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Co_Motion Dance “Force.” Photograph by Amy Lovelock

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

The Next Generation

London’s the Place has been running its Resolution Festival for more than 25 years. The annual showcase, which presents a spate of new dance works throughout January and February, is a boon for emerging artists: along with a performance platform, the dancemakers who participate receive professional support and guidance throughout the production process—a valuable leg up in a dance scene as competitive as London’s. The festival’s track record for launching famous faces is another draw: some of the biggest names in contemporary British dance, including Wayne McGregor and Hofesh Shechter, got their start on the Resolution stage.

Megan Fairchild in George Balanchine's “Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3.” Photograph by Paul Kolnik

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

Rare Pearls

George Balanchine’s “Ballo della Regina” and “Kammermusik No. 2” were created approximately at the same time and premiered by New York City Ballet in January 1978. Both pieces are concise and small in scale; both are fascinating and unique; yet neither belongs to the pantheon of Balanchine’s greatest creations. Nevertheless, each ballet, precious in its own way, adds to our understanding and appreciation of the craft of the great ballet master. Dance critic Arlene Croce aptly summed up her attraction to “Ballo della Regina” in particular—and to a Balanchine ballet in general—simply and clearly: “Who cares if it isn’t great?...

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Charged

“Please continue.”

REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Dreamers

Fleur Darkin's brilliant Scottish Dance Theatre are like chameleons, or shape-shifters: endlessly versatile. Anton Lachky's utterly demented “Dreamers” is a study in waving your freak flag high. Everyone in the ensemble of ten gets a chance to shine. Soloists 'nominate' their dancer of choice, and their improvisational style is as individual as a fingerprint.

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

The Journey Forward

In the programme notes for “…como el musguito en la piedra, ay si si si...” (“Like moss on a stone”), Pina Bausch’s final work before her sudden, unexpected death in 2009, dance writer Sarah Crompton insists the piece is “open to infinite interpretation,” that “[nothing] should be seen as explicit,” even the apparent allusions to Chile, where the German choreographer’s troupe took up temporary residence and conceived it as part of its famous World Cities series. Categorical interpretations might be off the table, but an abstract spirit of voyage and discovery does seem to infuse “Como el musguito,” inserting itself,...

Sara Mearns in George Balanchine's Walpurgisnacht Ballet. Photo Paul Kolnik

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

Mozartiana

A dance of transcendent beauty, “Mozartiana,” set to the musical suite of the same title by Tchaikovsky, was George Balanchine’s final masterpiece. The ballet was created for Suzanne Farrell, his last and greatest muse; in a way “Mozartiana” was his farewell gift to her. Choreographed in 1981 to commence the New York City Ballet Tchaikovsky Festival, this ballet was also a heartfelt homage to Tchaikovsky himself, whom Balanchine all his life regarded as a mentor and inspiration. “Balanchine at the age of seventy-seven had given us a vision of heaven as he interpreted it from the Lord’s Prayer, ‘on earth...

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Astonish Me

True to its mission of being an artistic collective, and loosely based on the principles of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, where great talents of the day were brought together to collaborate, L.A. Dance Project, founded in 2012 by Benjamin Millepied and a core group of artists, composers and designers, is proving its mettle. In its debut at the Wallis (a beautiful, intimate space for dance and an excellent fit for the nine-member company), the troupe brought two tried-and-tested goodies, and one U.S. debut that was breathtaking in its choreographic detail and jaw dropping in scope and execution.

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Disco Odyssey

Meg Wolfe has tackled various subjects in her choreographic evolution, including a hat-tip to film noir (2008’s “Eleven Missing Days”) and fantasies of a post-apocalyptic renewal (2007’s “The Return of Captain Ladyvoice”). Since moving to Los Angeles from New York in 2004, the 47-year old with the elfin face and neo-bobbed hair has also amassed an impressive following among scenesters, envelope-pushing terpsichoreans and all stripes of gays and transpeople (and any and all combinations thereof).

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Ashton on the Town

Frederick Ashton’s much-loved “Rhapsody” is perhaps epitomised by the scene in which six male dancers hold the lead aloft and parade him around like a king, a ring of glittering ballerinas encircling the reverent display. The plotless ballet, created as a birthday present for the Queen Mother in 1980 and presented here as part of a double bill celebrating the Royal Ballet’s founding choreographer, is all about spectacle—in fact, Ashton specifically enlisted Mikhail Baryshnikov, Russian virtuoso extraordinaire, for the starring role to ensure the piece had a central spark powerful enough to ignite the blaze of majesty he envisioned.

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Fire and Ice

Mystic, vibrant, violent, feminist—Akram Khan’s newest work is all this and more. The hour-long piece stars Khan himself alongside Ching-Ying Chien and Christine Joy Ritter, and takes its inspiration from Karthika Naïr’s 2015 collection of poems Until the Lions, a reinterpretation of the Mahabharata, the ancient Sanskrit epic. This postmodern narrative layering—in which mythology is reframed through a modern literary lens and then channeled through a prism of contemporary dance, itself informed, in this case, by kathak tradition—lends a rich complexity to the work, one that’s felt in many aspects, from the stratified music to the mosaic sequencing.

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Rain Dance

Inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Oya, the Afro-Cuban deity of, among other elements, wind, storms, fertility and magic, Ana María Alvarez’ world premiere, “Agua Furiosa,” was, in fact, frantic, frenetic and infuriating—to this reviewer. Alvarez, a Cuban-American in her late 30s, has been crafting the soggy opus for more than two years. Possessed of the DNA activist gene (her parents were both union organizers and also involved in civil rights), Alvarez founded CONTRA-TIEMPO (literally, “against the times”), in 2005.

Scottish Ballet in Christopher Hampson’s “Cinderella.” Photograph by Andy Ross

REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Grace and Pistachio Flavour

Chief executive and artistic director of Scottish Ballet, Christopher Hampson, has spoken of a desire to reimagine the classic fairytale as being a place populated by people who are “not defined by material things, or by who they have married.” Job done. It's an idiosyncratic, witty foray into scenes evocative of MGM's golden age, with a pinch of film noir at the start and an undercurrent of German Expressionism also thrown in, but moreover, his main remit is to weave a morality tale of eschewing worldly goods for inner beauty. The disparity between rich and poor is alluded to in...

Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Karen Hildebrand

Spellbound

Two performers crawl in on hands and knees wearing neon green, hooded coveralls—the lightweight papery kind made for working in a sterile environment—and clusters of balloons pinned to their backs.

REVIEWS | Sarah Cecilia Bukowski

Green Light

Will Rawls makes boundaries visible by defying them. Known for the disciplinary and topical range of his projects, the choreographer, director, and performer approaches issues of representation in “[siccer],” a multi-part, multi-site work co-presented by L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival. A live performance at Performance Space New York...

REVIEWS | Faye Arthurs

Home and Away

It is always interesting when multiple theme steps emerge over the course of a mixed repertory evening, but it is uncanny on one featuring five different ballets, each with a different choreographer and composer, covering a twenty-year span (2005-2025).

REVIEWS | Karen Greenspan

Of Dandelions and Resilience

Zvidance premiered its new work “Dandelion” mid-November at New York Live Arts. Founded by Zvi Gotheiner in 1989, Zvidance has been a steady presence in the New York contemporary dance scene, a reliable source of compositional integrity, and a magnet for wonderful dancers.

REVIEWS | Steve Sucato

The Music Within

Cleveland native Dianne McIntrye received a hometown hero's welcome during her curtain speech prior to her eponymous dance group thrilling the audience in her latest work, “In the Same Tongue.”