All – Tagged "REVIEWS" – Page 114

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REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

The Creative Act

A single bicycle wheel upturned and mounted upon a stool (Bicycle Wheel, 1951, third version, after lost original of 1913). A snow shovel (In Advance of the Broken Arm, 1964, fourth version, after lost original of 1915). A painted window (Fresh Window, 1920). When Marcel Duchamp placed a mass produced ‘readymade’ before us and disrupted how we thought about and interpreted art, the “ordinary object [was] elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.”[note]Marcel Duchamp, as quoted in The Art of Assemblage: A Symposium, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, October...

Lula Washington Dance Theatre's “Message for My Peeps.” Photo by Heather Toner

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Moves after Dark

Los Angeles, often dubbed the ‘city of the future,’ is not a town known for honoring its past. But with the Music Center having recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, it seemed the ideal venue for four local dance troupes to perform simultaneous, site-specific works on and around its Grand Avenue campus, one that’s been, on occasion, likened to New York City’s Lincoln Center.

REVIEWS | By Claudia Lawson

Power Pop

Anyone who has visited Cuba will know it is a country full of music and movement. The country’s first ballet company, the Ballet Alicia Alonso, was founded in 1948 by the renowned ballerina of the same name, Alicia Alonso (the company went on to become the Ballet Nacional de Cuba). Contemporary or modern dance, as it is known in the West, was only introduced in the early 60s after Cuba’s revolution. With trade embargos meaning the world has seen little of the Cuban dance scene, when Cuban dance company Ballet Revolución decided to include Australia in its world tour, the opportunity to attend opening night...

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Age of Magic

As befits the dreamscape of a fairy tale, the chance to revisit an encore Melbourne-only 2015 season of Alexei Ratmansky’s “Cinderella”[note]I wondered what I would see this time around—would the frame within a frame staging still toy with my sense of space and time? Would the celestial planets, in lieu of a pumpkin coach, continue to entrance with their circular orbit about the stage/through the cosmos? Would the ticking of the clock as time is suspended, chased, and distorted remain visible in the choreography melded to the score?—and I marvelled at the clever sorcery that made October 2013 feel like...

Just Us Dance Theatre. Photograph by Irven Lewis

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Pop and Lock

An energetic air rippled through the crowd on opening night of “Platform,” a showcase of recent work assembled by Just Us Dance Theatre. The bill marks one of the Greenwich-based collective's first full-length offerings on a London stage, and a quick introduction by co-founders Joseph Toonga and Ricardo Da Silva, in which they implored the audience to “please be open about our efforts,” suggested a lot was riding on its reception.

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

In Pursuit of Petipa

American Ballet Theatre’s brand new production of “The Sleeping Beauty” proved the most anticipated and talked about event of the ABT’s spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House, and the highest point of the company’s 75th anniversary celebrations. This birthday gift was orchestrated by Alexei Ratmansky, one of the most prominent and prolific choreographers in today’s ballet. Russian-born Ratmansky has been ABT’s artist-in-residence since 2009; “The Sleeping Beauty” is his most ambitious undertaking for the company to date.

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Home Turf

Last week Richard Alston Dance Company came full circle in its national tour, rounding off its recent string of performances around the UK in London, the same city where it had kicked off proceedings. The 'at home' bit of “Alston At Home” doesn't just refer to the company's hometown; it's a specific credit to The Place, where Richard Alston started his career as a dancer (as one of the first students at London Contemporary Dance School) and is now artistic director. The bill commemorates the twentieth anniversary of RADC, which Alston launched following, among many other successes, a twelve-year tenure...

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

Dreamers

New York City Ballet culminated its spring season at the David H. Koch Theater with George Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”—a masterpiece of witty comedy and brilliant dancing.

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Delirium, Art & Agony

A decidedly polarizing figure that prides himself on creating what he calls, “a new type of theater—Russian psychological ballet theater,” Boris Eifman, according to naysayers, indulges in bombast, his storytelling skills often as thin as prosciutto and his choice of pastiche musical accompaniments (always heard on tape), enigmatic and frustrating to the point of being bizarre.

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

Shades of Beauty

American Ballet Theatre’s “La Bayadère” has just turned 35 years old, standing as one of the most enduring of the nineteenth century classics in the company’s repertory. Such impressive longevity can be attributed to the uniqueness of the current staging, mounted for the company in 1980 by Russian prima ballerina Natalia Makarova, who danced the ballet, originally created by Marius Petipa, during her years with the Mariinsky Ballet of St. Petersburg (then called Kirov Ballet). Makarova acquired her knowledge of the interpretive nuances of the choreography as a manner of genuine artistic succession, learning the role of Nikiya, the ballet’s...

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Flower of the Season

In an astonishing display of courage, fortitude and wit, three dancers performed solos and with each other to a packed house in “Flower of the Season,” a series now in its 12th year presented by Body Weather Laboratory. B.W.L., a forum for investigating kinesthetic and movement research that was initiated by dancer/farmer and improvisateur, Min Tanaka, and is offered by exponents worldwide, is led in Venice by Oguri, the Japan-born performer who goes by one name only.

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

Square Dance

The third—and final—instalment of the New York City Ballet’s “Balanchine Black & White” festival offered three abstract ballets: “Square Dance,” “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” and “Stravinsky Violin Concerto,” in a program dedicated to Balanchine’s famed minimalist aesthetics. If the costumes of the dancers were simple and stage décor was absent, the stylistic and dramatic variety of the choreography was rich, vibrant and powerful.

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.