World-class review of ballet and dance.
New York has always been a hub for dance from all over the world, but the last few years, because of the pandemic, have created a sense of isolation. We began to forget how exciting visits by far-off companies can be, how they quicken the senses and renew our admiration for a particular artist, or introduce us to something completely new.
Continua a leggere
The term “wayfinder” has two definitions. The first refers to a sign or landmark that helps navigate people to a specific location; a physical marker guiding people home. The second points toward a traveller; someone who is in search of a particular place. Despite being either subject or object, the two definitions share a commonality—there is an inherent and active search going on. People searching for signs, for each other, and for meaning. The audience, too, walked into this performance searching for their own answers, as individual as they may be. And what they found was the kaleidoscopic brilliance that...
Continua a leggere
In their brand new facility in Sydney’s Walsh Bay, Bangarra Dance Theatre have once again produced an awe-inspiring work, but this time, it might also be their sweetest; their first offering for children: “Waru—Journey of the Small Turtle.”
Continua a leggere
Today I’m speaking with Beau Dean Riley Smith. Beau was born on Wiradjuri Country in Dubbo, Western NSW. But as a little kid the family moved to Culburra on the NSW South Coast where Beau spent his childhood surrounded by siblings, love and chaos while growing up at the beach. Beau didn’t learn to dance as a kid, instead he studied drama in high school, before being accepted into the performance program at WAPPA—the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in Perth.
Continua a leggere
The New York City Ballet opened its Fall Season with a bill of three Balanchine ballets which premiered in a relative cluster: “Divertimento No. 15” (1956), “Scotch Symphony” (1952) and “La Sonnambula” (1960). The first and last of these were reworkings. “Divert” was an update of “Caracole,” a ballet made in 1952 to the same Mozart score, which Balanchine and the dancers had simply forgotten when they tried to revive it four years later. “La Sonnambula,” titled “Night Shadow” until 1961, was originally created for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1946. When taking the first drafts into consideration,...
Continua a leggere
Miles underground, in the Earth’s mantle, Obsidian rock and Wayne McGregor’s “Obsidian Tear” begins. Originally commissioned by the Royal Ballet and Boston Ballet, premiering at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 2016, it is now time for the volcano to erupt for its Australian premiere season at the State Theatre in Melbourne. Six years deep, all that heat and pressure, it has melted to form magma. Slowly rising from the cracks underground in the Earth’s crust, it collects in a holding chamber, but it can only do so for so long.
Continua a leggere
Jennifer Homans, The New Yorker’s dance critic, has written a must-read biography, Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century. While plenty of ink has been spilled about the iconic choreographer, what makes Homans’s work distinct is her ability to get inside his head and capture his spiritual and personal life in graceful, poetic prose. Reading this monumental work felt like a full-bodied experience.
Continua a leggere
Smuin is an unusual company. It was founded by former San Francisco Ballet co-director Michael Smuin in 1994, about a decade after San Francisco Ballet’s board declined to name him the company’s next director. For its first fifteen years, the new eponymous troupe mainly danced Smuin’s over-the-top theatrical spectacles, like “Zorro!” and “Carmina Burana.” When Smuin died suddenly in 2007, his longtime muse Celia Fushille became artistic director. She has continued to feed the audience the hammier Smuin spectacles they love, but she has also considerably stretched the repertory with the addition of works by Trey McIntyre, Stanton Welch, and...
Continua a leggere
If you were to watch Leonardo Sandoval dance from just the ankles up, you might suppose he's skating. He travels so effortlessly across the stage, gently twisting and turning as though gliding on a sheet of ice and guided by the wind. But Sandoval's not an ice skater—he's a tap dancer. Guiding him through space is not a chilly winter breeze but an even, complex, syncopated sense of rhythm.
Continua a leggere
The 85th birthday of Philip Glass was feted to perfection amid the verdant rolling meadows at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in New York State’s Hudson River Valley. Nature conspired in staging an awe-provoking event with the Catskill Mountains as majestic backdrop, surrounding trees as arcaded entranceway for the performers, and clouds arriving on cue to mute the sun’s intensity.
Continua a leggere
A close-up image of white cloth undulates gently on a large projection screen set upstage. In front of it, a cameraman sits behind a table, facing the audience. His lens is trained on the bundle of white cloth draped on an easy chair set immediately downstage, its back to the audience. Underneath the fabric, dancer Albert Silindokuhle IBOKWE Khoza is wrapped up like a mummified king.
Continua a leggere
This return of Miami City Ballet felt like lifting the curtain on a new, wide-open moment. Fifteen years have passed since MCB last visited Berkeley’s Cal Performances; ten years have passed since MCB founding artistic director Edward Villella stepped down. The world is now post-covid (sort of), and the dance world is post-leadership changes at its Balanchine bastion, New York City Ballet. And so, we Californians had a clean stage for seeing what Lourdes Lopez has done with Miami’s Balanchine legacy over her decade of helming the 52-member troupe. What a refreshing view it was.
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.
Continua a leggere
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.
Continua a leggere