World-class review of ballet and dance.
A recent Dance Data Project survey reports what everyone in the ballet world knows: Women are grossly under-represented in ballet leadership. Just one of the top 10 largest ballet companies in the U.S. is led by a woman, and only 30 percent of the top 50 companies are. Retiring ballerinas, we know, are far more likely to become ballet mistresses and school faculty than artistic directors.
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To say that it was a joy to see live dance again after some 16 months is an understatement. And seeing San Francisco-based Alonzo King LINES Ballet in the final offering of the Music Center’s al fresco “Dance at Dusk” series, proved to be the cherry on the quasi-post-pandemic cake. Although we are not out of the Covid woods yet—Los Angeles has reinstated its indoor mask mandate and the Delta variant is on the rise—being socially distanced in pods of four on the Jerry Moss Plaza, made for a perfect blend of art, community and, well, safety.
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In 1975, Laura Mulvey first came up with the term “the male gaze,” where the assumption, particularly within the media, was that those consuming and watching most art forms were male, or male identifying, hence the need for women being represented as mere window dressing and sexually appealing objects. This was largely ubiquitous in film, art, pop videos and on fashion runways—even in dance productions. However, with strides being made in contemporary society in recognising that gender is largely a construct, and that it's no longer about male and female, but rather than gender can also be trans, fluid and/or...
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The long-awaited “Don Juan” by Johan Inger for Aterballetto has at last found its way on a national and international tour. Due to the first Italian lockdown, the creation of the new ballet was suspended and postponed and when it finally premiered, last autumn, it had only two performances: a preview in Reggio Emilia, the city where Aterballetto is resident, and an official debut in Ferrara. An important stop in this year's new tour was in Ravenna, at the renowned festival founded by Riccardo Muti’s wife. Performed indoor at Alighieri Theatre, a beautiful “teatro all’italiana,” “Don Juan” had two performances,...
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“Animals & Angels,” the new pas de deux by #QueertheBallet founder Adriana Pierce, is so pretty and easygoing you almost forget how radical it is. The piece is under five minutes long and features two women, Cortney Taylor Key and Audrey Malek, wafting joyfully around an airy white loft. They beam affectionately at each other as Joy Oladokun sings the opening line of her song, “Animals & Angels:” “Would you like some coffee with a side of cream?” Suitably, Key has a on a cream-colored shirt with latte brown high-waisted pants, Malek sports the inverse. It’s all so pleasant and...
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Astoundingly impactful, Bangarra’s “SandSong: Stories from the Great Sandy Desert” is a work that needs to be seen by all Australians.
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There is no genuflecting here. Joan Clevillé's new film for Scottish Dance Theatre, The Life and Times, is as close to the classic lush period cinema of Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman, with all of the integral anarchy, mischief and darkness as it's possible to create, without getting too controversial or explicit (neither director was a stranger to controversy, or well-crafted filth).
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The “Five Minute Call” proceeds a bit differently for this final offering in Pacific Northwest Ballet’s unprecedented digital season. In the pre-curtain video montage created by principal dancer Dylan Wald, we see the dancers pulling off false eyelashes and packing up—including sealing an era-defining face mask back inside a Tupperware container—then walking out of the dressing room to their post-performance lives. Except suddenly the footage runs in reverse. The eyelashes and costumes go back on, the dancers are back on the stage. Here we are in the heightened “already-but-not-yet” experience of our moment: We feel we are already past the...
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When I attended a performance at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park last summer, it was a picture-perfect day. Though I went during the thick of the Covid pandemic, a gentle breeze rustled the sunny fields framing the beautiful dancing and I could almost forget about the raging virus. This year, Mother Nature had other plans. My original ticket was for the Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend, which was correctly predicted to be a rainout, so I was encouraged to attend the same program on Saturday instead. The show went on, though it poured up until a few hours before and...
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It has been over a year since theatres closed due to Covid-19 and against my own logic, I am holding a ticket to see Canada’s first in-theatre dance program since the start of the pandemic: Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in “Echoes,” a 70-min mixed program of eight pieces, contemporary and classical, to include two new works by Canadian choreographers Hélène Blackburn and Andrew Skeels.
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Part of thinking about dance is thinking about bodies, the space they inhabit and the intimacy involved in creation: this is surely as true for critics as makers. So it is with Jasmin Vardimon Company's enigmatic Canvas, which interrogates such themes. In the middle of the pandemic, we are all becoming increasingly mindful of the space we take up, how to not get in the way of others, and how to be sensitive and recalibrate where we walk, queue, run, and travel (if possible). Just a hand placed in the wrong way is dangerous, just invading someone else's path is...
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The beloved festival of performance, provocation and boundary pushing, Take Me Somewhere, curated by artistic director LJ Findlay-Walsh, would of course have been a live experience at Glasgow's Tramway this May, but with the city still in lockdown, it is in a virtual format online for the first time. A real genre crusher, TMS proves dance and live art can mesh easily together, as evinced by so many of the artists that are programmed as part of this year's line-up. Two such artists are featured here, both with very different pieces captured and live streamed on film. It can often...
FREE ARTICLEWatching 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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