World-class review of ballet and dance.
The story began with an impulse to go back and give something back—to the performing arts traditions of India. Acclaimed British dancer and choreographer of Bangladeshi descent, Akram Khan, long known for dancing between worlds—contemporary dance and classical Kathak, decided to return to his roots.
Continue ReadingI step off the elevator onto the 5th floor of the Whitney Museum and I am awed by the spectacle, vastness, and ground shifting power of the “Edges of Ailey” exhibition. This tribute to Alvin Ailey and his universe—past, present, and future—not only lifts up its larger-than-life subject but it...
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Marius Petipa’s “Paquita” Grand Pas Classique has been around since 1881. I last reviewed a version in 2023, by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo.
Continue ReadingToday I have the immense privilege of speaking with Lucia Field. Lucia grew up with her family in Sydney, but with her dad, Anthony, as the original Blue Wiggle. It's not the childhood you might imagine. As the Wiggles became global superstars, Lucia didn't see her dad for nearly nine...
Continue ReadingJohn Scott Dance's “Begin Anywhere” started in the middle. A dancer walked to the center of the Irish Arts Center's JL Greene Theatre holding a discman, placed it on the floor, and pressed play.
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The United States is surreal at this moment. Dancers in black have been circling the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., performing Pina Bausch’s “Nelken Line” choreography to protest the self-proclaimed dictator making himself chair of the Center’s board. Choreographers are giving up hopes of National Endowment for the Arts funding now that guidelines demand “patriotic” art.
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Los Angeles-based Heidi Duckler, dubbed “Queen of Site-Specific Dance,” and whose Heidi Duckler Dance is celebrating 40 years of transforming spaces through the power of contemporary movement—kudos!—has stepped aside as artistic director, handing the reigns to associate artistic director, Raymond Ejiofor.
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“Tanz” opens on a ballet class like none I’ve ever attended. Onstage are two portable barres and four dancers in rehearsal clothes stretching and warming up. Eighty-three year old ballerina Beatrice Cordua teaches from a wheelchair, naked.
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John Scott Dance's “Begin Anywhere” started in the middle. A dancer walked to the center of the Irish Arts Center's JL Greene Theatre holding a discman, placed it on the floor, and pressed play.
FREE ARTICLE
Today I have the immense privilege of speaking with Lucia Field. Lucia grew up with her family in Sydney, but with her dad, Anthony, as the original Blue Wiggle. It's...
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The story began with an impulse to go back and give something back—to the performing arts traditions of India. Acclaimed British dancer and choreographer of Bangladeshi descent, Akram Khan, long known for dancing between worlds—contemporary dance and classical Kathak, decided to return to his roots.
Continue Reading
I step off the elevator onto the 5th floor of the Whitney Museum and I am awed by the spectacle, vastness, and ground shifting power of the “Edges of Ailey” exhibition. This tribute to Alvin Ailey and his universe—past, present, and future—not only lifts up its larger-than-life subject but it also, like a great ocean wave, raises up and carries forward everything in its wake.
Continue Reading
Marius Petipa’s “Paquita” Grand Pas Classique has been around since 1881. I last reviewed a version in 2023, by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo.
Continue Reading
The IBStage Star Galas have a mission to unite the best and brightest for gala ballet evenings. As seen at New York City Center, New York. Photographs by Steven Pisano
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While Kendrick Lamar performed “Humble,” during his Super Bowl halftime set and was surrounded by dancers clad in red, white and blue—and in the process assumed the formation of the...
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Let’s start with the obvious, or maybe to some this notion will be highly disputable, even offensive. OK, then, let’s start with what kept repeating in my head as I walked out of UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, synapses abuzz with the wonders of Twyla Tharp Dance’s 60th anniversary “Diamond Jubilee” program: My God, Twyla Tharp really is the most brilliantly inventive choreographer now alive on the planet.
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In Maldonne, French filmmakers Leila KA and Josselin Carré pose eleven women side by side on a barren stage. They’re dressed in floral patterns that hearken to the 1950s. The camera zooms in to frame their faces—each woman is in a state of distress.
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Today I have the immense privilege of speaking with Riley Lapham. Riley started dancing early in her home town of Wollongong, and by age 14, she had joined the Australian Ballet School. But from here, Riley's journey takes twists and turns. In her graduation year, Riley missed her final performance due to injury. But in a Center Stage-like moment, the then artistic director David McAllister offered her a contract with the company. In this brave and vulnerable conversation, Riley and I talk about what it's like to join a company while injured, and what it was like to deal with...
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I can’t remember seeing the Joyce Theater as full of energy. With the hour long “I Am,” Camille A. Brown & Dancers opens the tent of Black joy for all to enter, raising goosebumps and heat on a cold February night.
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Allison Miller, the acclaimed drummer and band leader of the group Boom Tic Boom, presented her multi-media performance, “Rivers in Our Veins,” for a one-matinee-only performance at 92NY on February...
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In the world premiere of Miguel Gutierrez’s “Super Nothing,” the quartet of performers fly through the vast, empty black box theater at New York Live Arts, small forms cast out like particles of light.
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“Well, it’s big,” Seattle ballet fans were saying as they headed into McCaw Hall’s sleek sanctuary of velvet settees and shiny metal staircases.
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Who says choreography can’t be taught? Not Ellen Robbins, a modern dance educator who has been teaching the art of choreography to young people in Soho for decades.
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Never forget!” With the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and International Holocaust Remembrance Day both having been recognized last month, these words, although unspoken, coursed through Melissa Barak’s first evening-length ballet, “Memoryhouse.”
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Talk about having a banner year! In 2024 alone, dancer, choreographer and spoken word artist Shamel Pitts not only received a MacArthur Fellowship and the Doris Duke Award, but was...
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