World-class review of ballet and dance.
American Ballet Theatre typically holds court in NYC twice a year. Their Summer Season at the Metropolitan Opera House features classical narrative full-lengths, and the Fall Season at the Koch Theater showcases edgier, short-form works.
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Unlikeable humanity in a rapacious society, Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” hits the zeitgeist—again. Recently staged by the National Ballet of Japan, it’s a stunning testimony to the ballet’s relevance across time and space. Fifty years since its creation and set in eighteenth-century France, the production nevertheless holds a mirror to now.
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An ambitious yet flawed work, “Dis-order,” seen last week at the Skirball Cultural Center, was described in the program notes as a “communal ritual, and a family drama that asks what forces move through us when we enact an ancient spring rite, and what is left unspoken when we gather around the table.”
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Crystal Pite is a connoisseur of the ensemble, with a forte for spotlighting the humanity of the collective, from the tight-knit flock to the anonymised mass.
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Once referred to as the “Rolls-Royce of American dance,” Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, founded in 1958 by Alvin Ailey, continues to live up to that plaudit.
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Ranjini Nair wears a few hats. Trained as a classical dancer in her native New Delhi by gurus Seetha Nagajothy, Jayarama Rao, and Vanashree Rao, she later found herself deep within the world of academia.
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It's with great sadness that we learned a couple of nights ago of the untimely passing of dance artist Iona Kewney.
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Looking down into the rotunda from the spiral ramp of New York’s Guggenheim Museum can be dizzying. My perch tonight is located two-thirds of the way to the top—and it’s the best view in the house for Lucinda Childs’ Early Works program.
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Push and pull are pretty commonplace commands. You can push someone’s buttons, pull someone’s leg. Somehow we always manage to conflate the two when facing a door in a public place.
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The Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory is a yawning, cavernous space. In its depths, even the fiercest applause can be rendered a mere din, sounding hollow and unappreciative.
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Noé Soulier’s “The Waves” ran for two nights at the Joyce Theater in early March as part of the Dance Reflections Festival by Van Cleef & Arpels.
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In transparent specimen bags, arranged in a circle, float Lemon Myrtle, Warrigal Greens, and Red Bottle Brush.
Continue ReadingWatching 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,...
Continue ReadingThe 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.
Continue ReadingAfter 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.
Continue ReadingAn “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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