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REVIEWS | By Karen Greenspan

Leaps and Bounds

Since receiving a transformative financial infusion in 2020, Gibney Company has been charging forward at a dizzying pace. The company, led by founder and artistic director Gina Gibney and company director Gilbert T. Small II, has doubled its roster of dancers while it voraciously acquires and commissions challenging works, rolls out two annual seasons in New York, and tours nationally and abroad. For its NYC spring season at the Joyce, Gibney presented a program of works by three distinct choreographers. Whether in the studio or on stage, the thirteen Gibney artistic associates are an immensely capable and technically versatile group...

REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Re-Emergence

Most mid-size US ballet troupes went through a thing or two during the pandemic, of course, but Sacramento Ballet’s passage was especially rough. When Covid hit, the troupe was just settling in with new artistic director Amy Seiwert after a bitter struggle between the board and the company’s longtime leaders, Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda. Seiwert was then abruptly let go, for reasons the board would not comment on. Anthony Krutzkamp, a former Cincinnati Ballet dancer who had been serving as executive director, took her place.

REVIEWS | By Cecilia Whalen

Timeless

Trisha Brown said her conversations with former French Minister of Culture Michel Guy occurred “outside of time.” Brown and Guy, who was the founder of the avant-garde international Festival d'Automne, would sit for hours discussing dance and art. Brown said during those discussion, Guy would have to adjust the blinds more than once to accommodate the changes in daylight.

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

The Power of Three

On one of the strongest lineups of the spring season, the New York City Ballet bookended Balanchine’s 1957 masterpiece, “Agon,” with the first and last ballets choreographed by Jerome Robbins: “Fancy Free” (1944) and “Brandenburg” (1997). “Fancy,” a theatrical Fleet Week farce, is starting to show its age. Though some tonal tweaks have been made, the scene in which the trio of sailors steals a woman’s red purse and playfully yanks her around doesn’t get the laughs it used to. Running concurrently across the plaza at the Met this month, coincidentally, is the powerful new opera “Champion.” It also has...

REVIEWS | By Madelyn Coupe

With Diamonds

Science fiction met real-time emotional animation in Australasian Dance Collective’s “Lucie in the Sky.” When the company released news of this work, there was resounding excitement—bold, pioneering, and arguably the most ambitious artistic choice ADC has made to date. From the outset, one question hovered over “Lucie in the Sky:” can we, as artists, anthropomorphise objects using choreography and spatial empathy to elicit an emotional response from our audience? A question that was answered with three words: emotionally coded drones.

REVIEWS | By Marina Harss

Entrances and Exits

The Indian dance company Nrityagram, which specializes in the East Indian dance form Odissi, has been a frequent visitor to New York since the nineties. Each visit has been revelatory in some way. For years that revelatory quality seemed intimately linked to the choreographic relationship between the company’s director and choreographer, Surupa Sen, and its main star, Bijayini Satpathy. The two have performed solos and duets of breathtaking beauty and complexity during which time seemed to stop, and the audience tried not to blink for fear of missing something.

REVIEWS | By Merilyn Jackson

She Sang the Body Electric

All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female. “I Sing The Body Electric” - Walt Whitman

INTERVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

New Romance

Talk about a radical retelling of a classic story! In Benjamin Millepied’s “Romeo & Juliet Suite,” performed by members of LA Dance Project, the troupe he founded in 2012, there are three casts playing the title roles: a traditional heterosexual couple, two men, and two women. And, as if that weren’t a major departure from your standard issue “R & J,” this evening-length rendering has much of the action captured through projections from a Steadicam while the cast navigates myriad areas of the theater.

REVIEWS | By Cecilia Whalen

Reframing American Cinema

The set is a mid-century living room. A green lamp and a bookcase rest downstage right; a typewriter and an abacus lie upstage on a desk. Cushioned chairs sit invitingly among scattered suitcases which are stuffed to the brim, and a single wooden chair sits center. This is the opening shot of Kayla Farrish's “Put Away the Fire, dear, pt. 2,” a second draft to the dancer/choreographer's exploration of American film and archetypes, which was presented as part of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival in the lower east side.

REVIEWS | By Josephine Minhinnett

Returning Home

Frigid waterfalls. Fog rising in the grey of morning. Dense forest yielding to expansive lakes. These are some of the landscapes in Santee Smith's latest production “Homelands” for Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, which premiered at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre. Smith is Kahnyen’kehàka/Mohawk Nation, Turtle Clan, from Six Nations of the Grand River territory in southern Canada and since 2005, she has built her company on a repertoire of innovative multimedia and contemporary dance productions that bring Indigenous experiences and Onkwehón:we worldviews to the stage.

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Verklärte Gala

Without a program, I would have confused the two premieres at the New York City Ballet’s Spring Gala. With its geometric arm motifs, calculated group patterns, and tastefully spare retro costumes, I’d have attributed “Standard Deviation” to former resident choreographer Christopher Wheeldon instead of newcomer Alysa Pires. It seemed like an outgrowth of Wheeldon’s “Mercurial Manoeuvres,” from 2000. But Wheeldon’s influence could also be felt in the energetic, shifting corps patterns of Justin Peck’s “The Times Are Racing” closer too. In fact, his presence was more palpable in these than in his own piece, “From You Within Me,” a dance...

INTERVIEWS | By Rachael Moloney

“Sea of Troubles” through a New Lens

Kenneth MacMillan created the short expressionist ballet “Sea of Troubles” in the late 1980s. The work draws on Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, and its central theme is Hamlet’s mental state following the suspected murder of his father, the King. As in many of MacMillan’s creations, an exploration of darker aspects of the human psyche underpins the ballet, whose nine scenes chart Hamlet’s journey as he becomes consumed with the desire for revenge and questions about guilt, morality, death, and what is true and false.

Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Lorna Irvine

Teenage Angst and Institutions

Watching 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,...

INTERVIEWS | Marina Harss

The Me of Today

The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.

REVIEWS | Rachel Howard

Starry Nights

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.

REVIEWS | Faye Arthurs

America, F**K Yeah

After 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.

REVIEWS | Emily May

Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup

An “Ajiaco” is a type of soup common to Colombia, Cuba, and Peru that combines a variety of different vegetables, spices, and meats.