World-class review of ballet and dance.
As the lights dim in Sadler’s Wells, I am struck by how dark the theatre I’m sitting in is. These few moments before a show begins create a unique situation of near complete trust on the audience; there’s no light, natural or artificial.
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During the past ten years, Jody Sperling has created a portfolio of dance works that calls for action to protect and preserve the environment. She has traveled to the Arctic to dance on disappearing ice.
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To stand out in a sea of world premieres, honesty and emotionality are key, if Repertory Dance Theatre’s most recent program, “Venture,” is any indication.
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On the cusp of celebrating their company’s milestone anniversary, Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson, who co-founded the New York-based Complexions Contemporary Ballet in 1994, still have plenty to say, both onstage and off.
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To Sir Frederick Ashton’s fast footwork and musicality belongs the Australian Ballet’s double bill “The Dream” and “Marguerite & Armand.” To the charming misadventure distillation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream bubbles “The Dream.”
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The moment arrived two-thirds into the program, near the peak of Donald Byrd’s “Love and Loss.” For more than an hour, the beautiful bodies on screen had been doing eloquent things, to curiously numbing effect.
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Since its founding in 2012 by Benjamin Millepied, L.A. Dance Project has not been lacking in talent, ideas, or, fortunately for them, funding, something that most dance troupes desperately need.
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When a choreographer takes on volcanic and iconic works from American musical giants like Leonard Bernstein and John Adams one move they could take is to cool them down with a couple of more soothing European works in between.
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If you are an insect in the superorder Endopterygota, you have the super ability to experience complete metamorphosis. You can transform from the four stages of life—egg, larva, pupa, adult—in a process called holometabolism.
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For our Season Three bonus episode, we speak again with the divine Dana Stephensen, who recently retired after two decades with the Australian Ballet and is ready for her bonus chapter.
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The Starlet in the ballroom with the candlestick. Or was it the Mobster in the billiards room with the dagger?
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Timelessness is a quality that is hard to pin down. It’s easy to see when a work of art fails to achieve it.
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, and it pulls no punches.
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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