World-class review of ballet and dance.
Talk about a Terpsichorean/Euterpean acid-like trip! Brooklyn-based Mark Morris Dance Group, currently celebrating its 45th anniversary, burst onto the stage of the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts last Friday in their Carnaby Street-type costumes that popped with color and pizazz, all the while brilliantly bouncing, wildly whirling, and lusciously leaping to live music.
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When Frank Gehry was tapped to be the architect of Walt Disney Concert Hall, home to both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, he envisioned the space to be “a living room for the city.”
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San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House is a grand, gracious theater, so it was a big deal to see the San Francisco Ballet School hold its end-of-year performances in that hall for the first time since at least 1985.
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At its heart, “Sylvia” is a ballet about the resistance to love—a theme that continues to resonate deeply, as the human spirit often recoils from love, driven by fear, pride, a need for control, or the weight of duties and moral constraints.
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Since the 1970s, the Paris Opera Ballet has cultivated a distinctive tradition of nurturing its own dancers as emerging choreographers.
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In John Cranko’s world, “if ballet only consisted of dance steps, it wouldn’t be worth dedicating your whole life to it,” and this sense of devotion is at the heart of Joachim A. Lang’s German-language film, John Cranko (2024).
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One of the hottest entities of Europe’s dance world is surely (La)Horde. A collective of three artists—Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer and Arthur Harel—the French theatrical trio could not be more on trend.
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Yellow caution tape dangles from the doorway to the Jerome Robbins Theater and ropes off every row of seats.
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The Trisha Brown Dance Company embarks on a national tour this June celebrating the centennial of avant-garde American visual artist Robert Rauschenberg.
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For Ballet Hispánico’s upcoming season at New York City Center from May 29-June 1, the company will present Gustavo Ramírez Sansano's “Carmen.maquia,” a contemporary take on the timeless story at the heart of George Bizet’s unforgettable opera “Carmen.”
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Angelina Laguna kneels on the sidewalk and places her body perpendicular to the flow of the First Avenue foot traffic.
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When the lights for “Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503” come up on four dancers silhouetted by refracted light of a billowing cloud of fog, the scene rivals halftime at the Superbowl.
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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