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Wild Variety
REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Wild Variety

For a colourful cross-section of the UK dance scene, you can hardly do better than “Sampled.” The annual event is a glimpse into the range of productions that grace the Sadler’s Wells stage over the year, pitching ballet alongside contemporary, hip-hop, flamenco and more. With its diverse line-up and proms-style standing tickets, the show caters to the devoted and the uninitiated alike, drawing a dynamic and often chirpier-than-usual crowd.

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Musing about Balanchine
REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

Musing about Balanchine

George Balanchine created “Apollo” 90 years ago. Set to Igor Stravinsky’s score, this ballet—seminal and historic on many levels—signified a major point in development of Balanchine’s aesthetics and principles as a choreographer. “Apollo” is regarded as one of signatures of New York City Ballet.

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Mass for Everybody
REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Mass for Everybody

This may be the Chinese year of the dog, but in music, 2018 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein, the conductor, composer, pianist, lecturer, broadcaster and writer who died at age 72 in 1990. In politics, Hollywood and in some concert halls, this year is also shaping up to be the year of the woman, with marches, protests and the #MeToo movement still going strong, and the rise of the female conductor becoming, er, somewhat more apparent.

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Jeune Homme
REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Love and Loss

English National Ballet has launched the New Year with two double bills anchored by August Bournonville’s beloved “La Sylphide.” Over the course of a two-week run, the Romantic staple—a flutter of forest sprites and lively Highlanders—is alternately paired with Kenneth Macmillan’s “Song of the Earth” and Roland Petit’s “Le Jeune Homme et la Mort,” both of which dedicate a principal role to Death.

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flavia cacace and vincent simone
REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Tango 'Til They're Sore

Has there ever been a sexier dance than the tango? From its origins in the 1880s in the River Plate, the border between Argentina and Uruguay, through the slums and bordellos to ballrooms—becoming a worldwide phenomenon during the Depression and extending far beyond the jazz era—its legacy still endures. It's simply a classic genre, because its romance, fire and passion are timeless.

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San Francisco Ballet Gala
REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Stars and Stripes

“What is dance now?” artistic director Helgi Tomasson asked in the middle of San Francisco Ballet’s gala, making a pitch for the massively ambitious Unbound Festival that will crown this company’s 85thseason with 12 world premieres by 12 international choreographers unveiled in four days. If we may recast Tomasson’s question a bit more specifically, to “What is ballet now?” this was a perfect question for the moment.

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Murder Ballades & Other Dances
REVIEWS | By Merilyn Jackson

Murder Ballades & Other Dances

Long before statistics and news, murder ballads were a staple of European folk songs and traveled here with immigrants. Dylan, Joan Baez and a lot of Appalachian singers sung them. One of the most famous in the 1950s was “Tom Dooley.” But I remember hearing somewhere along the way, “Oh, listen to my story, I'll tell you no lies, How John Lewis did murder poor little Omie Wise.” It’s the folktale of the early 19th Century murder of Naomi Wise. You can hear the tune and others deconstructed in Bryce Dessner’s original score, Murder Ballades, recorded by Eighth Blackbird. Resident...

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No Minor(ity) Matter
REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

No Minor(ity) Matter

The late rock icon Jimi Hendrix would have approved: Cool “purple haze”—as well as hot crimsons and other miasmas of color emanating from Ligia Lewis’ tour de force work from 2016, “minor matter”—proved mind-altering both visually and viscerally. Programmed as part of the Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA, the dance won a 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Production and is the second part of Lewis’ trilogy, “Blue Red White.”

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Flight Pattern
REVIEWS | By Merli V. Guerra

Flight Pattern

Not often does a production flow so seamlessly that a viewer can legitimately forget that the scenes unfolding onstage are live, and not simply a three-dimensional animation playing for the hundredth perfect cycle. Yet in the case of Shanghai Dance Theatre’s balletic dance drama “Soaring Wings: Story of the Crested Ibis,” the audience is indeed swept away to this heightened level of fantasy, in thanks not only to its imaginative sets, lighting, and costuming, but through the joyous expressiveness of its performers as well.

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Dancing through 2017
REVIEWS | By Penelope Ford

Dancing through 2017

“It always wants something more of me,” Belinda McGuire said to me with a wry smile a few days before the opening of her solo performance, “Waltz Slaughterhouse Requiem.” Something true of dance, I thought, and perhaps especially true for solo work. McGuire's performance of her own choreography, a personal reflection, “Slaughterhouse/Requiem” was highly original and impressive, and is one of my highlights of the year in dance.

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Dispatch from London: 2017 in Review
REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Dispatch from London: 2017 in Review

Sturm und Drang—2017 saw the dance world roiling with it, both on and off the stage. Israel’s culture minister hit the headlines for refusing arts funding to performances involving nudity; Palestinian-Syrian refugee Ahmad Joudeh made a prominent debut with the Dutch National Ballet after fleeing death threats from Islamic State; discord boiled over in Moscow as Kirill Serebrennikov, the director of the Bolshoi’s long-awaited “Nureyev” was placed under house arrest on what many suspect are trumped-up charges intended to punish him for celebrating the life of a gay man on stage—a conspicuous challenge to Putin’s ban on so-called ‘homosexual propaganda.’...

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