Moving Mountains
Batsheva Dance Company, under the artistic direction of Ohad Naharin, who led the troupe from 1990 until 2019 (he’s currently House Choreographer), has been an incubator for dancemaking talent. While...
Continue ReadingWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
The crowd of museum goers gathers around from multiple vantage points above and around the tiled, skylit courtyard of the Metropolitan Museum’s Robert Lehman Wing to view the dance performance. Perhaps they have just visited the exhibition Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter in the gallery above and are curious to continue digging into the story of this black artist, enslaved for over two decades in the studio of Spanish painter Diego Velázquez (1599–1660). Maybe they have just learned that seventeeth-century southern Spain had a large enslaved Muslim population forcibly brought from Africa and associated with many of the artists’ workshops and households. And people of color (enslaved and free) accounted for a large percentage of the population and were quite visible in real and rendered everyday life. Juan de Pareja (ca. 1608–1670) eventually negotiated his freedom and went on to become an artistic force in his own right.
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Batsheva Dance Company, under the artistic direction of Ohad Naharin, who led the troupe from 1990 until 2019 (he’s currently House Choreographer), has been an incubator for dancemaking talent. While...
Continue ReadingThe choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.
Continue ReadingThe New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ current exhibition is a dance epic. Full of tragedy and triumph spanning centuries and the globe, “Border Crossings: Exile and American...
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