Twenty Years of Los Angeles Ballet
The ballet community in Los Angeles, quite large and scattered, is fond of opining that they live in a “tough town for ballet.”
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Refuge and Resistance
In a week of humanitarian crisis, of bodies mobilised and menaced, what a privilege it’s been to take refuge in art that radiates integrity, conviction and splendour.
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Opposite Day
George Balanchine famously said, “ballet is woman.” But unusually, in “Kammermusik No. 2,” he featured an all-male corps de ballet. I can think of one other men-only Balanchine dance, and it happens to be running the same week this winter season: “Prodigal Son.”
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It Takes Two
What makes a good partner? For the dancers of New York City Ballet who are lined up on the stage—KJ Takahashi, Adrian Danchig-Waring, Emma Von Enck, and Sara Mearns—the answer is different, though together, their responses create a pretty comprehensive prescription. A good partner should be collaborative, honest, present, and sensitive.
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Fated Love
San Francisco Ballet artistic director Tamara Rojo has often said she believes ballet should operate more like Broadway, where shows have previews and work through revisions before the real premiere.
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Line Dancing
In general, one knows exactly what to expect of a Pam Tanowitz piece. There will be deconstructed ballet and modern steps.
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New and Old Stories
Two works, separated by a turn of the century. One, the final collaboration between Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane; the other, made 25 years after Zane’s death.
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Rituals of Flesh and Labour
Last December, two works presented at Réplika Teatro in Madrid (Lucía Marote’s “La carne del mundo” and Clara Pampyn’s “La intérprete”) offered different but resonant meditations on embodiment, through memory and identity.
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Feathers Flying
In a world where Tchaikovsky meets Hans Christian Andersen, circus meets dance, ducks transform and hook-up with swans, and of course a different outcome emerges.
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Half the Sky
Mao Zedong’s famous statement that women hold up half the sky may sound poetic and even liberating.
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Agile Masculinity
The men are already on stage when the audience filters into the theater. Some stand stretching at the ballet barres, aligned in neat rows, and others move around, jumping, swinging their legs, lunging.
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Dance Dance Revolution
The questions that the choreographic duo known as Baye & Asa set out to answer in their in-progress work, “At the Altar” may or may not be rhetorical: Who or what do we worship? How do we worship? Who are the righteous? Who are the blasphemous?
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Teenage Angst and Institutions
Watching 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,...
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The Me of Today
The 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.
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America, F**K Yeah
After 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.
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Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup
An “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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