World-class review of ballet and dance.
Talk about perfection! While the countdown is on, as Gustavo Dudamel, music director of the world-class Los Angeles Philharmonic, prepares to exit the stage for the New York Philharmonic (a big boohoo), his presence last weekend at Walt Disney Concert Hall further cemented his status as musical genius, tastemaker and catalyst for good.
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Whether it resembles the slow, building roll of distant thunder or the immediacy of an overhead lightning storm, flamenco is electric. This energy, however, is an intimate one, and one that benefits greatly from proximity.
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This winter has been one of the wintriest in recent New York City memory. Between the unnavigable mounds of dirty snow at every intersection, dangerous patches of black ice, multiple days of subzero temperatures, power outages, and frozen pipes, there has also been the bone-chilling rise of authoritarianism in America.
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Based in Tokyo, Condors is an all-male contemporary dance troupe founded by director and choreographer Ryohei Kondo in 1996. In their 30th year, the company retains all their original members with a few new additions.
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Liv Lorent MBE is a gal I relate to, a choreographer with a penchant for the gothic, drawing upon the duality of traditions within narrative dance: the grand guignol and the sentimental.
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One thing that I love about the Firebird is that she is the hero,” said Catherine Hurlin, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, in a Zoom interview on a snowy February morning.
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British choreographer Jaivant Patel has intersectionality at his core. He trained at the Northern School for Contemporary Dance and then went on to learn from Nahid Siddiqui, a global exponent of Kathak.
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It was perhaps on Instagram some five or six years ago when I first came across the dance films of Benjamin Seroussi.
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Beneath my feet, thousands upon thousands of tiny threads in the soil transmit messages and nutrients, actions and behaviours.
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The Prix de Lausanne 2026 crowned fourteen young dancers in its finale held at the Théâtre de Beaulieu in Lausanne, selected from 78 candidates who took part in the competition’s selection rounds. The jury this year was presided over by Kevin O’Hare, artistic director of the Royal Ballet.
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Lights go up on three dancers who sit side by side on the floor in a far corner of the stage, legs outstretched, soles of their bare feet delightfully exposed. Siblings posing for a photo in the backyard? It’s a brief look, like a flashback.
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Mesmerizing to watch? Or commentary on life versus machine? The program performed by Lyon Opera Ballet at New York’s City Center is both. Merce Cunningham’s “Biped” (1999) features a double cast—one of human dancers, and another of computer generated figures.
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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