World-class review of ballet and dance.
The Bolshoi Ballet recently unveiled a world premiere of “Orlando”—a two-act ballet based on the famous novel by English writer Virginia Woolf. The premiere took place on the Bolshoi Theater’s New Stage on March 24, with the cast led by the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina, Olga Smirnova, in the title role. The ballet was choreographed by Christian Spuck, a German dance-maker, who is currently artistic director of Ballet Zurich.
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Pascal Merighi’s raffish confidence dazzled when I first saw him dance in Pina Bausch’s “For the Children of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He all but hurled dancer Ditta Miranda Jasjfi around his waist as if she were a lifeless rag doll.
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Lillian Barbeito is a dancer, first and foremost. But beyond that, she’s a mover. Perhaps this is why when she has an idea, she can’t sit still. And when she devotes herself to bringing these ideas to life, she doesn’t do it halfway.
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On Thursday, December 3, in honour of the United Nations’ International Day of Persons with Disabilities, the New York City-based, physically integrated dance company Heidi Latsky Dance (HLD) will host an immersive durational performance and living installation “On Display Global” (ODG), in partnership with the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and United Nations. For 24 hours, from midnight to midnight Eastern Standard Time, audiences can tune into Zoom to watch participants from over 100 cities take part in the performance.
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In this era, when we think of dance and the body, we often overlook the material accoutrements and technologies that support and enhance performance. Fortunately, there are many dancers, choreographers, companies and performers who explore the body and its ‘mechanical’ extensions.
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It's being mooted that Tokyo, and Japan as a whole, escaped the full brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic and its catastrophic effect on the world's population and global economy. The number of cases is relatively low when compared to Europe and the US, and the number of deaths or serious cases decreasing daily. When Yuriko Koike, Governor of Tokyo, introduced a lockdown in the spring of 2020 the city became a wasteland for a few months with most people working from home and bars, restaurants and retail stores either closed, operating on limited opening hours or completely empty.
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On September 10th, the Bolshoi Theater opened its 245th ballet season with a surprising premiere. “Four Characters in Search of a Plot” ("Четыре персонажа в поисках сюжета") featured four young international choreographers, making their debut with Russia’s esteemed ballet troupe. Commissioned were an hour-long piece,“The Ninth Wave” by Bryan Arias (Puerto Rico) and three 15-minute works, “Just” by Simone Valastro (Italy), “Fading” by Dimo Milev (Bulgaria) and “Silentium” by Martin Chaix (France).
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Despite what the world is suffering this year, two of Europe’s most prestigious international summer dance festivals commit to go forward with drastically truncated, yet vital and imaginative programs. Berlin’s Tanz im August, under the artistic direction of Virve Sutinen, and the Venice Biennale’s Festival Danza under Marie Chouinard’s curatorial leadership will open in late August and mid-October respectively. Each artistic director spoke with me via Skype and Zoom recently about the hardships and angst of redesigning their festivals during this brutal pandemic. This month, we feature Tanz im August and how they pivoted from cancellation to a ten-day online...
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Like everyone else in the world, I’ve been trying to stay healthy, yet also connected to my work and passions during this abysmal pandemic. It’s a conundrum: I’m a dance critic now, but there are no live dance shows to review. This problem is small beans, of course, in the grand scheme of things. People are dying. People are starving. Life as we knew it has been irrevocably altered. The truly brave and selfless work of all those deemed essential is both humbling and awe-inspiring; I cannot thank these people enough for their intrepid commitment to the human race. But...
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For dancers, moving beyond our comfort zones—the places we know to be familiar and safe—often involve pushing the physical limits of the body, training to extremes to create a new normal. But sometimes going beyond comfort zones can also be an inward action, having the bravery to be vulnerable and let go, trusting the body to move towards its places of intuition and feeling. This is what the Dublin-based Flora Fauna Project has been encouraging everyday people from their community to do.
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Hua Hsu wrote in March for the New Yorker a quarantine-inspired piece about the BBC radio show “Desert Island Discs.” The program, which began during World War II as “part of the BBC’s broader effort to make life during wartime slightly more bearable” as Hsu puts it, presents interviews with cultural icons from various fields who are each asked to prepare a list of eight tracks that they would bring with them were they to be stranded on a desert island. Hsu uses “Desert Island Discs” to further his own investigation of the role of music in our lives and...
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The crowd is the first thing I notice in the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s 2016 performance of “Figure Eights” as part of a performance at Seattle Art Museum. The audience clusters behind the row of six dancers, who are all dressed in casual white shirts and loose, white pants. The audience claps and takes pictures, sits stage-side, heads in their hands, on their phones.
Continue ReadingWatching 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,...
Continue ReadingThe 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.
Continue ReadingAfter 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.
Continue ReadingAn “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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