World-class review of ballet and dance.
Every year at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, I look forward to the Taiwan Season. A curated selection of shows within the organised chaos of the festival, the quality of the dancing is always exemplary. I caught two out of the four shows of this season’s offering.
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How often have you sat in a dance piece that felt too long? Lewis Major’s “Triptych” successfully rises to the challenge of creating an evening of dance, without overstretching an idea into boredom.
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Dance aficionados are on high alert any time there’s a new Bill T. Jones work. That the artistic director/co-founder and choreographer of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company did not make dances for “The Motherboard Suite,” but directed it, still made for a solid evening of dance drama.
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The temperature rose again on Thursday at the Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles’ celebrated outdoor venue, when Spanish-American conductor François López-Ferrer brought the heat to the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a program dubbed “Symphonic Tango & Flamenco.”
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“Life is a thief,” pouts Alan Greig, emerging in the studio space clad in black vest, full skirt and voluminous trousers. Impish and imperious, he becomes Tennessee Williams in waspish mode even as he lies dying, or perhaps he's Blanche Dubois, looking to fill the void.
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This provocative double bill showcases contrasting approaches to the body, and perceptions of how and why they take up and transform the space. It's also a meditation on art as an act of resistance, a form of political liberation.
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The Pilobolus troupe took over the Joyce Theater for three weeks this August with a rotating pair of programs: one was called “Dreams,” the other, “Memory.” Both titles were good catchalls for the company’s signature brand of surrealist, muscular theatricality.
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A unique cooperation by New York City’s five largest dance companies, BAAND Together Dance Festival was conceived as an effort to restart live dance performance after the pandemic.
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Bookending my first day at the Edinburgh Festival are two very different but beautiful performances at the wonderful Dance Base venue in the Grassmarket, Matthew Hawkins’s “Ready” and Christine Thynne and Robbie Synge’s “These Mechanisms.”
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Bharatanatyam soloist, Christopher Gurusamy, describes his practice as purely based on his traditional dance training, Bharatanatyam, an Indian classical dance that originated in the Hindu temples of Tamil Nadu in southern India.
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On a sultry day like this, it might be easy to imagine we’re somewhere in the south, rather than the urban confines of Hearst Plaza, where a small group has gathered, curious about a free event. We’re not quite sure where to sit.
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One night, three premieres, and a mixture of tradition and originality. Queensland Ballet’s “Bespoke” presented new works that playfully experimented with the classical technique in a contemporary setting.
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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