World-class review of ballet and dance.
For the most dynamic performers, artistry is an embodied quality. Whether through natural aptitude or diligent training—or most often, a combination of the two—the performer transcends the physical, choreographed act of their composition to present something that lingers outside the boundaries of their form.
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The New York City Ballet mounted no premieres this spring, unless you count the stage adaptation of Kyle Abraham’s Covid lockdown film “When We Fell.” Instead, the company drummed up hype by packing the season with debuts in dances both newish and old.
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Bill T. Jones wriggles upstage on his back in a rectangle of light, reciting an unsent letter to the New York Times dance critic Jack Anderson.
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The annual Dancing the Gods Festival of Indian Dance celebrated its fourteenth and final year with a generous finale May 16-18. This final event extended for three evenings instead of the usual two.
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Something old, something new, something borrowed, and something “Blue.” The premise of Australasian Dance Collective’s fortieth anniversary celebration stems from the traditional divisions of time.
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Shadows, dark matter and the enigmas of consciousness—the ideas behind Crystal Pite’s “Frontier” are timely and timeless at once.
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Ballet West’s Works from Within program gave company dancers a chance to speak. This year’s edition featured five works: Katlyn Addison’s “Andromeda,” Nicole Fannéy’s “Lingering Echoes,” Jazz Khai Bynum’s “With Feeling,” Vinicius Lima’s “Elis,” and Emily Adams’ “Mass Hysterical.”
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For the third year in a row, I attended the Spring is Blooming festival on Mother’s Day. Thanks to Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels and artist Alexandre Benjamin Navet, in place of crowded, overpriced brunches, I now look forward to a public dance spectacle, bougie swag, and the delightful camouflaging of the concrete jungles of midtown with pop-art flowers, pastel gazebos, and lazy bench swings.
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Pattern and symmetry are the modus operandi of choreographer Thierry Malandain’s “Les Saisons” (2023), performed by his Malandain Ballet Biarritz contemporary ballet company to close out the Pittsburgh Dance Council’s 2024-2025 season.
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Talk about a Terpsichorean/Euterpean acid-like trip! Brooklyn-based Mark Morris Dance Group, currently celebrating its 45th anniversary, burst onto the stage of the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts last Friday in their Carnaby Street-type costumes that popped with color and pizazz, all the while brilliantly bouncing, wildly whirling, and lusciously leaping to live music.
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When Frank Gehry was tapped to be the architect of Walt Disney Concert Hall, home to both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, he envisioned the space to be “a living room for the city.”
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San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House is a grand, gracious theater, so it was a big deal to see the San Francisco Ballet School hold its end-of-year performances in that hall for the first time since at least 1985.
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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