World-class review of ballet and dance.
A new ballet about Elvis Presley by the ubiquitous Annabelle Lopez Ochoa promised to be a perfect fit for San Francisco’s Smuin Contemporary Ballet; after all, company founder Michael Smuin (1938-2007) never met a pop song he couldn’t craft into a crowd-pleasing ballet ditty. The surprising thing about Ochoa’s “Tupelo Tornado,” though, is that it isn’t any fun.
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For the first time in a year, the Sydney Dance Company is back home in Sydney. After a long hiatus touring the world—a post Covid catch-up tour if you will—the company has arrived in Walsh Bay to present their newest work, the world premiere of “momenta.”
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Grace Maduell Holmes has only been the new director of the San Francisco Ballet School five months, but she’s wasted no time getting ambitious.
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The stage is strewn with potatoes. Single straight back chair, overturned. A canteen. At center is a life scale charcoal sketch, unframed on canvas. It looks like a human figure topped by a dark smudge of a head—the shape calls to mind a famous work of Gustav Klimt.
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How long is their nap?” my three-year-old asked about halfway through the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s performance of “Group Primary Accumulation,” a 20-minute supine dance for four.
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Sacramento Ballet executive and artistic director Anthony Krutzkamp dresses sharp and gives a memorable pre-curtain speech. The way he tells it, the Central California company was in rehearsals for “Swan Lake” last year when he realized he faced an enviable problem: the dancers were too good for the ballets he’d programmed under a five-year plan.
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Though the New York City Ballet’s Spring Gala featured two premieres, the real buzz of the season belonged to the revival of Balanchine’s “Tzigane”—now titled the more politically correct “Errante”—after a 30-year absence.
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An enduring image from Jody Oberfelder’s new site-specific dance “And Then, Now,” is of the lithe, 70-year-old choreographer perched up on a tall hill at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, framed by enormous trees and an expansive blue sky.
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Jukebox musicals tend to come in two packages. The first centers a celebrity musician or musical group and uses the subject's body of work to tell a biographical narrative (“Carole King,” “The Temptations,” “The Four Seasons”).
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I may never know what it is like to be an octopus, but I can begin to imagine what it might be like if I was an octopus.[1] Equally, I may never know what it is like to be a dancer, and someone who communicates with their body, but, thanks to a special in-house showing of Prue Lang’s work-in-progress, “Poesis,” as part of her Australian Ballet’s residency program,[2] I can imagine what it might be like if I were. And so it was, that I found myself once more, in the late afternoon, in the van Praagh studio, of the Primrose...
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It was a tri-polar night—but in a good way—last weekend, with a trio of high-energy, beautifully crafted works performed by the spectacular members of L.A. Dance Project.
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On a mild spring night, the New York City Ballet held a similarly temperate Gala performance. The flower arrangements were lovely, the speeches were okay, the two premieres weren’t bad, and the Balanchine excerpt was sturdy. In almost every way, it was an enjoyable—if not overly momentous—night at the ballet.
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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