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Tanowitz at the Joyce

Solos and site-specific works were the dance world’s prevailing themes in 2020, for obvious reasons: people couldn’t touch each other or congregate. But the term site-specific can mean two different things. Sometimes it refers to a live event attended by a real, albeit limited, audience. For example, the LA Dance Project put on a series of drive-in shows, the Kaatsbaan summer festival offered spaced-out picnic blanket-seating, and Troy Schumacher and company are currently staging walk-through “Nutcracker” performances at the Wethersfield Mansion. But site-specific also refers to a dance choreographed for a particular place, which is then filmed and broadcast to...

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

A Beautiful Toybox

It's not just little girls who dream of escaping into ballet. Created for the screen by Christopher Hampson and set and costume designer Lez Brotherston and filmed by directors Jess and Morgs, The Secret Theatre comes across as a Victorian toybox full of rich, endless surprises. When a young boy, played with exuberance and wonder by Leo Tetteh, finds his way into an empty theatre, he is taken on an adventure into the heart of Christmas ballet, where dancers cast spells before his eyes. Here, Scottish Ballet bring the viewer not one, but two, magical ballets for the festive season, as...

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Merilyn Jackson

Beyond Ballet

In the last three decades, the term Dance and Technology became a thing, a niche where choreographers strove to enhance and marry kinetic movement with digital, animation, film and video. Brilliant failures and successes ensued, depending on how the collaborators gelled with each other. One of the great triumphs was “BIPED,” (1999) where Merce Cunningham partnered with Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar's dazzling projected animation imagery and the murky, sonar-like thuds of Gavin Bryars' score. The dancers' shimmering tourmaline costumes furthered the underwater impression and the choreography swam, receding, wavery, elusive.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Dusk Chorus

The Swan, with choreography from David Dawson and written and filmed by Eve McConnachie, is of course inspired by “Swan Lake,” and focuses on the first six minutes of Act 4. It acts as (all being well next year) a wonderful taste of Scottish Ballet's forthcoming full adaptation and tour.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Holding Tight

While many smaller American ballet companies hang on month to month through the pandemic to learn the ultimate shape of their fates, other troupes have faced harsh consequences swiftly. Just three months after California’s Covid restrictions, the board of the Sacramento Ballet voted to terminate Amy Seiwert’s tenure as artistic director, and the shifts she’d begun there—away from classical chestnuts and regional-level Balanchine and towards European-influenced new works—ended abruptly. Swiftly, Seiwert announced that she was returning to her project-based company in San Francisco, Imagery, which among other endeavors (and tours to the Joyce Theater Ballet Festival and Jacob’s Pillow) produces...

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Windows on Dance

In a window longer than it is tall, within a white frame, there is a room. A room as a blank canvas. A room as a piece of paper awaiting the first gesture of a drawing. The optical illusion of this window through to a room held within a white frame makes the information it holds appear three-dimensional: my eye registers a room and the white frame becomes a flat two-dimensional screen, on my computer screen, by comparison.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

The Future is Unwritten

Based in Glasgow, and recently celebrating three years since they formed, Project X have a strong aesthetic and highly prolific output with a focus on history, culture and the lived experience of the African and Caribbean Diaspora. These two brand new short films from the multi-disciplinary company, screening as part of Black History Month, take on a female perspective. Both films rejoice in sisterhood and a strong sense of selfhood, both are beautiful celebrations of black women, and feel powerful and moving in distinct ways.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Flower of the Season

Now, it seems, more than ever, do we need art. And while Covid continues its assault on a huge swath of our population, relief came to this reviewer in the form of a live-streamed concert by butoh master Oguri. Bringing laser-like intensity to each and every performance while simultaneously creating portraits of staggering resilience, this supreme mover continues to surprise, stun and satisfy with his dances, whether solo or in conjunction with others.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

New [digital] Ghosts

What was live, I can pause, and it occurs to me that not being able to conveniently pause a live performance was one of the things I most enjoyed about it. It was live. It is live. It was/is roaring along, independent of my will. And in having no control over any part of its trajectory, I disappeared completely, in the best possible sense. I wasn’t me in the theatre or hall, but a series of notes, a flurry of limbs, a lightness, an extension, particles illuminated by stage lighting; anything. In this freedom, a different kind of pause. A...

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

Summer Shorts

In the beginning of August, Marquee TV—a performing arts streaming platform—unveiled its inaugural “Summer Short Film Festival,” a curated selection of 28 short films of dance and music from around the world. The festival is a result of the partnership of Marquee TV with the San Francisco Dance Film Festival and Scotland’s Screen.dance festival. All the entries of “Summer Shorts” are offered for free viewing until the end of the month.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Róisín O'Brien

Festival Lights

Edinburgh is quiet. In August, the city normally swells with people jostling to get into theatres, pubs, shipping crates, beer gardens, and tents. The festivals are a key part of Edinburgh’s identity, and while there are often murmurs within the industry that a break from, or a scale back of the festivals wouldn’t do the city any harm, nobody wanted a break this way.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Bright Lights and Bach

It begins in a place I know well. In the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria. Benedicte Bemet, who was promoted to coryphée in 2013, to soloist in 2016, to senior artist in 2018, and to principal artist in 2019 with The Australian Ballet, is seated at the far end of the hall. Beneath the prismatic revelation of Leonard French’s Great Hall ceiling (1963–67), Bemet is alone.

Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Rebecca Deczynski

Firebird Rising

Long before the dancers take the stage, Dance Theatre of Harlem’s season at New York City Center feels like one of the most energizing cultural events of the spring.

REVIEWS | Faye Arthurs

Rare Birds

It is rare for George Balanchine’s grand, bedazzled “Symphony in C” to open a program. Its champagne-popping finale for 52 dancers tends to be a nightcap.

REVIEWS | Faye Arthurs

Lord of the Dance

The Spring is Blooming festival, by Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, now in its fifth year, has become a highlight of the spring dance circuit.

REVIEWS | Eoin Fenton

Jack of Hearts

As the audience come to their feet at the end of this ballet there is a noted difference to be seen on stage. Three women stand with joined hands, taking their call as the romantic leads of a loud and proud lesbian ballet.

REVIEWS | Rachel Howard

School Report

One of San Francisco Ballet’s greatest assets is its home venue, the Beaux-Arts style War Memorial Opera House, with four rings of seating that require performers to project their energies practically to the exosphere.