World-class review of ballet and dance.
“Carmen” has been in the air this year. Especially at the Kimmel Cultural Campus. Almost as a prelude to the Philadelphia Ballet’s “Carmen,” the Philadelphia Orchestra presented choreographer Brian Sanders’ aerial play on Rodion Shchedrin’s 1967 “Carmen Suite” (created for his wife, the Bolshoi’s Maya Plisetskaya) last March at Verizon Hall.
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In 2019, Pam Tanowitz gripped London with “Four Quartets,” an ode to T.S. Eliot that sparked five-star reviews and declarations of her supremacy in the 21st-century dance theatre scene.
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The Martha Graham Dance Company filled some of the Metropolitan Museum’s most impressive spaces for two full days with pop-up performances of six Graham solos choreographed in the 1930s.
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Malpaso Dance Company brought a vibrant slice of Cuban life to the Joyce last week: virtuosic dance, live music, humor, and of course, the salsa—an element that was ever-present as a through-line for the evening.
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Not for the first time at the Fall for Dance Festival, now in its 20th year, Chippendale’s emerged as the theme of the night. There were 32 male dancers across the three works on the festival’s third program, 31 of whom danced shirtless.
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In 1913, a few weeks before the premiere of his revolutionary “Rite of Spring,” Nijinsky created another, smaller ballet for the Ballets Russes.
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The ballets of George Balanchine are a window into the company he, with the help and support of Lincoln Kirstein, created three quarters of a century ago. The fact that they and the company are still here is a kind of miracle if one thinks of the short afterlife of most ballets. How lucky we are that the two men met, and that Kirstein convinced Balanchine to try his luck in New York.
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Backdropped in layers of flowy plastic sheeting, an enormous inflatable nut brown sow dominates the stage. Projected video make it appear uncannily as if it’s breathing.
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For remote fans of Pacific Northwest Ballet, the curiosity increases as the calendar days tick further beyond the pandemic: How is the company still offering digital recordings of so much of its programming? And how much longer can the company keep offering these? The dread of losing digital access is felt especially after PNB’s latest streaming wonder, a tribute to the theatrical brilliance of Nederlands Dans Theater, danced with such mirth and fluency that you might suspect the performance had been filmed in Amsterdam rather than in Seattle’s McCaw Hall.
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It may not be the height of fashion—a dull grey hoodie worn upside down and backwards—but it certainly served a higher purpose in, “These Are the Ones We Fell Among,” a one-hour duet seen last weekend at the UCLA Nimoy Theater. (Formerly the Crest Theatre, the reimagined movie hall named for the late actor, director, and philanthropist Leonard Nimoy, has a full slate of performances scheduled for its inaugural 2023-24 season.)
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The elegant woman seated next to me at the Sunday matinee was excited to see Sara Mearns in “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” This was high praise, as she had fond memories of Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell in the piece—the ballet’s original 1968 cast.
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There seems to be no clear organizing principle behind the programs at the yearly Fall for Dance festival at New York City Center.
FREE ARTICLEWatching 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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