World-class review of ballet and dance.
Leslie Cuyjet’s “With Marion” opens with a very particular coming-of-age tradition: the cotillion ball. In the the Kitchen’s temporary home at Westbeth, Cuyjet takes over the center of the loft space with a rectangle of screens.
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One of the reasons to see “Is it Thursday Yet?,” the new collaboration between choreographers Sonya Tayeh and Jenn Freeman inspired by Freeman’s diagnosis with Autism Spectrum Disorder, has little to do with the show itself.
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Casting is central to the most recent revival of Pina Bausch’s “The Rite of Spring.” Touring with a new duet entitled “common ground[s],” the mixed bill was put together as an homage to Bausch. While Bausch’s 1975 masterwork features 34 extremely talented, diversely trained dancers from 14 African countries, “common ground[s]” creates an entire universe with just two captivating dancers in their seventies: Senegalese-French choreographer Germaine Acogny, founder of the international education center for traditional and contemporary African dances, Ecole des Sables, and the French dancer Malou Airaudo, who is a former member of Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. The show, co-produced...
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To fell a tree, after determining the fall path, you need to make a notch in the side of the trunk with your chainsaw.
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Paris Opera Ballet presented an all-Robbins program at the Garnier from October 24 to November 10: “En Sol,” “In the Night,” and “The Concert,” all works Jerome Robbins made for New York City Ballet.
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This week at the Joyce, the Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Reflections Festival presented its starriest program yet: “Dancing with Glass: The Piano Etudes.”
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Watching George Balanchine’s “The Nutcracker” the other night at New York City Ballet, I was struck, once again, by the sense of balance it both portrays and embodies.
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As the lights dim in Sadler’s Wells, I am struck by how dark the theatre I’m sitting in is. These few moments before a show begins create a unique situation of near complete trust on the audience; there’s no light, natural or artificial.
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During the past ten years, Jody Sperling has created a portfolio of dance works that calls for action to protect and preserve the environment. She has traveled to the Arctic to dance on disappearing ice.
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To stand out in a sea of world premieres, honesty and emotionality are key, if Repertory Dance Theatre’s most recent program, “Venture,” is any indication.
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To Sir Frederick Ashton’s fast footwork and musicality belongs the Australian Ballet’s double bill “The Dream” and “Marguerite & Armand.” To the charming misadventure distillation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream bubbles “The Dream.”
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The moment arrived two-thirds into the program, near the peak of Donald Byrd’s “Love and Loss.” For more than an hour, the beautiful bodies on screen had been doing eloquent things, to curiously numbing effect.
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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