World-class review of ballet and dance.
My favorite books of 2024 offer dance history from the artist’s point of view. Perhaps there is nothing too unusual about this, and yet, something about this trend feels special as we step with trepidation into the first days of 2025.
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The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s annual December residency at City Center featured four world premieres. I caught two: Hope Boykin’s “Finding Free” and Lar Lubovitch’s “Many Angels.”
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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” so began Charles Dickens’s masterpiece, A Tale of Two Cities.
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The Sarasota Ballet does not do a “Nutcracker”—they leave that to their associate school. Instead, over the weekend, the company offered a triple bill of which just one ballet, Frederick Ashton’s winter-themed “Les Patineurs,” nodded at the season.
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I couldn’t stop thinking about hockey at the New York City Ballet’s “Nutcracker” this year, and not only because the stage appeared to be made of ice: there were a slew of spectacular falls one night I attended.
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Last week, during the first Fjord Review Dance Critics’ Festival, Mindy Aloff discussed and read from an Edwin Denby essay during “The Critic’s Process” panel.
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There are “Nutcrackers,” and then there’s American Contemporary Ballet’s “The Nutcracker Suite.”
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Is it as traditional as there being “The Nutcracker” or the British pantomime on at Christmas time, for there to be an alternative offering?
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To paraphrase that great song from “A Chorus Line,” the Los Angeles-based BodyTraffic gave a concert that might best be summed up as, “Dancers 10, Choreographers, well, 3.”
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As Highways Performance Space continues its 35th anniversary celebration, executive director Leo Garcia and artistic director Patrick Kennelly presented two special programs, each honoring titans of the post-modern dance world
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I can only imagine the challenge it might be for a creator to approach the cavernous 55,000 square foot drill hall of Park Avenue Armory in its raw state.
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’Tis the season, so it would be churlish to pick holes in Christopher Hampson's glorious confection, adapted from Peter Darrell's iconic work.
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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