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Odette vs Odile x 3

The ink is barely dry on year-end top ten lists, yet the first months of the new year bring no respite from heady contest. In sports (the Super Bowl), cinema (the Golden Globes through the Oscars), and politics (the primaries), winter in America is rife with competition. Why should the ballet world be any different? In the span of roughly a month, NYC dancegoers had to choose between three major productions of that classic synecdochical of the art form: “Swan Lake.” Actually, there were four—but in this review I won’t cover the St. Petersburg Ballet Theater’s two shows at BAM....

REVIEWS | By Rachel Elderkin

The Space Between

“maliphantworks3” marks choreographer Russell Maliphant's third season of works performed at the Coronet, an intimate venue in London's Notting Hill characterised by its dimly-lit corridors and eclectic collection of objects and memorabilia. Like the previous two programmes, “maliphantworks3” presents a selection of short works by the choreographer and his collaborators, including three world premieres and the return of 2018's “Duet” performed by Maliphant and long-term collaborator, Dana Fouras. Significantly, this third season also marks Fouras’ last performances with Russell Maliphant Dance Company.

Scottish Dance Theatre Antigone, Interrupted

REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Herstory

It starts with a hand—a fist, clenching, pulsing as a heartbeat. Sinews and muscles are taut, the arm outstretched. The hand gives, but can also take away. The hand strikes, punches, slaps, caresses, pulls. So, too, the hand crowns kings and queens. This is the jumping-off point for French dancer Solène Weinachter's incredible new solo performance, “Antigone, Interrupted.” Human fragility is, Weinachter suggests, one side of the same coin, where strength is another. It is both meditation on Antigone, princess of Thebes and doomed daughter of Oedipus, from a feminist perspective; and also a personal journey between Weinachter and director...

REVIEWS | By Josephine Minhinnett

Chouinard, Velocity and Vigour

After premiering “Radical Vitality, Solos and Duets” at the Venice Biennale in 2018 and touring it to festivals across Canada and Europe, Compagnie Marie Chouinard came back to a familiar venue at Canadian Stage in Toronto and took up place in the inaugural season for new artistic director Brendan Healy.

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Balanchinean Revivalism, Amen!

Last week the New York City Ballet premiered the newest Ratmansky work. This week, the new… Balanchine? The company’s latest program is full of offbeat revivals: two B-sides from the house’s founder and a Jerome Robbins deep track too. It was must-see viewing for ballet nerds, who were out in full force. If I may speak for our kind, it didn’t disappoint. Though I do wonder if the casual ballet-goer was as entertained.

REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Bullet Points

Inspired by a real-life incident years ago, when police bust in on Joseph Toonga after a neighbour complained about noise, and he had to prove he was a dance student to them and had done nothing wrong, “Born to Manifest” is a brutal and brittle concrete slab of dance. Toonga's choreography sits neatly alongside the cultural signifiers of black culture, where racially-motivated police brutality isn't merely alluded to but represented in an unflinching way in hip-hop, film and literature. I'm reminded of tracks like Public Enemy's “Fight the Power,” Ruthless Rap Assassins' “Justice” and Childish Gambino's “This Is America.” It's...

Teaċ Daṁsa in Michael Keegan-Dolan's “MÁM”

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Unmasked

Michael Keegan-Dolan’s first production with his company Teaċ Daṁsa was a version of “Swan Lake” reworked into a critique of the Catholic church. With “MÁM,” the Irish dancemaker continues to probe the keystones of Irish culture, this time with a more impressionistic lens. The new work glides through a fog of cigarettes and dance halls, intimacy and anguish, craggy sea cliffs and whispers of holy ghosts. Its scope is cosmic and targeted at once, hitching the profundities of existence to the minutiae of everyday life. Mám means ‘mountain pass,’ but it can also refer to an obligation or a handful...

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

To Lula with Love/Warrior

Black History Month was ushered in with a bang when members of Lula Washington Dance Theatre shredded the stage—in a good way—at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing arts last weekend. At least technically speaking, as the 10 exceptional performers proved indefatigable, joyous and a solid reason to continue to support the art form that celebrates the body in motion—in this case, from an African-American perspective.

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Ratmansky’s New Voice

The New York City Ballet presented its first premiere of the year Thursday night: Alexei Ratmansky’s “Voices.” This piece marked a welcome departure for Ratmansky. Erenow he has essentially worked in two modes: emotionally resonant, peasant-inflected abstraction or grand-scale historical reconstruction. “Voices” is neither, though it contains elements of both (like folksy accents for Megan Fairchild, and challenges of classical ballet technique—for almost everyone). Its closest antecedent, perhaps its inverse, is his “Serenade after Plato’s Symposium”—a set of solos for seven men which was choreographed for ABT in 2016. But that piece was more conventional, with steps that hewed closely...

REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Ever After

I must have been fifteen: A little old, already, for the content, and yet the spectacle held my attention more than MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which my mother had brought me to a few seasons before, driving us four hours from our Section 8 neighborhood in flat, brown Fresno, through the skyscrapers of San Francisco to the gilt War Memorial Opera House. The ballet this time was Michael Smuin’s “Peter and the Wolf.” The company was American Ballet Theatre. There were dancers dressed like animals. Costumes of bright orange and green, copious plumage. An easy-to-follow story, made all the more...

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Going Platinum

Just a few beats after the curtain went down on English National Ballet’s roundly admired run of “Le Corsaire,” the company threw itself into another shiny production: a gala to celebrate its platinum anniversary. In 1950, ENB was an upstart troupe with a makeshift title (London Festival Ballet). Even with two marquee names attached—Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin, darlings of the Ballets Russes—the road to success was riven with financial pitfalls. Fast-forward 70 years, though, and ENB’s an immutable presence on the British stage, still rocking starpower on the mantle, with Tamara Rojo doubling up as artistic director/lead principal since...

REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Dancing in Unison

It is surely a measure of the dire American moment. In 20 years of watching the San Francisco Ballet, I cannot remember a single occasion when artistic director Helgi Tomasson has so much as alluded to societal tensions. But there he was pre-curtain at the opening gala of his company’s 87th season, explaining he had chosen to launch the evening with an excerpt from George Balanchine’s “Stars and Stripes” because “it has a way of reminding us in challenging times that despite our differences we are all Americans and art can bring us together.”

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.