Magic Numbers
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.
Continue Reading
Latest
Enduring Magic
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.”
FREE ARTICLE
Love and Loss
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 Reading
A Gala Affair
Since its founding in 2012 by Benjamin Millepied, L.A. Dance Project has not been lacking in talent, ideas, or, fortunately for them, funding, something that most dance troupes desperately need.
Continue Reading
Somewhere and Fearful Symmetries Meet in Doug Varone and Dancers
When a choreographer takes on volcanic and iconic works from American musical giants like Leonard Bernstein and John Adams one move they could take is to cool them down with a couple of more soothing European works in between.
Continue Reading
Bloom Explorations
If you are an insect in the superorder Endopterygota, you have the super ability to experience complete metamorphosis. You can transform from the four stages of life—egg, larva, pupa, adult—in a process called holometabolism.
Continue Reading
The Barest of Margins
The Starlet in the ballroom with the candlestick. Or was it the Mobster in the billiards room with the dagger?
Continue Reading
Timeless
Timelessness is a quality that is hard to pin down. It’s easy to see when a work of art fails to achieve it.
Continue Reading
Music as Muse
Music was muse, medium, and the message during Kyle Marshall Choreography’s recent engagement at the Joyce Theater.
FREE ARTICLE
Power Chords and Enigmatic Moves
WTF! And this reviewer means that in a good way. No, make that a great way! Whatever it was—and is—“takemehome,” the 65-minute work choreographed by Paris, France-based Dimitri Chamblas, was, by turns, provocative, enigmatic, stunning, stirring, singular and, well, something else again.
Continue Reading
Collective Forward Motion
As Ballet West celebrates its 60th anniversary, it is clearly on an upward trajectory. The company is consistently filling seats, tackling more ambitious work, and the company’s first triple bill of the season was no exception.
FREE ARTICLE
From Blossoms to Moss
I’d nearly forgotten the many pleasures of watching dance from a folding chair on a riser in a SoHo loft, sound of sirens and traffic rising from the street outside to compete with the more subtle notes of a cello.
Continue ReadingFeatured Reads
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,...
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading
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 Reading
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.
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading