The Take Away
Who would think that the unglamorous prep work in a Thai restaurant kitchen would serve as an idea for a choreographic work?
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Dream Ballets
It’s hard to imagine a ballet quite as exquisite as Michel Fokine’s 1909 “Les Sylphides.” The white tutu piece, set to a score by Fredéric Chopin, introduced the world to the concept of a plotless ballet—and, in that, opened the door for every choreographer who was to come.
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Turn Up, Turn Out
Tiler Peck has easily proven she can pull off multiple roles: dancer, in addition to artistic director, choreographer, and curator. The success of “Turn It Out With Tiler Peck and Friends”—which debuted at City Center in 2022 as its inaugural Artists at the Center program and has since been performed across the U.S. and in London—is evidence of that.
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Art of Seduction
It’s a foregone conclusion that no matter how young, how beautiful, how alive one may be, death can come at any time.
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The Big World in Small Spaces
London has very little to do to convince the world of its artiness. It’s often given that eye-roll inducing title of a ‘world city;’ whatever your heart wishes to see will probably, at some point, make its way through London.
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Balletic Battlegrounds
The New York City Ballet’s Fall Fashion Gala was unusually tense this year, as the dancers refused to walk the red carpet or attend the post-performance dinner in protest of the standstill on their collective bargaining agreement.
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Listening to the World with Abigail Levine
On a Saturday afternoon in late September, the air feels electric in an upstairs rehearsal studio at Kestrels, in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn.
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Between Wave and Water
Alethea Pace's latest work, “between wave and water,” is a journey. Performers physically lead an audience through the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx while examining the history of a local Enslaved African Burial Ground.
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Dancing in Circular Time
Amrita Hepi, a choreographer with Bunjalung and Ngāpuhi roots, has come a long way from her home in the Pacific.
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Devotion and Desire
Sir Kenneth MacMillan began his choreography for “Manon” with the pas de deux, and from this shining, central point spun outward. Building the story from its heart, almost as if from the inside out, the pas de deux reveals not only the emotional connection between the two dancers, but their place in the world.
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Creative Risk
If the ballet world now seems inundated with Dracula productions, Frankenstein adaptations are a rarer sight.
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Diamonds are Forever
It’s amusing to read in Pacific Northwest Ballet’s generally exceptional program notes that George Balanchine choreographed the triptych we now know as “Jewels” because he visited Van Cleef & Arpels and was struck by inspiration. I mean, perhaps visiting the jeweler did further tickle his imagination, but—PR stunt, anyone?
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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,...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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