World-class review of ballet and dance.
Some programs at New York City Ballet feel like a well-balanced meal; others, like a hodgepodge. The “Masters at Work: Balanchine & Robbins 2” program, which I caught last week, fell into the latter category, as if the company had put together a program from bits and pieces left over from other programs.
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There are moments during boxing matches when the two combatants lean into each other, their bodies interlocking in an embrace. They linger there until the referee intercedes, pulling them apart. At those moments you realize that they are as close to each other as two humans can possibly be, vulnerable, exhausted, in pain, set apart from the audience by their herculean strength and effort. At that moment, nothing else really exists for them outside of that embrace. The audience is irrelevant.
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Nothing becomes a legend like getting two National Medal of Arts awards from two different presidents. As Philadanco! founder, Joan Myers Brown received one from Barack Obama for her powerful effect on American dance over the past six decades. And in March, she received another from President Joseph R. Biden as a co-founder of the International Association of Blacks in Dance (IABD.) Early members such as Cleo Parker Robinson Dance, Dayton Contemporary Dance and Lula Washington Dance Theatrewere on board when they launched in 1988.
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We enter off the commercial retail strip of Broadway into a whimsical garden of cardboard cut-outs painted in shades of neon pink, orange, and green by the artist Mimi Gross. The gleaming wood floor of the fully functional dance studio is now bordered with flowering hedges, mirrored wall draped in leafy boughs, the glass itself painted as an enchanted forest. It all seems to quiver under the glow-in-the-dark lighting design of Lauren Parrish. As if a salve for a troubled and contentious world, Douglas Dunn has turned his SoHo loft into a lush “Garden Party,” filled with poetry and music...
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The first time I slid on my well-worn Grishko canvas ballet slippers and placed my left hand on the barre after two years away, it felt like a homecoming. There were many other things I expected to feel during that first class: trepidation, perhaps even some embarrassment. But that day I only felt pride—at the fact that my body was still capable of many of the movements I’d spent years perfecting—and joy—at the fact that I was finally practicing them again.
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Why program George Balanchine’s 1968 ballet “La Source” with Alexei Ratmansky’s 2010 “Namouna, A Grand Divertissement,” as New York City Ballet has done this season? The thing that binds the two ballets together is a similar spirit, born of their common origin: the Paris Opéra. Both are set to lustrous music composed by 19th century French composers (Léo Delibes and Édouard Lalo) for grandiose ballets filled with adventure and set in magical locales. Both Balanchine and Ratmansky have dispensed with their original plots, to differing degrees—Ratmansky keeps the whiff of a story and the notion of characters with specific traits,...
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Northern Ballet's critically-acclaimed adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” now in its tenth year, is back on May 16th at Sadler's Wells. With superb choreography from David Nixon CBE, audiences are sure to be dazzled by their highly visual, pulse-raising production, which promises to go deep into the scandals, decadence, wild parties and heart-rending tragedies. Above all, the piece will explore the huge moral ambiguity at the heart of the classic Jazz Age drama.
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In Bobbi Jene Smith’s “Broken Theater,” 12 performers play artists unmoored and unraveling in a dark theater. The New York premiere of this work at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre last Saturday evening, as part of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival in association with American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), immersed the audience in a raucous dance theater work that reckoned with temporal and terminal themes. Layers of text, live music, and movement, built to an intensity that eventually stripped the production bare, exposing the trembling gap between artifice and reality.
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Dance Theatre of Harlem kicked off its final season under the artistic directorship of Virginia Johnson with a superb program at City Center that surveyed the troupe’s history. The bill went in chronological order, beginning with Balanchine’s “Allegro Brillante,” choreographed in 1956 and first danced by DTH in 1975. (Arthur Mitchell, DTH’s founder, was the first Black principal dancer with the New York City Ballet; Balanchine helped him to start his own company in 1969.)
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For many, the movement of the human body is something that can be innately understood. The shapes we make with our limbs have the power to share stories. And the meaning we find in these shapes—and in the dances we make when we combine them—is something that so easily speaks to the soul. Ballet West’s season closer triple bill, “The Wedding,” draws out each of these elements of dance’s ethos.
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In 2014, five years before writer Toni Morrison passed away, Princeton University acquired a collection of the luminary’s personal papers, letters, and manuscripts. The goal behind the collection (known as the Toni Morrison Papers) is to inspire original creations across genres; a more forward-thinking approach than simply cultivating research on Morrison and her work.
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It’s unlikely that when José Limón choreographed “The Winged” in 1966 he had the 200 different species of migratory birds that rely on Utah’s Great Salt Lake at the top of mind. And when Donald McKayle created “I’ve Known Rivers” in 2005, he was inspired by Langston Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and by Pearl Primus and Janet Collins, not the many river drainages that are being diverted from the Salt Lake. But, what’s wonderful about great art is that it’s timeless—it can conjure many things depending on who is watching and where they come from.
Continue ReadingLong before the dancers take the stage, Dance Theatre of Harlem’s season at New York City Center feels like one of the most energizing cultural events of the spring.
Continue ReadingIt is rare for George Balanchine’s grand, bedazzled “Symphony in C” to open a program. Its champagne-popping finale for 52 dancers tends to be a nightcap.
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The Spring is Blooming festival, by Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, now in its fifth year, has become a highlight of the spring dance circuit.
Continue ReadingAs the audience come to their feet at the end of this ballet there is a noted difference to be seen on stage. Three women stand with joined hands, taking their call as the romantic leads of a loud and proud lesbian ballet.
Continue ReadingOne of San Francisco Ballet’s greatest assets is its home venue, the Beaux-Arts style War Memorial Opera House, with four rings of seating that require performers to project their energies practically to the exosphere.
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