World-class review of ballet and dance.
Having retired as a dancer from Scottish Ballet in 2017, artist-in-residence choreographer Sophie Laplane always delights in anything she turns her hands to. Her new world premiere, created to mark the company's fifty year anniversary, “Dextera,” is really rather special, characterised by her typically wicked wit and imagination.
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When Queen Victoria died in 1901, her youngest daughter, Beatrice, took it upon herself to ‘edit’ her late mother’s diaries for the public—a deed once deemed “the greatest act of censorship in history.” For better or worse, Beatrice revised the unsavoury aspects of Victoria’s memoir and excised others altogether, shaping the triumphant biography that lives on today. This process of transcription—in particular, the dilution that occurs when we reinforce attenuated versions of truth—drives Cathy Marston’s new production for Northern Ballet, a metanarrative that filters Victoria’s life story through the dual lens of her own recorded memories and Beatrice’s revamp. It’s...
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“Apollo” is about poetry, poetry in the sense of a brilliant, sensuous, daring, and powerful activity of our nature . . . Balanchine has told this metaphysical story in the concrete terms of classical dancing, in a series of episodes of rising power and brilliance. Extraordinary is the richness with which he can, with only four dancers, create a sustained and more and more satisfying impression of the grandness of man’s creative genius . . .”[note]Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)[/note] So wrote Edwin Denby, eloquently and incisively describing the very essence of George...
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Let’s be frank: “I Married an Angel” is a terrible musical. It has mediocre songs, a cockamamie plot, a bad book, and seriously dated jokes. But I think everyone involved in the current Encores! revival knew that going into it. The reason for its resurrection overlooked these factors. City Center’s 75th anniversary season includes many tributes to George Balanchine, who choreographed the original “Angel” production for his first wife Vera Zorina. In a kismet confluence, Broadway choreographer Joshua Bergasse helmed this incarnation and made the dances for his new wife, the New York City Ballet principal Sara Mearns, in her...
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Catherine Hurlin, a soloist with American Ballet Theatre, and Siphesihle November, a corps de ballet dancer with the National Ballet of Canada, each won the 13th International Competition for the Erik Bruhn Prize held on Saturday, March 23, at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.
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It is the smell of composted ingredients I notice first as I make my way along the passage. A blend of animal manure, rainforest mulch, leaf mould, washed river sand, and loam, giving off that warm garden smell. A mound of steamy soil, piled high in the Magdalen laundry[note] Magdalen laundries, Abbotsford Convent, accessed March 22, 2019 [/note] of the Abbotsford Convent; a soil mix for holding moisture in a space still damp from its history. Soil might be a source of nutrients for growth, but in the dirt and dust and sadness of the laundry, its steam is overpowering...
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Thirteen dances. Thirteen stages. “13 meditations on death and loss.” Stephanie Lake’s new work, “Skeleton Tree” is about death and loss, and in being about death and loss it is also about love and hope. Someone to farewell, to grieve over, an ache to feel and perhaps to heal. A recognition of presence: I existed; I ended. I live on, hopefully. I am remembered; remember me.
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Women of the world, take over, because if you don’t the world will come to an end and we haven’t got long.
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Five minutes late to the world premiere of Lucy Guerin’s “Make Your Own World” and I had to wait to be admitted into the Magic Theatre of the North Melbourne Town Hall.
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I caught the final showing of the New Combinations program over the closing weekend of the New York City Ballet’s winter season. It happened to fall on one of the Art Series nights, on which discounted tickets and a mid-performance demonstration draw a young, fashionable crowd. The evening had a bustling energy. But the biggest buzz of the week was the announcement of another new combination: the appointment of Jonathan Stafford and Wendy Whelan to the helm of the company, as artistic director and associate artistic director, respectively.
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The theatre/dance show that is “Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake” is by now a global institution. There has been so much written about it over the decades, that I may need to find new language to define why it endures so much, some twenty-four years later from its Sadler's Wells premiere. There are several strands to this iconic production.
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Dancer and choreographer Shaun Parker, hailing from Mildura, Victoria, has had a near two-decade career as a dancer with prominent Australian contemporary companies such as Meryl Tankard's Australian Dance Theatre, Force Majeure, Chunky Move and Sydney Dance Company. Now his company, Shaun Parker & Company, performs to sold-out theatres internationally. His newest work is “King,” an all-male exploration of patriarchal power, and socio-sexual and political structures. The world premiere took place in Sydney as part of the 2019 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival.
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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