Renegades
Last week as certain ageist opinions were being aired in Washington, D.C., five performers in a tiny NYC East Village theater quietly made a case for the power of creative longevity.
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New York x London
On the evening of March 7th, New York City Ballet opened a run of shows at Sadler’s Wells Theatre.
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Bunnymen
The first few minutes of Pontus Lidberg’s “On the Nature of Rabbits,” confounds the viewer with a series of inexplicable images in quick succession.
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Tropicalismo in White and Black
The Brazilian company, Grupo Corpo, peerless for their kaleidoscopic sets, costumes, choreography and their music, are touring the US with two reimagined works from just before Covid hit.
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A Night of Ideas
Past the Gallery Kitchen, which for tonight has become an open mic Poets Café, I swim through the swirling 100-metre-long, multi-panelled Mun-Dirra (Maningrida Fish Fence), woven by 13 Burarra women weavers, which hovers above the floor and makes the gallery a waterway.
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Classic NYCB?
At the tail end of the New York City Ballet’s winter season, the sixth and final showing of the “Classic NYCB” program featured thrilling debuts: soloist Emma Von Enck and second-year corps de ballet member David Gabriel assumed the lead roles in Balanchine’s tricky “Ballo della Regina.”
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A Golden Gift
As Belgian choreographer and dancer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker approached her sixtieth birthday in 2019, she decided to gift herself a solo to the music of one of her favorite partners—Johann Sebastian Bach.
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Acts of Defiance
One would think that a dance inspired by the events of the January 6 insurrection—yes, a dance!—would not be the ideal stuff of theater, but the eight members of Laurie Sefton Creates (formerly Clairobscur Dance Company), succeeded in giving life to Sefton’s premiere “Herd. Person?”, while the dance, itself, was occasionally problematic.
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A Danced Legacy
A man stands on a dark box facing sideways. He gently shifts his weight from heels to toes, rocking forward and backward. His gaze remains front, but his body never lands anywhere. He is in constant motion: neither here nor there, caught somewhere in between.
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Questions that Remain
To begin her creative process, the legendary German choreographer Pina Bausch often asked her dancers questions. These questions—and further, the thoughts and deeper rumblings they provoked in the dancers—then formed the basis for many of her pieces.
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Fighting on a New Front
I woke up this morning to the tragic news of Aleksei Navalny’s death in a Russian prison, and the first thing I thought of was the ballet premiere from the night before. That’s new.
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Swans in Seattle
One way to get to know the history of a company is through the “liner notes” of its “Swan Lake” production, and for those of us continuing to build an admiring familiarity with Pacific Northwest Ballet via its digital season offerings, Kent Stowell and Francia Russell’s “Swan Lake” provides an interesting glimpse into PNB prior to Peter Boal’s leadership.
FREE ARTICLEFeatured Reads
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,...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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