World-class review of ballet and dance.
With the Berliner Festspiel under renovation on Berlin’s western end, artistic director, Virve Sutinen, spread this year’s Tanz im August festival (TIA)—its 33rd—throughout venues in the eastern part of the city. By theater and neighborhood, here are 15 of the shows I took in at this year’s TIA. Each theater has a bar, but not one has so much as a standing or ceiling fan to fend off sweltering heat. So it’s BYOF—Bring Your Own Fan.
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On the edge of the Black Forest, Baden-Baden is not only home to Germany’s most renowned thermal springs. It also hosts the Festspielhaus, the largest opera house in the country, an imposing monument overlooking the chic city center. Seeking to turn Baden-Baden into a wider cultural haven, Benedikt Stampa, new artistic director, opened the season with a big name (John Neumeier), a famous opera (Gluck’s “Orphée and Eurydice,” in its Paris version) and a fine company (Hamburg Ballet).
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It was full speed ahead when L.A.’s very own repertory dance troupe, BodyTraffic took to the stage at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts over the weekend to begin its 2019-2020 residency at the Beverly Hills venue. Co-founded by Lilian Barbeito and Tina Finkelman Berkett in 2007, the eight-member company has carved out a name for itself on both national and international stages while also helping to elevate the contemporary dance scene in its home town.
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How to dance a dance of contrition? Jealousy, slander, hysteria and fear? Helen Pickett's latest, more fleshed-out adaptation of Arthur Miller's classic The Crucible arrives at an interesting time, culturally, when the two most recent successful TV franchises focus on female protagonists: The Handmaid's Tale and Killing Eve (the former focusing on misogyny and oppression, the latter, psychopathy and sexuality). She pulls the audience into the shadow psyche, by framing the Salem witch trials around the affair between servant Abigail Williams (Claire Souet) and affluent, married man John Proctor (Barnaby Rook Bishop) and consequently, the fall-out in their deeply religious...
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It's perhaps entirely apposite to watch something as glorious as this strange, elegiac piece from artistic director Kally Lloyd-Jones on this week, of all weeks, when the global impetus is on the effects of climate change, and all of our futures. (We are doomed if action isn't taken.) It's all about tension and trust within day-to-day relationships for this “intensely personal” piece choreographed by Lloyd-Jones, in collaboration with the cast.
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It’s been 30 years since Alvin Ailey’s death, but his company looks eager as ever to spread the gospel he wrote: a hip, harmonious union of modern dance and black vernacular styles. Ailey’s eminent legacy infuses every piece the troupe performs, even recent commissions like those on show in this UK tour. Where he led, his dancers continue to follow, finding vibrant new ways to honour the lives and experiences of black America.
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Deborah Hay, a torchbearer of America’s 1960s postmodern dance movement, usually deals in minimalism, which means her work rarely feels embellished, emotive or particularly intense; you’re unlikely encounter explicit themes or narratives. The story is the body and how it moves through space in different iterations—how motions can reach beyond the recognised borders of skill and performance in search of something reflective. The idea of liminality is fundamental to Hay’s choreography, which is usually devised using esoteric questions relating to time, perception and place.
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From many languages, one song; from “the beginning of day,”[note]David Unaipon, Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker (eds.), Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines (Carlton: Miegunyah Press at Melbourne University Press, 2001), 217[/note] shared knowledge, respect, and understanding; from an unbreakable connection to land and community, come together, with purpose, invites Bangarra Dance Theatre. Come together for “30 years of sixty five thousand” to mark the company’s 30th anniversary. Come together to learn, dig deep, acknowledge, and say thank you. “With roots in the world’s oldest continuing culture, “Bangarra: 30 years of sixty five thousand” carries the spirit of Bangarra into...
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I have long wished to swim through the other-worlds created by Georges Méliès, and Stanton Welch’s “Sylvia,” a co-production between Houston Ballet and the Australian Ballet, gives me the opportunity to do just that; to submerge myself in a fantastical landscape that delights in the play of model making and storytelling; in how we tell a story and the story itself. Theatrical and larger than life.
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Like Baz Luhrmann before him, Matthew Bourne’s contemporary reworking of “Romeo and Juliet” adds a coat of grit to fair Verona. Gone are the marbled columns and wrought-iron balconies of the Capulet court; it’s all sheetrock and cold metal bars at the Verona Institute, a juvie-asylum hybrid where disaffected teens are doped into submission. Absent too are the feuding families. Romeo’s parents are shellacked politicians, eager to hand their son over for medicated safekeeping, while Juliet’s are absent from the picture altogether. A legion of tyrannical guards stand in the way of our star-crossed lovers, commanded by a nightmarish Tybalt...
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Though Battery Dance Festival has had many names and neighborhoods through nearly 40 years running, shifted by floods and unnatural phenomena altering the geography of the city, its home here, along the waterfront in Battery Park against the New York Harbor, brings the sublime into the space. The sun, in particular, backgrounding the seven dances on the first day of the weeklong free festival, arcs through the acts of the show, giving a program from companies from around the globe some grandeur and structure. It’s beautiful, and free, so its flaws can be forgiven.
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It's the screaming that resonates around the auditorium. The blood curdling, hellish shrieks that chill to the bone. Such shrill cries to the gods to intervene. Ululations to despair and emptiness, entirely bereft of hope, rise up and circle the space. Is there anything more heart-rending, to see someone cry, and feel powerless to intervene? Crying, we enter the world. Screaming, we leave.
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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