Steps in Time
William Forsythe’s new program for La Scala provides an opportunity to reflect on the direction taken by “contemporary ballet” over several decades.
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Brush up Your Dante
For four weeks in May, Paris Opera Ballet ran contrasting programs in its two homes: at the smaller Garnier, the POB premiere of Wayne McGregor’s “The Dante Project” and, at the Bastille, a program of three Maurice Béjart works from the 1970s.
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Castles in the Sky
Andrea Miller’s Gallim Dance returned to the Joyce Theater, in New York, with a generous program titled “Bodies of Matter” that celebrated the company’s fifteen years.
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Nobody
With “Nobody” from Motionhouse, it’s the second half that’s really worth watching; something gets cleared away, and the show focuses in on the performers themselves.
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Deep River
In other words, “Deep River” was signature King: elongated, oblique moves, accentuated with filigreed arms, and deft and articulated footwork.
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SAB Resets
Last year’s School of American Ballet Workshop performances marked two milestones: Suki Schorer’s 50th anniversary as a teacher, and Kay Mazzo’s retirement from the Chair of Faculty position after 40 years.
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Beauty to my Mind
The elegance of New York’s City Center theater is a good look for Ballet Hispanico. Artistic director Eduardo Vilaro’s vision to champion the work of Latine choreographers is evident in the four featured artists of this program bill.
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“Biéde In Motion”
With backgrounds in planning for iconic Japanese fashion brand Comme des Garçons and archiving for the art industry, Tokyo-based consulting office Kleinstein run by Yusuke and Miki Koishi are real-deal intellectuals with a drive and aim to bring art, fashion and performance to the forefront of cultural consciousness.
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Parks and Rec
The haute joaillerie house Van Cleef & Arpels has a long history of supporting dance, since Louis Arpels attended the Paris Opera Ballet in the 1920s.
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School Report
This year’s San Francisco Ballet School Spring Festival offered a moment to say hello to the company’s next generation of dancers, and goodbye to the leader who shaped them: Patrick Armand, who took over the Trainee Program in 2010 and directed the school since 2017, has just stepped down. In the stark architecture of the Blue Shield Theater lobby, glass cases held photos of Armand, during the dashing prime of his Ballet Theatre Francais career, taking bows alongside Nureyev after a performance of Bejart’s “Song of a Wayfarer.” Meanwhile onstage, a pas de deux by school faculty Viktor Plotnikov best...
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New Meanings
And just like that, another spring season has ended at New York City Ballet. There was much to celebrate, in particular the rise of a new generation of dancers. All at once, the company looks renewed. And in particular, the corps de ballet and soloists, individually and as a whole, rose to challenge after challenge, looking technically strong, assured, full of promise, joyful.
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Gram Technique
If you thought Akram Khan’s 2016 update of “Giselle”—which resituated the 1841 classic to apply to modern migrant workers in a haunted garment factory—was radical, you should see Joshua Beamish’s 2019 “@giselle,” which takes place almost entirely over social media. I should clarify. This is not an online viewing situation, one watches “@giselle” in-person at an actual theater. (To be specific: the NY premiere of “@giselle” was held at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College.) But projections of Instagram-esque formatting, by Brianna Amore, were cast onto a scrim and framed nearly every scene. The flesh-and-blood performers danced...
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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,...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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