World-class review of ballet and dance.
Phoenix Dance Theatre returned for the fourth time to the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House London with a triple bill of new and recently commissioned works. Phoenix is a company with a diverse repertoire and while a programme will always exhibit the technical strength of their dancers, it’s a pleasure to not quite know what to expect.
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It was a week like none other. Let’s just say that there was “before Paris” and then there was the unfathomably horrific, “after Paris,” when the world was once again irrevocably changed. Before Paris, people, went about their business—be it benign, beautiful, dutiful and/or consequential, which, in this writer’s case, happens to be covering the arts. And so it was with extraordinary excitement, that Royce Hall loomed early in this pre-holiday period, because that was where the intensely brilliant choreographer, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who rarely ventures to the West Coast (she performed at Orange County’s Irvine Barclay Theatre in 1997;...
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“The Rite of Spring” is celebrated as much for its infamy as it is for its groundbreaking aesthetic and influence on twentieth-century dance and music. The uproar the avant-garde ballet—scored by Igor Stravinksy and originally choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes—provoked during its 1913 premiere in Paris has enticed many a dancemaker to tackle it in the century since, with choreographers as diverse as Kenneth MacMillan, Martha Graham, Glen Tetley and Pina Bausch trying their hand. In fact, the work has undergone more than 150 interpretations since its debut, and while some are more liberal than others,...
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How to reinvent J.S. Bach's famous, sublime Goldberg Variations? This collaboration between Stockholm-based choreographer Örjan Andersson and Scottish Ensemble's Jonathan Morton seeks to do just that, with a series of choreographic movements integrated with the musicians themselves, blurring roles and responding to the fragmentary nature of the music. It is an ambitious project, and one which mostly works through sheer audacity and imagination.
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Head down, an old man shuffles with the assistance of a wheeled walking frame past the ghostly blue façade of a building. Unbeknownst to him, his dog is tangled in his own lead and is being dragged on his back through the grey streets. In the background, a traditional jazz band plays.
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American Ballet Theatre’s principal dancer Marcelo Gomes, with his good looks, gentle manners and generous spirit, is the embodiment of a Romantic hero. In many ways, he is the ideal Prince Charming of classical ballet: handsome, sweet and kind. In the course of his 18-year career with the company, Gomes has danced scores of princely roles, covering most of the romantic and classical repertory from Albrecht to Siegfried and beyond. Yet the Brazilian-born dancer knows what it takes (and how it feels) to be an anti-hero in dance—particularly in modern dance—portraying, most fascinatingly, The Moor in Jose Limon’s “The Moor’s...
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Rambert’s latest bill, “Love, Art & Rock’n’Roll,” features works from three different choreographers, each corresponding to one of the titular motifs. There’s a fair bit of thematic crossover between Didy Veldman’s ‘art’ offering (“The 3 Dancers,” debuted earlier this autumn) and Kim Brandstrup’s ‘love’ (“Transfigured Night,” here receiving its London premiere): both are earnest in tone and romantic in subject—an intersection that somewhat sequesters Christopher Bruce’s jaunty 1991 Rolling Stones tribute, “Rooster” (in its final performance here). Thematic incongruity aside, the picks gave rise to some stellar opening night performances, with company favourites Dane Hurst and Miguel Altunaga shining particularly...
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Balanchine thought that wondering what a ballet was about was like pondering the theme of a flower. Cunningham averred that a dance was as fraught with meaning as stepping in to a diner for a cup of coffee. Puzzling over “themes” in dance marks you as a yokel, and the closest most sophisticated choreographers will come to indulging you is to defer to the music or some other structural element unlikely to yield answers.
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The first thing that you see as you enter the space is the slumped body of performer/dancer Caroline Bowditch on a bright yellow table, looking in a mirror at herself, looking at the audience looking back at her. Such an act is a statement of intent: Edinburgh Fringe sell-out “Falling in Love with Frida” is both self-reflexive portrait and a homage to the great Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-54).
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The two-week fall season of American Ballet Theatre at the Lincoln Center offered the audience the thrill of discovering something new and the joy of reconnecting with much-beloved classics; but most importantly it showed the company in its full power, with the members of the corps de ballet and the soloists sharing center stage with the principal dancers in a variety of short works.
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For Matisse, who ‘carved’ into colour, blue was the sound of a gong. For Kandinsky, blue was instead evoked by the sound of the cello, which he played. For the poet Arthur Rimbaud, blue was the vowel ‘O’, and it was a “sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds.” Arranged in a line, Rimbaud’s Vowels (1871), from ‘A’ to ‘O’ in colour read: black, white, red, blue, green. On Sunday night, Sydney Dance Company became a body of sound to the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s sounding body. For one night only in Melbourne, a soundscape became a landscape! And blue was...
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Coloured fanciful and utterly distorted, the window onto the world, trumpeted the circus of former glory: Let me show you the fantastical, long-necked “cameleopard”[note]The “cameleopard” turned out to be a giraffe, as the mysteries of the world moved from the ‘discovered’ realm of explorers to the big top’s window on the world.[/note] of yore; behold “300 dancing girls in entrancing revels.”[note]Ringling Brothers advertisement from 1913 in Dominique Jando, “Wonders of the World Await You,” The Circus 1870s–1950s, ed. Noel Daniel, (Germany: Taschen, 2010), 111[/note] The promise of “the marvels of many nations,”[note]The world map depicted on W. W. Cole’s 1881 circus courier...
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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