World-class review of ballet and dance.
Cincinnati Ballet’s “Carmina Burana” and “Extremely Close” formed the second program of its 2022-2023 season, led by new artistic director, Jodie Gates. Pairing Nicolo Fonte’s powerful “Carmina Burana” with Alejandro Cerrudo’s tantalizing “Extremely Close” was a match made in heaven, showcasing the breadth and versatility of the company’s dancers.
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We all know the sensation that comes once in a while during a performance, when something extraordinary happens onstage, time stops, and the audience and performers seem to co-exist within the same thrilling, elevated bubble. That magic only happens in live performance. But during the pandemic, one dance for online consumption, came close, and that was Ayodele Casel’s tap evening “Chasing Magic.”
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In her career as a performer, Stefanie Batten Bland assembled a CV filled with prestigious dancemakers. She has worked with Bill T. Jones, Lar Lubovitch, Sean Curran, Angelin Preljocaj, Julie Taymor, and Pina Bausch, any of which may have left an imprint on her creative process. In the case of “Embarqued: Stories of Soil” I couldn’t help but feel an echo of Bausch’s Tans Theater Wuppertal, both in its structure and production values. Batten Bland, an award-winning choreographer and filmmaker in her own right, makes good magic with elegant costuming, sculptural props, original sound score, delicious abstract movement, and a...
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Watching Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan in “13 Tongues,” two impressions dominate. The first is that the dancers use their bodies like calligraphers, producing a constant trailing of elegant lines that linger in the mind’s eye like brushstrokes. The second impression is that, as a group, the dancers roil like mercury around the stage, a soloist or duo pulling away only to be sucked back into the mass via forces of atomic attraction.
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Two nights before I saw the third and final instalment of DanceX, presented by the Australian Ballet, a juvenile Bar-tailed Godwit set the world record for continuous flight, flying 13,560km (8,435 miles) from Alaska to Tasmania.[note]Graham Readfearn, ‘Bar-tailed godwit sets world record with 13,560km continuous flight from Alaska to southern Australia’, The Guardian, October 27, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/27/bar-tailed-godwit-sets-world-record-with-13560km-continuous-flight-from-alaska-to-southern-australia, accessed October 30, 2022.[/note] Satellite tag number 234684 completed their marathon voyage in 11 days. By shrinking their internal organs to make room for fat stores, Bar-tailed Godwits are astonishing.
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Talk about in-your-face ballet! “Be Here Now,” a one-hour abstract work choreographed by Benjamin Millepied, who founded his L.A. Dance Project in 2012, was thrilling, energetic and insanely beautiful. Under the banner of “Dance Reflections,” and presented in partnership with Van Cleef & Arpels (would that the French luxury jewelry company spread its baubles/euros around to more L.A.-based dance troupes), the company premiered the work in June at its black box studio in the City of Angels and was mounted there again last week. (The troupe also did a brief stint at Paris’ Théatre du Châtelet in mid-October, when “Be...
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In the second week of its fall season at Lincoln Center, American Ballet Theatre introduced a series of mixed bills that combine new and older works. The elder statesman here is Frederick Ashton. His ballet “The Dream,” from 1964, is a miraculous work that combines the most refined comedic timing—all musically-based—with amazing narrative clarity and gorgeous through-the-body movement that sends shivers through the spine. How did Ashton accomplish something so full in just one act? Aspiring choreographers should be forced to study “The Dream” in school, the way sculptors study statuary.
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At the Koch Theater, it is fairly easy to catch a ballet version of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” set to Mendelssohn. Likewise, a silly, yet bravura, dance loosely scaffolded by The Four Seasons is regularly programmed there. But these statements are only true when the choreographers are George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, not Frederick Ashton and Alexei Ratmansky. During week two of American Ballet Theater’s Fall Season at the Koch, it was a little surreal, yet illuminating, to see variations on perennial New York City Ballet rep more regularly performed across the plaza at the Metropolitan Opera House. ...
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There's a clip from “Twyla Moves,” the PBS American Masters episode about Twyla Tharp, of Tharp rehearsing with dancers in Central Park. It's from 1969: They were wearing regular street clothes, kicking and turning, throwing their bodies up and across, down and around as baby carriages, football players, and police on horseback meandered through them. Indifferent towards aesthetic perfection or public perception (not to mention whether or not their sneakers got stained), the dancers launched themselves through the park, falling and flying to the point of exhaustion.
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The night begins with a homophone. With a playful swap of the knowing word ‘knew’ for a word that sounds the same when you speak or read it, but which now conjures up things shiny and in the present: ‘new.’ Johan Inger’s high-spirited, wistful memory, “I New Then” premiered in 2012, but it looks back further still, to what we now know was a ‘new’ time, one “that was both pure and simple but with the distinct challenges of becoming an adult.”[note]Johan Inger, “I New Then” choreographer’s statement, https://www.johaninger.com/#/i-new-then, accessed October 21, 2022.[/note] With an invitation to “walk and talk...
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Fouad Boussouf’s “Näss” (the title means “people,” in Arabic) is a dance for seven men from his company Le Phare, set to an hour’s worth of intensely rhythmic, often trance-like music. The men are strong, and focused, at times vulnerable, at times aggressive, but never less than compelling. As their bodies submit to, and then begin to bend, the rhythm, they seem to take part in rituals, either private or shared. Eventually each man peels away from the group and erupts into a solo—if it were a play, these would be monologues. Each seems to express a different emotion: solitude,...
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A breath of fresh, brilliant, joyous—and much needed—air blew into BroadStage on Thursday for the world premiere of Mark Morris’ “The Look of Love.” Co-commissioned by a national consortium of arts presenters, including BroadStage, the work is set to music from the vast cannon of multi-Grammy-award winning pop composer and songwriter, 94-year old Burt Bacharach, with lyrics by his frequent collaborator, Hal David, who died in 2012.
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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