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“Sea of Troubles” through a New Lens
INTERVIEWS | Di Rachael Moloney

“Sea of Troubles” through a New Lens

Kenneth MacMillan created the short expressionist ballet “Sea of Troubles” in the late 1980s. The work draws on Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, and its central theme is Hamlet’s mental state following the suspected murder of his father, the King. As in many of MacMillan’s creations, an exploration of darker aspects of the human psyche underpins the ballet, whose nine scenes chart Hamlet’s journey as he becomes consumed with the desire for revenge and questions about guilt, morality, death, and what is true and false.

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Room for Manoeuvre
REVIEWS | Di Victoria Looseleaf

Room for Manoeuvre

There were shots fired—blanks, of course—when the New York-based Paul Taylor Dance Company, founded in 1954, opened the 20th season of Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center during the last weekend of April. Indeed, in a concept program of three anti-war works, which may have looked good on paper, the program mostly misfired, none of the works more than Lauren Lovette’s world premiere, “Dreamachine.”

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Locke-step with Ligia Lewis
INTERVIEWS | Di Victoria Looseleaf

Locke-step with Ligia Lewis

As a choreographer and dancer who conceives and directs experimental performance, Dominican-born, Florida-raised Ligia Lewis is not shy about expressing her opinions, whether in an interview, on stage, or in real life. Indeed, with her most recent work, “A Plot/A Scandal,” which has its U.S. premiere in Los Angeles at the Geffen Contemporary at Museum of Contemporary Art, May 5-6, Lewis once again pulls no punches as she weaves together historical, anecdotal, political, and mythical narratives as only she can.

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A New Kind of Ballet Romance
BOOKSHELF | Di Sophie Bress

A New Kind of Ballet Romance

Thinking of a ballet-world novel, there are certain things that might come to mind: an illicit relationship between a young female dancer and a (usually significantly) older male choreographer, a backstabbing betrayal between dancers who compete for said choreographer’s attention, glass in pointe shoes as revenge . . . You know the drill. All these tropes—and more—are thrown out the window in Chloe Angyal’s debut novel, Pas de Don’t.

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Love and Loss
REVIEWS | Di Rachel Howard

Love and Loss

The final weeks of San Francisco Ballet’s ninetieth season brought a flurry of news, intrigue, and emotion. On April 20, the company announced an ambitious 2024 season, the first programmed by new artistic director Tamara Rojo. The next morning, the company dropped a bomb: executive director Danielle St.Germain had just resigned after barely a year in the job. Given that SF Ballet offered no reason for the resignation and the enthusiastic way St.Germain had positioned herself as co-leader with Rojo, speculation flew as to whether St.Germain had feuded with the board or Rojo or both. As I write this, news...

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Beneath the Surface
REVIEWS | Di Rachel Howard

Beneath the Surface

At the high point of Hope Mohr’s new hour-long “Horizon Stanzas,” the three dancers announce, in a zombie monotone, “I knew what to do now.” They crawl to the wall to scribble makeup on their faces. Then Suzette Sagisi buries her head in The Joy of Cooking and sobs about mayonnaise, Belinda He maniacally scrubs herself with a kitchen brush, and Tegan Schwab-Alavi stuffs potatoes and squash into her bra. (The vegetables keep tumbling out, making for classic slapstick.)

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A Mixed Bag
REVIEWS | Di Marina Harss

A Mixed Bag

Some programs at New York City Ballet feel like a well-balanced meal; others, like a hodgepodge. The “Masters at Work: Balanchine & Robbins 2” program, which I caught last week, fell into the latter category, as if the company had put together a program from bits and pieces left over from other programs.

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In the Ring
REVIEWS | Di Marina Harss

In the Ring

There are moments during boxing matches when the two combatants lean into each other, their bodies interlocking in an embrace. They linger there until the referee intercedes, pulling them apart. At those moments you realize that they are as close to each other as two humans can possibly be, vulnerable, exhausted, in pain, set apart from the audience by their herculean strength and effort. At that moment, nothing else really exists for them outside of that embrace. The audience is irrelevant.

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New Balance
REVIEWS | Di Merilyn Jackson

New Balance

Nothing becomes a legend like getting two National Medal of Arts awards from two different presidents. As Philadanco! founder, Joan Myers Brown received one from Barack Obama for her powerful effect on American dance over the past six decades. And in March, she received another from President Joseph R. Biden as a co-founder of the International Association of Blacks in Dance (IABD.) Early members such as Cleo Parker Robinson Dance, Dayton Contemporary Dance and Lula Washington Dance Theatrewere on board when they launched in 1988.

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Enchanted Evening
REVIEWS | Di Karen Hildebrand

Enchanted Evening

We enter off the commercial retail strip of Broadway into a whimsical garden of cardboard cut-outs painted in shades of neon pink, orange, and green by the artist Mimi Gross. The gleaming wood floor of the fully functional dance studio is now bordered with flowering hedges, mirrored wall draped in leafy boughs, the glass itself painted as an enchanted forest. It all seems to quiver under the glow-in-the-dark lighting design of Lauren Parrish. As if a salve for a troubled and contentious world, Douglas Dunn has turned his SoHo loft into a lush “Garden Party,” filled with poetry and music...

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Back to the Barre
OTHER | Di Sophie Bress

Back to the Barre

The first time I slid on my well-worn Grishko canvas ballet slippers and placed my left hand on the barre after two years away, it felt like a homecoming. There were many other things I expected to feel during that first class: trepidation, perhaps even some embarrassment. But that day I only felt pride—at the fact that my body was still capable of many of the movements I’d spent years perfecting—and joy—at the fact that I was finally practicing them again.

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À la Française
REVIEWS | Di Marina Harss

À la Française

Why program George Balanchine’s 1968 ballet “La Source” with Alexei Ratmansky’s 2010 “Namouna, A Grand Divertissement,” as New York City Ballet has done this season? The thing that binds the two ballets together is a similar spirit, born of their common origin: the Paris Opéra. Both are set to lustrous music composed by 19th century French composers (Léo Delibes and Édouard Lalo) for grandiose ballets filled with adventure and set in magical locales. Both Balanchine and Ratmansky have dispensed with their original plots, to differing degrees—Ratmansky keeps the whiff of a story and the notion of characters with specific traits,...

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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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