World-class review of ballet and dance.
A healthy-sized crowd swarmed ODC Theater’s lobby for SFDanceworks’ closing matinee in the Mission District, and word from the box office was that attendance the previous nights had been robust. This was happy news for San Francisco dance fans who appreciate a Nederlands Dans Theater-esque aesthetic: sleek, spine-roiling movement, virtuosic in balletic ways yet weighted, often set to contemporary music with a tinge of the ominous and intellectual.
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The Metropolitan Opera stage, awash in harsh lights and a roughly patterned backdrop, almost felt industrial when the curtain rose on Alonzo King’s “Single Eye.” But as dancers appeared in pale aqua velvet leotards, the stage softened. Then, it began to feel more vulnerable and intimate, as principal dancers Christine Shevchenko and Thomas Forster performed a pas de deux full of gorgeously fluid movements between geometrical positions.
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A ballet as famed and often performed as “Swan Lake” comes with both high expectations and the risk of losing its lustre, making it both a rite of passage and a continuing challenge for dancers at all points of their careers. Audiences were able to see both in action in American Ballet Theatre’s recent 12-show run of “Swan Lake,” where dancers both debuted and revisited the iconic roles of Odette/Odile and Prince Siegfried.
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Sometimes a work of art can be compelling for its strict adherence to the rules of a given form, for the comfort and beauty that can be found in a virtuosity we already know how to gauge. Classical ballet is rife with examples of this sort. Other times, a spirit of rebellion or failure to conform can provide a kind of satisfying spaciousness—an atmosphere in which we are dazzled not just by what our eyes are seeing but by what we might imagine going forward. On Thursday, June 30th, 2022, at the Joyce Theater, Christopher Williams Dances had moments of...
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Returning to Dancehouse’s Sylvia Staehli Theatre for Week Two of the Keir Choreographic Award, let us begin at the end. In a live cross to Carriageworks, Sydney, the 2022 KCA international jury, Daniel Riley (Wiradjuri/Australia), Eko Supriyanto (Indonesia), Laurie Uprichard (Ireland), Lemi Ponifasio (Aotearoa/New Zealand), and Nanako Nakajima (Japan), awards the $50,000 Keir Choreographic Award to Tra Mi Dinh for her questioning of what really is an ending in her work “The ___”.
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Desolate. Exuberant. What do we do now? We dance, of course. From a callout in November, 2021, eight applicants were selected to develop a work of up to 20-minutes in a five-month period (February to June) in 2022, for the fifth edition of the biennial Keir Choreographic Award (KCA). The eight commissioned works included Alan Schacher and WeiZen Ho, Tra Mi Dinh, Alice Will Caroline, and Jenni Large, in Week One at Dancehouse, Melbourne. With Lucky Lartey, Rebecca Jensen, Joshua Pether, and Raghav Handa to follow in Week Two, at the culmination of which, the $50,000 prize will be awarded...
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Pacific Northwest Ballet finally made good on its long-planned tour to New York City this week, exactly two years after its intended run. Covid was still, unfortunately, plaguing the troupe: many last-minute principal replacements were announced in both the dancing ranks and those of the PNB orchestra—who were also, impressively, along for the tour. Poor, lovely Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan danced in two pieces while taking a mask on and off depending on whether she was in proximity to other dancers’ faces. (What a lot to keep track of! Did she have a mask waiting in every wing?) Despite these pandemic remnants,...
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In Alexei Ratmansky’s revival of Marius Petipa’s lost classic “Harlequinade,” we have the familiar characters Pierrot and Pierette, Harlequin and Columbine. Known from paintings, figurines, pantomimes, other ballets, sweets, and from the commedia dell’arte. With a chorus of characters, young and old, coloured by collective, ever-changing memory over the centuries, the Australian Ballet presents “Harlequinade” a co-production with American Ballet Theatre. This merry romp, a light-hearted play, a confection for the senses. True to history, “Harlequinade’s” appeal lies in its quick-change movements of the familiar, stock characters and the quick-change movements of the story. In his pre-curtain address, on opening...
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Who is Marta Carrasco? Her bio says that she’s a “celebrated Catalan artist who moves between theater, dance and the visual arts as a performer, dancer, choreographer and director.” She also formed her own company in 1995 and has taken home a fistful of awards, including the National Dance Prize of Catalonia and several Max awards. But in what was billed as Carrasco’s farewell performance at Los Angeles Theatre Center, in a mind-blowing 11-day run presented by the Latino Theater Company, Carrasco delivered a gut-punch to the soul in her never less than astonishing, “Perra de Nadie.”
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George Balanchine famously said, “there are no mothers-in-law in ballet.” Well, fifteen minutes into “Of Love and Rage,” Alexei Ratmansky’s new full-length production for the American Ballet Theater, there was one mother-in-law pacing the stage and two fathers-in-law in a reconciliation dance. By the intermission, the leading lady Callirhoe (Catherine Hurlin, exquisite) had been married twice, impregnated, threatened into a coma (huh?), buried alive, and abducted by pirates. In Act II she was nearly kidnapped twice more. She was saved only by the deus ex machina intrusion of a war that required the services of all the men in the...
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At the end of Yin Yue's “A Measurable Existence” on June 15, Marla Phelan and Kevin Pajarillaga walked stoically forward and back, one downstage and one upstage, standing in a glow of orange lighting. The piece is a feat of clever partnering and energetic contemporary phrase work that is intricate and challenging. In New York Live Arts' intimate space, we can see even the beads of sweat that drip off of the dancers' chins. Performing up close can be risky; but the Gibney dancers up close are perhaps even more remarkable than afar, as we witness in immediacy their precision,...
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Remember me. Remember me. The comfort that floats behind the heartache of Henry Purcell’s Lament from “Dido and Aeneas,” When I am laid in the earth: remember me. Be now, in the present, remember me. So begins “Kunstkamer,” originally commissioned in 2019 for the 60th anniversary of Netherlands Dans Theater, and presented for the first time outside of the Netherlands by the Australian Ballet.
Continue ReadingLong before the dancers take the stage, Dance Theatre of Harlem’s season at New York City Center feels like one of the most energizing cultural events of the spring.
Continue ReadingIt is rare for George Balanchine’s grand, bedazzled “Symphony in C” to open a program. Its champagne-popping finale for 52 dancers tends to be a nightcap.
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The Spring is Blooming festival, by Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, now in its fifth year, has become a highlight of the spring dance circuit.
Continue ReadingAs the audience come to their feet at the end of this ballet there is a noted difference to be seen on stage. Three women stand with joined hands, taking their call as the romantic leads of a loud and proud lesbian ballet.
Continue ReadingOne of San Francisco Ballet’s greatest assets is its home venue, the Beaux-Arts style War Memorial Opera House, with four rings of seating that require performers to project their energies practically to the exosphere.
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