World-class review of ballet and dance.
Geometrically speaking, a line is a symbol of freedom: A figure formed between two points, the ends are limitless, extending to infinity. In Baye & Asa's “HotHouse,” lines are binding rather than liberating. The duo Sam “Asa” Pratt and Amadi “Baye” Washington are stuck in a large, rectangular plexiglass structure. They pace in linear patterns back and forth, unable to escape the confines of four finite walls.
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House lights are still up as Tommie-Waheed Evans' "Bodies as Sites of Faith and Protest" begins. A group of dancers in all black step on stage, marching and clapping in time. Facing in toward each other, they are unified and mission-driven. Suddenly, a single dancer emerges from the group singing the folk song "We Shall Overcome." He walks carefully straight ahead, proclaiming the Civil Rights anthem to the audience. The lights dim.
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As “’lectric Eye” opens, a group of 14 bursts onstage, stepping in formation as runway fashion model swagger meets drill team precision. They criss cross the stage, arms swinging, hips gyrating, assorted gold and coppery mylar apparel flashing. It’s sexy, glitzy and mind-boggling in its intricate unison. As a group they step, turn, lunge, plié, kick, dip, relevé—constantly changing direction to a droning disco beat punctuated by the sound of drumsticks. Sound and movement are equal partners in choreographer Joanna Kotze’s work, and for “’lectric Eye,” musical collaborator, Ryan Seaton, emerges from the sound booth to perform a fully integrated...
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The stage is an orange box, with three simple long benches pushed against the walls. A dancer enters in silence, barefoot, dressed in a dark tunic with a collar that stands up at the neck and a bulbous skirt resembling petals of a flower. Other dancers arrive, men and women dressed alike. They take a seat, two to a bench. I imagine a Shaker gathering, austere and pensive. As the house lights go down and the music rises, the performers stand and take up a ritualistic stepping from side to side in unison. The flicking and scraping of bare feet...
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“Call it culture.” This short phrase acted as the backbone of “Curriculum II,” a new work from the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. Uttered as a satirical refrain or in bold type, floating in the numerous screens as a reprimand, this barb reappeared continually like so many tiny vertebrates supporting the structure of a complex and at times, unwieldy, composition.
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After the comfort-food programming of December, January tends to kick off with prestige offerings and new works. So it was unusual that the first dance show I saw in 2023 featured timeworn ballet standards like “The Dying Swan” and “Paquita.” These warhorses were being performed by the Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, however, so they were not exactly pablum. And to be fair, I caught the Trocks in the third week of their run at the Joyce Theater; so this was, in part, feel-good holiday programming. But though the Trocks have been affectionately spoofing ballet en travesti since 1974,...
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Not satisfied with the lone “Nutcracker” I saw in New York a few weeks back, and finding myself in Florida, I decided to pay a visit to Miami City Ballet’s “Nut” at the Arsht Center in Miami. (After Christmas, the production moves on to West Palm Beach.) The company, whose founding director was Edward Villella, is now headed by Lourdes López. Both spent their careers at New York City Ballet. And given the company’s strong Balanchine lineage, it’s no surprise that it is Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” that is performed here, albeit, since 2017, with new designs by Isabel Toledo (costumes) and...
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You know something is up when, on the Friday night the last weekend before Christmas, “Revelations” is not the peak of an Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performance at City Center. This was not the fault of “Revelations,” which still galvanized the sold-out crowd. But it couldn’t hold a candle to the opener: Ailey’s “Night Creature,” which was brilliantly led by Sarah Daley-Perdomo and danced in front of the Future of Jazz Orchestra, curated by Jazz at Lincoln Center. Throughout the first half of the evening, the pairing of the live band with some of Ailey’s best pieces to Duke...
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Even those who don’t like Rudolf Nureyev as a choreographer (and this writer is among them), cannot fail to appreciate his “Nutcracker,” returning this season to La Scala after a sixteen-year absence. It was foreseeable that the director of the ballet, Manuel Legris, a pupil of the dancer-choreographer and a great performer of his ballets, would dust off the production, allowing few regrets for the previous versions that have passed on the stage at La Scala without leaving a mark: from the bad edition by Nacho Duato to that sadly staged by George Balanchine. The return to a ballet by...
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2022’s abundant, and at times, overwhelming, calendar of dance was a weekly reminder of New York’s place as ‘a’ if not ‘the’ major dance capital of the world. Though the pandemic caused an exodus of artists from the city in search of affordability and space, I was thrilled again and again, by how many have stayed and continued to make powerful work centering their fellow dancers and uplifting their communities. And while there were many singular performances of note—like Jacquelin Harris’s brilliant conjuring of Winnie Mandela in “Survivors” during Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s winter season last week—what has stayed...
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In New York, the year that is drawing to a close was marked by a true return to the pleasure of live performance. Going to the theater felt almost normal again. Sure, theaters were a bit emptier than before the pandemic, and that is understandable. Some people are still nervous about spending hours in close proximity to others, especially now that the masks are coming off. But many are returning, reacquainting themselves with the irreplaceable sensation of sharing time and space with extraordinary performers, knowing that what one is about to see will never again be repeated in quite the...
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With the global pandemic mostly in the rearview mirror, dance lovers once again enjoyed—literally—a movable feast. Indeed, the movers and shakers on this writer’s radar during the past year proved to be resilient, gorgeous and, happily, an embarrassment of riches.
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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