Tetsuya Kumakawa, In the Comfort Zone
For a man considered an icon in Japan’s performing arts world, Tetsuya Kumakawa, in person, is surprisingly down-to-earth.
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Butoh Reframed
Amelie Ravalec is a London-based French film director and producer, photographer, publisher and colourist. Her internationally screened films include Art & Mind, Paris/Berlin: 20 Years Of Underground Techno and Industrial Soundtrack For the Urban Decay.
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The Dreamer's Life
A stool, a clothesline, a hanging sheet. But for these three things, the stage set for “Woolgathering” was largely empty. “Woolgathering” is a ‘spoken word opera’ directed and composed by Oliver Tompkins Ray with choreography by John Heginbotham, inspired by the poetic memoir by Patti Smith.
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Flaws in the Short Game
The American Ballet Theatre’s opening bill was not a hole-in-one, but the ideas behind the programming were sound: feature a new work that builds upon company traditions (Gemma Bond’s “La Boutique”), push the dancers in a different style by a hot choreographer (Kyle Abraham’s “Mercurial Son”), and show off the troupe’s prodigious technical chops in a grand manner (Harald Lander’s “É tudes”).
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Kitty McNamee, Shining a Light
It’s not every contemporary choreographer who is able to cross over into directing large-scale opera. But that’s precisely what Kitty McNamee has done.
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Good and Evil, Embodied
During opening night of Ballet West’s performance of Val Caniparoli’s “Jekyll & Hyde,” my dad turned to me and said, “I remember you once told me that dancers are telling stories with their bodies.
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Working the Room
In a small white studio space, the line between performers and audience is being blurred. Choreographer Meytal Blanaru, born in Israel but now Brussels based, has devised this piece along with the dancers, and it’s multifaceted indeed, a study in hope and community spirit, with many playful detours along the way.
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An Empire of Florals and Tweed
Staging the biographical details of someone’s life is by no means an easy task; doing so for a figure who was complex and controversial amplifies this charge to a new level.
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Music and Meaning
I’ve been thinking about content for a while now. Without it, blogs, websites, and other social media die. But content, as an adjective, has a different meaning: to be pleased, gratified or even, complacent. It is also the root of the adjective contentious.
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The Tempo is Rising
Artistic director and guest curator for this year’s Tempo Dance Festival in New Zealand is proud Ngāti Tūwharetoa man, Moss Te Ururangi Patterson.
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Innovations Past and Present
The American Ballet Theater’s Fall Season opened at the Koch Theater with a program called “Innovation Past and Present,” which featured two world premieres and a company staple.
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Atonement
When I first read Ian McEwan’s Atonement at university, my lecturer told us that, upon finishing the book, she threw it on the ground.
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Teenage Angst and Institutions
Watching 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,...
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The Me of Today
The 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.
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America, F**K Yeah
After 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.
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Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup
An “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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