World-class review of ballet and dance.
In the Upstairs Studio at Dancehouse, Rosalind Crisp hands me a small card which invites me to “Please sit where you want and move wherever you want.” She motions to the small light fixture on the wall, should I need it, to illuminate the printed text.
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The porous borders of Rafael Bonachela’s “I Am-Ness,” Marina Mascarell’s “The Shell, A Ghost, The Host & The Lyrebird,” and Antony Hamilton’s “Forever & Ever,” when viewed as a collective, make a visionary trance, as Sydney Dance Company’s triple bill “Ascent” inhabits the stage at the Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne.
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What could be better than a performance of Merce Cunningham’s “Beach Birds” on the actual beach? On a rainy Saturday in late August, the clouds parted in time for a committed crowd of dance lovers to make way by subway and ferry to Rockaway Beach, and gather at Beach Street 108, where a band of confident dancers marched across the sand to perch themselves on the rocks of the jetty.
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Jacob’s Pillow, Vail, Saratoga, Kaatsbaan, Lake Tahoe, Nantucket, Fire Island. There are numerous summer festivals that feature world-class dancing in gorgeous natural landscapes around the US But the Battery Dance Festival, now in its forty-second year, is one of the few to offer soft grass and warm breezes as well as the glinting edges of the New York City skyline at sunset.
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The annual Tanz im August, a contemporary dance festival in Berlin, draws in hundreds of spectators and dance companies from around the world. This year, two companies with West African roots proved particularly popular: Nadia Beugré’s Libr’Arts and Serge Aimé Coulibaly’s Faso Dance Theatre.
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While the US Congress is still out on summer recess, CONGRESS VIII is alive and kicking, as well as spinning, vamping, breaking, and, well, blowing the roof off of the intimate L.A. Dance Project space, where eight cutting-edge commercial choreographers and a bevy of top-notch dancers dazzled the crowds in three sold-out performances over the weekend.
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For the fifty-seventh year of its summer residency in July at Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC), upstate in Saratoga Springs, the New York City Ballet brought three programs.
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Ilter Ibrahimof is the cofounder and artistic director of Toronto’s Fall for Dance North festival. Held annually since 2014, FFDN is a Canadian offshoot of the beloved New York City Center series.
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The inaugural season of “Escalator,” presented by Stephanie Lake Company in association with Abbotsford Convent, begins with the slow traction of Kady Mansour dressed head to toe in white as a tampon, replete with two strings around each ankle, and concludes with two dancers dressed as mirrored disco balls, declaring to the audience that they are “strong enough / to live without [us]” as they rewind and rotate on the dancefloor to Cher’s “Strong Enough.”
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In downtown Chicago, 100-foot-tall dancers glide along the Chicago River. Projected onto the enormous digital installation Art on The Mart, the dancers of the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project look like ancestral spirits keeping watch over the city.
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Has any choreographer extracted as much value from the chug step as Mark Morris? Jerome Robbins came close in “Glass Pieces,” and George Balanchine gave chugs some big moments in “Apollo,” but Morris consistently uses the simple move to demonstrate a profound musicality.
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For thirteen years, from 2011 until this summer of 2023, Virginia Johnson was Dance Theatre of Harlem’s artistic director.
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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