World-class review of ballet and dance.
How do we love Highways Performance Space? Let us count the ways! Indeed, a longtime nucleus for experimental theater, dance and art, the intimate black box venue in Santa Monica was the scene of a 35th anniversary celebration over the weekend.
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The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater held a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week.
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In a willingness to explore the mythologies of the afterlife, I find my way to the last of a handful of seats for Melanie Lane’s “Arkadia” at the Substation.
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“Law of Mosaics” is a great title, and one that would befit almost any dance by the deconstructivist choreographer Pam Tanowitz. It just so happens that it belongs to the third ballet she has made for the New York City Ballet, and it stems from its Ted Hearne score.
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Choreographers Caili Quan, Phil Chan, Zhong-Jing Fang, and Edwaard Liang are grateful to share the bill for Ballet West’s sixth choreographic festival, but hope that events like these will soon be rendered obsolete.
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A new ballet about Elvis Presley by the ubiquitous Annabelle Lopez Ochoa promised to be a perfect fit for San Francisco’s Smuin Contemporary Ballet; after all, company founder Michael Smuin (1938-2007) never met a pop song he couldn’t craft into a crowd-pleasing ballet ditty. The surprising thing about Ochoa’s “Tupelo Tornado,” though, is that it isn’t any fun.
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For the first time in a year, the Sydney Dance Company is back home in Sydney. After a long hiatus touring the world—a post Covid catch-up tour if you will—the company has arrived in Walsh Bay to present their newest work, the world premiere of “momenta.”
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Grace Maduell Holmes has only been the new director of the San Francisco Ballet School five months, but she’s wasted no time getting ambitious.
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The stage is strewn with potatoes. Single straight back chair, overturned. A canteen. At center is a life scale charcoal sketch, unframed on canvas. It looks like a human figure topped by a dark smudge of a head—the shape calls to mind a famous work of Gustav Klimt.
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How long is their nap?” my three-year-old asked about halfway through the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s performance of “Group Primary Accumulation,” a 20-minute supine dance for four.
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In her new biography, The Swans of Harlem, journalist Karen Valby is witness to the testimony of five pioneering Black ballerinas intimate with the founding history of Dance Theatre of Harlem.
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Sacramento Ballet executive and artistic director Anthony Krutzkamp dresses sharp and gives a memorable pre-curtain speech. The way he tells it, the Central California company was in rehearsals for “Swan Lake” last year when he realized he faced an enviable problem: the dancers were too good for the ballets he’d programmed under a five-year plan.
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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