World-class review of ballet and dance.
Lights go up on three dancers who sit side by side on the floor in a far corner of the stage, legs outstretched, soles of their bare feet delightfully exposed. Siblings posing for a photo in the backyard? It’s a brief look, like a flashback.
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Mesmerizing to watch? Or commentary on life versus machine? The program performed by Lyon Opera Ballet at New York’s City Center is both. Merce Cunningham’s “Biped” (1999) features a double cast—one of human dancers, and another of computer generated figures.
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Company Grande, a new dance theater project from the Saitama Arts Foundation triumphed in their recent production, “The Rite of Spring.”
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In the second week of February, an ensemble of young and remarkably accomplished dancers presented a lovely and generously conceived programme just beyond the Paris city limits, at the Théâtre des Sablons in Neuilly-sur-Seine, as part of a tour spanning not only several French cities but also Spain, Germany, Switzerland and Malaysia. The evening unfolded as a carefully balanced succession of styles, allowing the dancers to reveal both technical assurance and interpretative maturity. Overall, the cohesion of the ensemble and the clarity of their stage presence matched those of an established professional company. Yet this was not, strictly speaking, the...
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Oh to love and be loved, what a beautiful mess it is. Nobody captures the contradictions of passion quite like Pina Bausch, whose “Sweet Mambo” is cast in her signature silly-meets-sincere mould—another treat for us Bausch bods out here, less fetching perhaps if you’re not a fan of her highly mannered house style.
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Continuing a project launched in 2019, lyrical singer Ekaterina Anapolskaya and former Opéra de Paris sujet, now professor at the ballet school, Gilles Isoart curated an evening of international guests conceived as a celebration of the nineteenth-century heritage.
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London loves Pina Bausch. The Tanztheater legend is an annual fixture at Sadler’s Wells, and her work still manages to be one of the hottest tickets in town.
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I caught the New York City Ballet’s two Winter Season premieres last week, and it seems that opposites are still attracting over at the Koch Theater.
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Created in the early sixties, Glen Tetley’s “Pierrot Lunaire” is a rarely revived little dance oddity.
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The National Ballet of Japan’s annual triple bill of dance, “Ballet Coffret” binged on three neoclassical favorites this year: David Dawson’s “A Million Kisses to my Skin” (2000) Hans van Manen’s “5 Tango’s” (1977) and George Balanchine’s “Themes and Variations” (1947).
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Carolyn Carlson stands as one of the defining figures of contemporary dance. An American visionary shaped by the radical kinetic thinking of Alwin Nikolais in 1960s New York, she arrived in Europe in 1971 as a seismic force, dismantling the rigid hierarchies of the classical world to forge a new path for modernism. In 1974, she was appointed Étoile Chorégraphe, a title created specifically for her at the Opéra de Paris, where she led the pioneering Groupe de Recherches Théâtrales until 1980. Decades later, she would once again redraw institutional boundaries as the founding director of the Venice Biennale’s first...
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The modern classic “Le Parc” by Angelin Preljocaj is a masterpiece that never ceases to interrogate the dialectic of nature and culture, confronting human behaviour as shaped by societal norms or driven by raw emotion.
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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