World-class review of ballet and dance.
While the global village keeps getting smaller, thanks to Google, YouTube, Instagram and the like, the real world of dance, happily, is growing larger. At least that’s the way it seemed during the 39th edition of the Montpellier Dance Festival. Founded in 1980 by dancer-choreographer Dominique Bagouet, who died of AIDS at age 41 in 1992, this annual celebration in the glorious south of France has been directed by Jean-Paul Montanari since 1983.
Continue Reading
Philadelphia’s contemporary ballet company, BalletX continues to reach for, and often achieves, its ambition to commission new works, sometimes seven or eight in a season. To its credit, many commissions go to women choreographers, as underserved in the dance world as in the real world.
Continue Reading
For the first time in its 72-year history, the Holland Festival invited two artists to program its prestigious multidisciplinary three-week arts celebration that unfolded over various venues around Amsterdam—and both hail from Africa: The visual artist William Kentridge is from South Africa and the choreographer Faustin Linyekula is Congolese. It’s no surprise, then, that the internationally acclaimed dancer/choreographer, Gregory Maqoma, was asked to perform with his Vuyani Dance Theatre.
Continue Reading
He’s collaborated with some of the world’s most notable boldfaced names, including Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jack and Meg White of the White Stripes. He’s also served as movement director in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. But one of Wayne McGregor’s most recent collaborators is, perhaps, his most audacious yet—the Google Arts & Culture Lab, the results of which, “Living Archive: An AI Performance Experiment,” was seen onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion last weekend in a program dubbed, “Adès & McGregor: A Dance Collaboration.”
Continue Reading
A bevy of black swans circled our car parked near to the lake’s edge. It was my first encounter with a black swan, nose to beak, separated only by a wind-up wind-down window pane. I would have been no taller than one of the swans, had I’ve been out of the car. I remember feeling awestruck by their scale, their very presence. And yet as I was four years of age, or thereabouts, is this a later addition stitched to a memory derived from family folklore? My mum recalled one of the swans hopped up on the car’s bonnet, but wonders...
Continue Reading
Birmingham Royal Ballet’s latest bill, “[Un]leashed,” treats us to two premieres and a reprised 2012 ballet, all from female choreographers. It’s an attractive offering, somewhat unfocused but capably danced and dressed with some handsome moments.
Continue Reading
Masculinity is at the core of Gary Clarke's best work: from “Bagofti” which used masks to distort through Francis Bacon's violent triptychs, to the surreal, dreamlike “2 Men and A Michael” and “Horsemeat,” his is an iconoclastic approach to the representation of modern men. So it is with “Wasteland,” the follow-up to his award-winning “Coal.” “Wasteland” interrogates the effects of the closure of mines (in this instance, the Grimethorpe Colliery) on the local working-class male community, and the galvanising influence of rave culture on the younger lads. Using film footage, video work from Charles Webber and live vocals from local...
Continue Reading
Boston Ballet closed its 2018-19 season with a touch of the new and a revival of the past with “Rhapsody,” a mixed program featuring seldom-seen works by Leonid Yakobson, alongside George Balanchine, and the world premiere of “ELA, Rhapsody in Blue” by Boston Ballet principal Paulo Arrais.
Continue Reading
It’s elaborate partnerwork and committed performances at programme C of San Francisco Ballet’s big London tour, a two-week bonanza of 12 UK premieres spread over four different mixed bills. This one features Liam Scarlett’s 2014 ballet “Hummingbird” sandwiched between 2018 works from Stanton Welch and Justin Peck. All three pieces invoke abstract themes and contemporary choreography, though their respective tones and textures vary widely.
Continue Reading
Reuniting two separated siblings, opera and ballet, was Benjamin Millepied and Stéphane Lissner’s mantra. And so they did. The premiere of the extravagant double bill “Iolanta/The Nutcracker,” staged by Dmitri Tcherniakov, was a major highlight of the Paris Opera Ballet's 2015-2016 season. There wasn’t much left of the original 1892 version, though. Tcherniakov was much praised for endowing the two scattered works with a newfound unity, his “Nutcracker” responding to “Iolanta” in some ways.
Continue Reading
When asked to explain what her dance had meant, Isadora Duncan said: “if I could tell you what it meant, I wouldn’t have to dance it,” encapsulating the idea that dance, in its traditional sense, removes the need for words. The quote reminds us that the body is capable of expressing just as much as language; that physical expression, as Duncan pointed out, can capture the emotions, thoughts and images that exist around and beyond words.
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.
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading