin Millepied, L.A. Dance Project was touted as some kind of second coming for the dance scene in Los Angeles. It’s too bad, then, that the 9-member troupe is rarely in town and that its home, the Theatre at Ace Hotel, a refurbished United Artists movie palace originally co-founded by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith, has extremely bad sight lines and a small stage for dance. That the audience can also bring in food and drink (popcorn, wine and whatever), is another reason the venue is a less than...
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Forget crooning crockery; it’s waltzing pigs and jazz-dancing ravens in David Bintley’s “Beauty and the Beast,” a glittery production with a green twist. Bintley’s version reframes the fairytale as a pro-conservation allegory: an arrogant prince with a heartless hunting habit is cursed into living as a beast himself among the very animals he once targeted. The eco slant calls to mind Bintley’s excellent “Still Life at the Penguin Café” in its manifest respect for the natural world, though “Beast” is less of an admonitory tale than one focusing on personal redemption.
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Equal parts dystopian horror show and raucous romp, Matthew Bourne’s “Lord of the Flies” is a firecracker of a production. Over two acts, nine members of Bourne’s New Adventures and 22 locally sourced teenagers retell William Golding’s allegorical tale of marooned British schoolboys and their atavistic descent.
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The ritual began the moment I entered the upstairs studio at Dancehouse. Correction, the ritual began before that. As befits a work which looks at the liminal space between states, and between performer and audience, unbeknownst to me, it began in the series of actions I undertook to dress and walk around the corner to Dancehouse, ready to fill my agreed role as ‘audience member’ awaiting ‘a performance.’
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After an inexplicable 10-year absence from the City of Angels, this 44-year old, Rochester, N.Y.-based troupe roared back into town with power, grace and its unique brand of high-octane ebullience, courtesy of Ebony Repertory Theatre’s Wren T. Brown. The timing, as it were, couldn’t have been more propitious: It was recently announced that the smash Broadway hit, “The Lion King,” choreographed by Tony award-winning Garth Fagan and directed by Julie Taymor, had become the most successful work of entertainment in history. Besting the box office of films including Titanic and Avatar and stage shows such as “Phantom of the Opera,”...
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Flourishing his sword in the air, the Nutcracker cried aloud, “Crack—crack—crack—stupid pack—drive mouse back—stupid pack—crack—crack—mouse—back—crick—crack—stupid pack.”[note]E. T. A. Hoffman, Nutcracker and Mouse-King, trans. Mrs. St. Simon, (New York, 1953) 36. Viewed online at American Libraries archive.org.[/note] In the beginning, in the words of E. T. A. Hoffmann, there was a “hateful” Mouse-King with fourteen eyes and seven heads who gnawed with sharp teeth at the gingerbread and sugar-plums. In the beginning there was a Mouse-King and his ragged army to defeat. A dancing cast, there on the page, their actions written as sounds, ripe for musical translation and, arguably, the...
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In 1924, Captain John Noel, with the aid of his hand-cranked camera (and steel nerves, I wager) captured footage of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine’s infamous attempt to climb Everest in all its beauty and brutality. The footage, recently restored by the British Film Institute National Archive in The Epic of Everest: The official record of Mallory and Irvine’s 1924 expedition (with a score composed, orchestrated and conducted by Simon Fisher Turner), saddles a backpack to the shoulder of the viewer even by today’s standards, and leaves me in little doubt as to the majesty of such an environment. Alongside...
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Ako Kondo in Stanton Welch's “La Bayadère.” Photograph by Lynette Wills
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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