World-class review of ballet and dance.
L-E-V’s “Love Chapter II” at the Joyce Theater starts with a harsh knocking sound, and tender, sinewy bodies already holding vulnerable parts of themselves. With one hand protecting a throat, belly or rib, the other reaches up while bevelled feet root the six dancers to the floor. They grow and grow in (almost) unison tormented by the thumping beat of DJ Ori Lichtik’s thrilling live score.
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Watching Jack Ferver’s “Everything is Imaginable” is akin to armchair cliff diving. This thrilling dance/theater piece—which returned to New York Live Arts from January 7-12 after a critically acclaimed run last April—showcases both the highs and lows of queer experience. Act 1 closes on four men in colorful fringe dresses lip syncing for their lives and grinding on each other in glee. Act 2 closes on a solitary man (Ferver) in black contemplating his suicidal urges. Though vertigo-inducing, these two halves prove to be profoundly complementary.
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Collaborations can sometimes be risky business. But in the right hands—and feet—they can have wondrous results. Case in point: Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Third Coast Percussion, also Chicago-based, brought a dreamy, sometimes dazzling, sometimes delirious blend of music and dance to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts over the weekend.
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The festive lights have been switched off and the Christmas trees kicked to the curb, but sparkle can still be found this side of the holidays in English National Ballet’s glittering “Swan Lake.” Derek Deane’s production, devised in 1997, is rich in detail and spirit, a glossy vehicle for Marius Petipa’s nineteenth-century classic. There are times when its busyness verges on hectic, and when the staging reveals itself as more suited to Deane’s original in-the-round conception than the London Coliseum’s proscenium set-up, but the show’s lustrous veneer outshines these weaknesses, capturing the sugary splendour that keeps “Swan Lake” at the...
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We are not at your usual end-of-year concert. We are at Carriageworks, Sydney’s coolest performance space to witness graduating students of Sydney Dance Company’s pre-professional year in “Revealed.” An initiative of SDC, PPY is a platform for ballet and contemporary dance students to take the next step, preparing themselves for a career in dance or choreography.
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New York City Center’s 75th anniversary celebration gets more rollicking by the day. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is currently in a five-week residency at the theatre, where it is celebrating its own 60-year legacy. The season, titled Ailey Ascending, includes an impressive mix of works from decades past, and offers three world premieres as well as a company premiere. True to the billing, the newest works shone brightest. But Ailey’s great legacy loomed large over the proceedings, and it particularly informed Ronald K. Brown’s stunning new dance, “The Call.”
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Pad through sound as if it were a light dusting of colour pigment that changes with the flicker of notes and feel within a mist of sea foam, a dusting of blush pink, a nuzzle of red. Inward. Radiate a gleam of gold, a wink of turquoise, generated by sound. Outward. Fantasia.
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The versatility and adventurousness of BalletX's dancers and its leading lady, artistic and executive director, Christine Cox, are matchless. Cox has just helmed the company into its new studio. Built from the ground up over the last year, the Center for World Premiere Choreography went live last month in South Philadelphia, where hundreds of the city’s dancers live.
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With her company nearing its 50th anniversary, Philadanco’s intrepid and indefatigable founding leader, Joan Myers Brown, decided to take one step back and two steps forward for her fall program at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. Philadanco! (Yes, with an exclamation point!) has been dance company-in-residence at the Kimmel’s Perelman Theater since it opened in 2001.
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Marriage is one of those long-standing rituals woven deep into society and yet for each person it means something different. It can be a joyful or serious occasion, a spectacle or intimate. It can be a celebration of two people’s love, or it can be political; a formal arrangement, a powerful alliance. It can, at long last, be between people of the same or different genders—at least in some countries.
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He's on impish form tonight, Richard Alston, and so should he be. This tour (possibly one of the company's last) goes out on a high, as he celebrates fifty years of innovative choreography. “Mid Century Modern” is like a greatest hits compilation, with all of the stunning sculptural work we have come to expect from his repertoire. He twinkles and jokes about “getting it right,” his influences and so forth, and there's even a moment halfway through the show, when his recorded voice deadpans mischievously, “No, this isn't . . . an interval . . . Just . . ....
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Celebrating 100 years of the Estonian National Ballet, this trio of raw and intimate pieces explores ideas around relationships and communication. All three works, created by Estonian choreographers, take very disparate approaches, but contain similar jumping-off points. This is presented as part of the Estonia Now festival of arts.
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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