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Tanz im August 2.0

Despite what the world is suffering this year, two of Europe’s most prestigious international summer dance festivals commit to go forward with drastically truncated, yet vital and imaginative programs. Berlin’s Tanz im August, under the artistic direction of Virve Sutinen, and the Venice Biennale’s Festival Danza under Marie Chouinard’s curatorial leadership will open in late August and mid-October respectively. Each artistic director spoke with me via Skype and Zoom recently about the hardships and angst of redesigning their festivals during this brutal pandemic. This month, we feature Tanz im August and how they pivoted from cancellation to a ten-day online...

FEATURES | By Faye Arthurs

Notes from Quarantine

Like everyone else in the world, I’ve been trying to stay healthy, yet also connected to my work and passions during this abysmal pandemic. It’s a conundrum: I’m a dance critic now, but there are no live dance shows to review. This problem is small beans, of course, in the grand scheme of things. People are dying. People are starving. Life as we knew it has been irrevocably altered. The truly brave and selfless work of all those deemed essential is both humbling and awe-inspiring; I cannot thank these people enough for their intrepid commitment to the human race. But...

FEATURES | By Josephine Minhinnett

The River

For dancers, moving beyond our comfort zones—the places we know to be familiar and safe—often involve pushing the physical limits of the body, training to extremes to create a new normal. But sometimes going beyond comfort zones can also be an inward action, having the bravery to be vulnerable and let go, trusting the body to move towards its places of intuition and feeling. This is what the Dublin-based Flora Fauna Project has been encouraging everyday people from their community to do.

FEATURES | By Caroline Shadle

Desert Island Dances

Hua Hsu wrote in March for the New Yorker a quarantine-inspired piece about the BBC radio show “Desert Island Discs.” The program, which began during World War II as “part of the BBC’s broader effort to make life during wartime slightly more bearable” as Hsu puts it, presents interviews with cultural icons from various fields who are each asked to prepare a list of eight tracks that they would bring with them were they to be stranded on a desert island. Hsu uses “Desert Island Discs” to further his own investigation of the role of music in our lives and...

FEATURES | By Rachel Stone

[Web]Site-Specific

The crowd is the first thing I notice in the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s 2016 performance of “Figure Eights” as part of a performance at Seattle Art Museum. The audience clusters behind the row of six dancers, who are all dressed in casual white shirts and loose, white pants. The audience claps and takes pictures, sits stage-side, heads in their hands, on their phones.

FEATURES | By Victoria Looseleaf

Dance in the Time of Covid-19

Who knew that the performance of American Ballet Theatre's world premiere, “Of Love and Rage,” that I was privileged to see at Segerstrom Center for the Arts on March 5 would be the last live dance concert I would share with some 3,000 thrilled theater-goers. Yes, that’s a rhetorical question, but since the world irrevocably changed in a matter of weeks because of Covid-19, the novel coronavirus, all dance troupes, performing arts organizations and any place people gather—whether for culture, entertainment, dining, drinking and/or to experience nature—have effectively shut down.

FEATURES | REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Odette vs Odile x 3

The ink is barely dry on year-end top ten lists, yet the first months of the new year bring no respite from heady contest. In sports (the Super Bowl), cinema (the Golden Globes through the Oscars), and politics (the primaries), winter in America is rife with competition. Why should the ballet world be any different? In the span of roughly a month, NYC dancegoers had to choose between three major productions of that classic synecdochical of the art form: “Swan Lake.” Actually, there were four—but in this review I won’t cover the St. Petersburg Ballet Theater’s two shows at BAM....

FEATURES | By Josephine Minhinnett

Walk-on, Drop Dead, Exit

On a Wednesday afternoon in Toronto, I watched two former dancers, husband-wife duo Alisia Pobega and Louis-Martin Charest, work alongside a group of serious sixteen- and seventeen-year-old ballet dancers from Canada’s National Ballet School. Pobega crouches in one corner of the studio with half of the students rallied around her, speaking in low tones. Charest is on the opposite side of the room with his back to the mirrors, his dark hair barely perceptible above a crowd of ballet bodies clothed in leotards, loose t-shirts, and sweatpants. He draws the students in closer. They lean towards him, straining to hear....

FEATURES | REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Tappy Holidays

The Joyce Theater presented two festive tap shows this December: Dormeshia’s soulful “And Still You Must Swing” as well as a three-week residency by Dorrance Dance—featuring the premiere of a tap “Nutcracker Suite” to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s funky arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s ubiquitous holiday score. Dorrance’s programming changes weekly, but each show closes with the new “Nutcracker.” This comes to 21 performances, far more than most regional ballet companies and even American Ballet Theatre (with 12). Could a tap company loosen ballet’s yearly stranglehold on this Christmas classic?

FEATURES | REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Story Lines

Prologue

FEATURES | By Merilyn Jackson

Is all that jazzy modern dance Jewish?

With a Jewish population of more than a quarter million and a rich dance culture that boasts five internationally known professional companies in as many ethnicities and dance genres, Philadelphia is a likely stage for a Jewish dance company. Jewish dancers, choreographers, presenters, entrepreneurs, critics, and even arts editors of prominent publications have largely shaped the city’s cultural dancescape over the past century. But, in fact, the first truly Jewish dance company, Koresh Dance Company, (KDC) was founded by Israeli Yemenite choreographer Ronen (Roni) Koresh in 1991. On its own, the company most represents Jewish dance in Philadelphia and nationally....

FEATURES | INTERVIEWS | By Rachel Stone

Taking A.I.M

As the sun set on a humid Central Park the first evening of August, Kyle Abraham, the artistic director of A.I.M (a modern, genre-bending dance company formerly known as Abraham.In.Motion), spoke with Gibney’s new curatorial director Eva Yaa Asantewaa. In the few hours before A.I.M’s performance at the Summer Stage, they talked about Abraham’s performance style and influences, his advice to those who started dancing late in life, and his apprehension surrounding a piece he is currently choreographing for New York City Ballet.

Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Lorna Irvine

Teenage Angst and Institutions

Watching 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,...

INTERVIEWS | Marina Harss

The Me of Today

The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.

REVIEWS | Rachel Howard

Starry Nights

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.

REVIEWS | Faye Arthurs

America, F**K Yeah

After 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.

REVIEWS | Emily May

Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup

An “Ajiaco” is a type of soup common to Colombia, Cuba, and Peru that combines a variety of different vegetables, spices, and meats.