World-class review of ballet and dance.
Miami City Ballet’s week-long engagement at the Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater was full of wonderful surprises, rewards, and revelations. Watching the two mixed-bill programs the company presented during the run, I couldn’t help but notice just how much at home the Miami dancers looked on the stage that is invariably associated with the illustrious New York City Ballet.
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Twenty years after their last production of “Swan Lake,” Scottish Ballet return with this tough but tender spin on the iconic ballet, created by internationally acclaimed Amsterdam-based choreographer David Dawson. Composer Tchaikovsky described the swan as “femininity in its purest form,” and Dawson's approach is certainly suggestive of this.
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In commissioning “She Said,” a triple bill featuring three new ballets by female choreographers, English National Ballet’s artistic director and lead principal dancer Tamara Rojo has challenged the status quo of contemporary ballet in two major ways. The first is a rebuke of its notoriously, dispiritingly male-dominated upper ranks (consider this: in her 20 years as a professional dancer Rojo, one of today’s most famous and decorated ballerinas, has never performed in a ballet choreographed by a woman). “We need those female voices on stage, those emotions,” Rojo notes in the programme. “We need all ways of expressing feeling.” Her...
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It is often said that one of a dancer’s unsung partners is the floor. In Isabelle Schad’s and Laurent Goldring’s 45-minute opus, “Der Bau,” one might consider Schad’s partner to be large swaths of fabric that she manipulates during the course of a physically intense, metaphorically-driven work. Based on Kafka’s unfinished novella, The Burrow (Der Bau), a tale describing the universe of an animal entrenched in a place to make it feel protected, the piece deals with the relationship between body and space.
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Celebrating the contemporary dance community in the City of Angels, the indefatigable Deborah Brockus has mounted her latest iteration of the LA Dance Festival since founding it in 2012. Bringing together 28 troupes over four nights (with nine separate performances)—as well as offering classes—Brockus has been producing events like these for years, including the Spectrum Dance in LA series, which received a Lester Horton award for “Outstanding Production of a Festival or Series” back in 2002.
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What do gestures become when stripped of their in-the-moment communicative purposes? South American choreographer Luis Garay borrows the word “maneries” from Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who, in his book The Coming Community, analyses the word’s etymology and comes to a conclusion that is mirrored by Garay’s program notes on the dance: “‘Maneries’ refers to neither a universal nor a particular; it embraces both, like an example.”
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Seeing dance in New York City is always an exciting grab-bag of movement invention and ideas. But, the companies and performers in New York can be increasingly, well, New York. Much of the work presented at our many institutions (and there are many), outside of NYC-based artists that is, are of an international set. In this city, it often seems easier to catch the latest import from Belarus or Budapest than from Boise. That is why the recent trio of works by the Pennsylvania Ballet at the Joyce Theater was a singular treat; an American company in NYC that was...
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Upstage, the company stands in line. As the music builds, the whirring tones of Julia Wolfe’s score for eight double basses, a group breaks rank and runs forward, flying through space with strong, powerful movement. “Stronghold,” the new work by former company dancer and now associate choreographer of Richard Alston Dance Company, Martin Lawrence, is one of four pieces in the company’s latest programme. Performed at Sadler’s Wells, London, it’s a piece which, like the rest of the bill, shows this long-standing company is far from ready to rest on its laurels.
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The ultimate totalitarian novel, George Orwell's 1984 which was written in 1948, remains one of the most powerful, often oddly prescient books of all time, presenting a fictionalised world where citizens are dehumanised through an autocratic government (simply termed ‘The Party’) with mind control, 24-hour surveillance culture and the proliferation of advertising at every corner.
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In a March 2015 interview with the New York Times, Paul Taylor spoke with dance critic Gia Kourlas on the inaugural season of his newly-established Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance. “I'm not going to disband,” Taylor makes a point to say. “I'll have to die before I leave.” The company, formally announced the year prior, was to be a solution for the continuation and preservation of Taylor works, as well as new and restaged works by choreographers deemed American masters. In the interview, one that emphasized his frankness, Taylor makes clear this was not a means to stage a gracious...
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It’s safe to say that hip-hop and street dance—from breaking, popping and locking, to krumping, jookin’ and the like—is by now an established dance genre. With the Brazil-based troupe, Companhia Urbana de Dança, the form, as deployed by its nine indefatigable members, and choreographed (and developed in collaboration with the dancers), by artistic director Sonia Destri Lie, could also be called classical hip-hop—indeed, neo-classical.
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“… for the only human race to which it is forbidden to sever the bonds of time is the race of those who create art.” –Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps
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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