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REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Goodbye to All That

It is always interesting to see what a famous ballerina does when given the freedom to program her own show. On Saturday, Natalia Osipova, the Russian-born superstar (who has been a principal with the Royal Ballet since 2013), brought her much-hyped and sold-out extravaganza, “Natalia Osipova: Force of Nature,” to City Center for one night only. The ambitious, crowd-pleasing lineup—including the “Don Quixote” Act III Pas de Deux and “The Dying Swan” solo—was announced in a press release in early January and promoted in an interview with Pointe’s Kyra Laubacher less than a week before the performance. I don’t know...

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Off to the Races

The New York City Ballet opened its Winter Season with a wonderful all-Balanchine program, which I caught on the second night. Not only was the lineup of ballets interesting and well-balanced, there were excellent performances in leading roles throughout the show, by dancers in various stages of their careers—including the best principal casting I’ve ever seen in Balanchine’s tiny 1967 masterpiece, “Valse-Fantaisie.”

REVIEWS | By Candice Thompson

Finding Grace

If an evening of dances from Ronald K. Brown/Evidence could be said to leave me wanting, it is surely only because the dynamic and spirited dancers in Brown’s rousing compositions leave me wanting more. On Tuesday evening at the Joyce Theater, this was the case once again. I would have happily stayed put in my seat late into the evening if the show could have gone on longer. The three works on the program charted a range of moods and explored the worldly with a divine nuance.

REVIEWS | By Cecilia Whalen

Isolation and Injustice

Geometrically speaking, a line is a symbol of freedom: A figure formed between two points, the ends are limitless, extending to infinity. In Baye & Asa's “HotHouse,” lines are binding rather than liberating. The duo Sam “Asa” Pratt and Amadi “Baye” Washington are stuck in a large, rectangular plexiglass structure. They pace in linear patterns back and forth, unable to escape the confines of four finite walls.

REVIEWS | By Cecilia Whalen

Collective Pursuits

House lights are still up as Tommie-Waheed Evans' "Bodies as Sites of Faith and Protest" begins. A group of dancers in all black step on stage, marching and clapping in time. Facing in toward each other, they are unified and mission-driven. Suddenly, a single dancer emerges from the group singing the folk song "We Shall Overcome." He walks carefully straight ahead, proclaiming the Civil Rights anthem to the audience. The lights dim.

REVIEWS | By Karen Hildebrand

Uneasy Moves

As “’lectric Eye” opens, a group of 14 bursts onstage, stepping in formation as runway fashion model swagger meets drill team precision. They criss cross the stage, arms swinging, hips gyrating, assorted gold and coppery mylar apparel flashing. It’s sexy, glitzy and mind-boggling in its intricate unison. As a group they step, turn, lunge, plié, kick, dip, relevé—constantly changing direction to a droning disco beat punctuated by the sound of drumsticks. Sound and movement are equal partners in choreographer Joanna Kotze’s work, and for “’lectric Eye,” musical collaborator, Ryan Seaton, emerges from the sound booth to perform a fully integrated...

REVIEWS | By Karen Hildebrand

Trees of Life

The stage is an orange box, with three simple long benches pushed against the walls. A dancer enters in silence, barefoot, dressed in a dark tunic with a collar that stands up at the neck and a bulbous skirt resembling petals of a flower. Other dancers arrive, men and women dressed alike. They take a seat, two to a bench. I imagine a Shaker gathering, austere and pensive. As the house lights go down and the music rises, the performers stand and take up a ritualistic stepping from side to side in unison. The flicking and scraping of bare feet...

REVIEWS | By Candice Thompson

Web of Culture

“Call it culture.” This short phrase acted as the backbone of “Curriculum II,” a new work from the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. Uttered as a satirical refrain or in bold type, floating in the numerous screens as a reprimand, this barb reappeared continually like so many tiny vertebrates supporting the structure of a complex and at times, unwieldy, composition.

INTERVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Tamara Rojo leads San Francisco Ballet

On January 19th, San Francisco Ballet opens its 90th season—its first under new artistic director, Tamara Rojo. Rojo is new to many San Francisco dance viewers but a near-household name to ballet fans in Europe, where she began her dancing career with the English National Ballet, ascended to stardom at the Royal Ballet, and then returned to ENB in 2012 to serve as both artistic director and principal dancer, raising the company’s profile from a regional touring troupe to an international newsmaker, particularly by prioritizing women’s choreographic voices and by commissioning Akram Khan to radically reinvent the Romantic era staple...

INTERVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Dancing All Over Town with Heidi Duckler

The reigning goddess of Southern California site-specific dance, the indefatigable Heidi Duckler, began her terpsichorean journey in 1985 in Los Angeles. Originally dubbed Collage Dance Theatre, the troupe, now Heidi Duckler Dance (HDD), began its storied history in, well, a laundromat. That work, “Laundromatinee,” originally staged in 1988 in Santa Monica’s Thrifty Wash Laundromat, featured dancers performing amid washing machines, dryers and a bevy of onlookers, intentional or not.

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

New Year, Old Ballets

After the comfort-food programming of December, January tends to kick off with prestige offerings and new works. So it was unusual that the first dance show I saw in 2023 featured timeworn ballet standards like “The Dying Swan” and “Paquita.” These warhorses were being performed by the Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, however, so they were not exactly pablum. And to be fair, I caught the Trocks in the third week of their run at the Joyce Theater; so this was, in part, feel-good holiday programming. But though the Trocks have been affectionately spoofing ballet en travesti since 1974,...

BOOKSHELF | INTERVIEWS | By Marina Harss

Why Dance Matters

Mindy Aloff’s new book Why Dance Matters is part of a series, published by Yale University Press, on why this or that thing should matter to the reader. The series has already taken on such subjects as architecture, translation, poetry, and acting. And as of next January, it will include Aloff’s meditation on the many ways dance enters and alters our lives. At different points in her career, Aloff has been a poet, a dance critic, an essayist, a teacher, the editor of the anthology Dance in America, and the author of Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation....

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.