World-class review of ballet and dance.
Sarasota Ballet is known for its scrupulous renditions of ballets by Frederick Ashton and other British choreographers, as well as for its general excellence in classical dance. What it is less known for is commissioning new works from living choreographers. Which makes its new “A Comedy of Errors,” which premiered at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall on March 26th, all the more remarkable.
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When I heard that Karole Armitage had packaged her latest creations as “A Pandemic Notebook,” I was intrigued. What exactly does a punk ballerina/director/choreographer get up to during a long cultural shutdown? As is her wont, a lot. And though she did succumb to one straightforward pandemic trope, in “6’ Feet Apart” (the only clunker on the bill), she mostly took the big themes of the past few years—disease, Trump, nature, celebrity—and filtered them through her smart and eclectic lens. At New York Live Arts last week, her Notebook entries were presented as a series of short works alternating between...
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Last seen at La Scala in 2014, George Balanchine’s “Jewels” returned on stage this season, coincidentally like many other companies around the world: the New York City Ballet and Royal Ballet, not to mention the Bolshoi Ballet and the Mariinsky Ballet.
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Calling all dance junkies! Seriously, after being deprived of live performances for more than two years—save for the occasional outdoor terpsichorean pleasure—Angelenos were treated to heavy doses of balletic feasting when Hamburg Ballet made its debut at the Music Center this month.
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The Joyce Theater celebrated St. Patrick's Day with a riveting and rhythmic run by the midwestern Trinity Irish Dance Company. The company, under the direction of founding artistic director Mark Howard, claims to be the birthplace of “progressive Irish dance,” a genre which uses traditional Irish step dance in contemporary choreographies alongside both traditional and contemporary music. The company presented a number of short pieces, mainly by Howard, as well as one new commission by tap stars Michelle Dorrance and Melinda Sullivan.
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At a train station of the St Petersburg Railway, I arrive. A prologue, in Moscow. In the State Theatre, first viewing. Live streaming on Ballet TV, the second. As the engine smoke clears, I get my bearings. Taking my seat on the platform, in both audiences, I am rendered diminutive. The station is a vast cavern, looming overhead. It is a projection, but it is so cinematically real in its rendering. I might be experiencing the Australian Ballet’s new co-production with the Joffrey Ballet of Yuri Possokhov’s “Anna Karenina,” but I am also visiting a friend: Tolstoy’s timeless literary work....
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Things open where they began, in a loop, only I don’t know it yet. In measured steps, Angela Goh walks diagonally across the stage. She studies the audience, her focus fixed, unblinking. Upon an exposed, brightly lit stage, it could be said she is comparatively exposed, but her unflinching focus says otherwise. In the quiet of the Sylvia Staehli Theatre, at Dancehouse, for the opening night performance of “Sky Blue Mythic,” you can hear the noise of the traffic outside. In a work that “is about our relationship to what surrounds us,”[note]Angela Goh, “Sky Blue Mythic” Artist Statement, Dancehouse, https://www.dancehouse.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Sky-Blue-Mythic-Artist-Statement.pdf,...
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How do dancers with disabilities navigate space? Who is defining space for disabled dancers? What are the objects that obstruct, block and blur? How do we define choreography within the framework of disability? Candoco Dance Company are, as ever, refining and redefining what it is to move in space, and how dancers of various abilities navigate this in their practice. They ask the questions that make other people shy away, because society is still not comfortable with disability. As an arts critic recently diagnosed with a disability, I became increasingly aware during lockdown of how I interact with day to...
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It was a joyous return to the stage after a long, hard 23-month slog through a global pandemic, and it was only fitting that the Brooklyn-based Ronald K. Brown/Evidence opened the CAP UCLA season at Royce Hall on Saturday night. The losses have been—and continue to be—profound, now including the many dead from Russia’s despicable war on Ukraine, making the performance a powerful and healing statement in the name of art.
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In this moment of intense human suffering, I find that my reaction to art and beauty is complicated by conflicting emotions. The need for beauty and connection is strong, but so is the mental refusal of anything that rings false or comes across as too easy. When human frailty is so glaringly present, art that reflects that frailty becomes all the more precious.
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As jazz music was evolving in the early 20th century, people were moved by it and moved to it. Early jazz dances like the Charleston and the Lindy Hop emerged as a response to swing music and, like their musical counterpart, celebrated energetic improvisation using vocabulary rooted in West African and African American aesthetics. In the 1940s, the music took a sharp new turn: the art form moved into the era of bebop, the modern, virtuosic and up-tempo style that critics complained “you can't dance to.” While bebop musicians cleverly retorted that maybe “you can't dance to it,” the critics...
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Sasha Riva and Simone Repele, Italian dancers with parallel careers with Hamburg Ballett and Geneva Ballet, now a choreographic duo, chose the novel and the movie The Danish Girl as a subject for their new work: “Lili Elbe Show.” After a preview last summer in Montepulciano (a beautiful village in Tuscany), the piece for five dancers, with revised choreography, staging and with new costumes by Francesco Murano, premiered in February in Rovereto and Trento, headlining inDanza.22. As explained by the choreographers themselves, it was not easy to approach such a story, but they believe that this is the right moment...
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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