Elevation

For the first time in six years an international choreographer has created a work on Sydney Dance Company. Spanish superstar Marina Mascarell’s “The Shell, A Ghost, The Host and The Lyrebird” is one of three works being performed at the Sydney Opera House as part of the company's triple bill, “Ascent.” The night brings together three wildly different works, three sublimely different choreographers, and two world premieres.

Rainbow After

In a world in the midst of war, emerging from its post-pandemic slumber, themes and acts of unity, contact and harmony are more than welcome. The differences that make us human are also, dichotomously, the magic that brings us closer together. The subtle nuances of language, the freckles on your skin, the color and glorious hues of your eyes, the food you eat and the mannerisms and peculiarities that identify you as you, are the uncompromising glue that holds us together.  

15 Minutes of FRAME

This time yesterday I was sat on the floor. This time yesterday, at 3pm, in the van Praagh studio, named after Peggy van Praagh, the Australian Ballet’s founding artistic director, at the Primrose Potter Australian Ballet Centre, I was unsure what I’d see, in the truest and best sense of being uncertain. Having taken the lift to level five, the path ahead was unfixed, something of which many tales of curiosity require. I was there to experience “An Afternoon of Work-in Progress Studio Showings” presented by the Australian Ballet as part of the inaugural 2023 FRAME festival program.

Kylin’s Garden

Some years ago, I wrote, “Dance has the power to stir the viewer's innermost longings and outermost visceral reactions. Few choreographers reach into those sensibilities as effectively as Kun-Yang Lin. With quiet power, he arrives at the essence of an emotion—humor, spirituality, anguish, ecstasy—extracts it raw, and then, with quicksilver speed, subtly refines it.”*

When Beauty Awoke

Avenging Angels

“I’m really into vengeance, sadly,” Maurya Kerr told the 92nd Street Y’s Harkness Dance Center director Taryn Kaschock Russell following Kerr’s “black calls to dark calls to deep underneath.” “I try to get it out in my work instead of in person,” Kerr added.

Khansa, Warsha and the Queering of Lebanese Dance

Mo Khansa, who works simply as Khansa, is a radical young Lebanese dance artist, choreographer and singer who interrogates ideas about identity, place, gender, sexuality and autonomy in his incredible work. Influenced by his mother, herself a more traditional type of dancer, and iconic artists like Arca, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bjork and FKA Twigs, his is a singular path. Watching him move feels like being let in on a secret, one which could blow things apart—such is his power.

Friends in High Places

This mixed bill takes its name from the daily barre classes Tiler Peck started hosting on Instagram Live during the 2020 lockdown, an impromptu venture that soon had 15,000 people tuning in to #turnitoutwithtiler. The New York City ballet superstar is a much-loved luminary, known for her sunny energy on and off stage. That vim comes through in this fizzing programme of new and recent work, Peck’s London debut, giving it a warmth that’s often missing from the contemporary ballet sphere, including in NYCB’s slick neoclassical house style.

A Resilient History

Returning after its two-year pandemic hiatus, the 33rd International Conference and Festival of Blacks in Dance kicked off at the end of January with 500 attendees from ten countries convening in downtown Toronto. Hosted in a different North American city each year, the conference visits Toronto for the third time with local co-host dance Immersion, a non-profit organization that produces and promotes dancers and dances of the African Diaspora.

Naharin’s Enigmatic Hora

The Batsheva Dance Company returned to New York City after a four year hiatus for a two-week engagement (February 28-March 12) at the Joyce Theater to perform “Hora,” created by Ohad Naharin. The renowned choreographer, having led this premier dance company of Israel from 1990 to 2018 as artistic director, has shaped an extraordinary company of dancers—creatives in their own right—through his nurturing leadership, visionary approach to dance practice, and his distinctive movement language and toolbox called Gaga. In his current role as house choreographer, he continues to endow Batsheva with a repertoire of bold, characteristic works that are recognized...

Rethinking the Broadway Body

Broadway Bodies is dedicated to “anyone who has ever been told they were too fat, too short, too gay, too disabled, and otherwise too much or not enough to be in a musical.” The book, written by musical theater scholar Ryan Donovan, examines the ways different aspects of identity have historically affected casting on the Great White Way, using shows like A Chorus Line, Dreamgirls, and La Cage aux Folles as case studies to illustrate the issues that arise when bodies are used as an artistic medium.

A New Vision with Melissa Barak

It’s been a good year for women leading ballet companies: In the recent past, Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell took the reins at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago; Tamara Rojo became the first female artistic director of San Francisco Ballet in the troupe’s 89-year history; and Jodie Gates is leading Cincinnati Ballet into a new era.