World-class review of ballet and dance.
“Century,” Amy Hall Garner’s joyful new work for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, was crafted as a present for her grandfather on the eve of his 100th birthday. Such a personal gesture is unusual for a guest choreographer, but birthday ballets are certainly not out of place at the AAADT.
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Isadora Duncan. Doris Humphrey. Pauline Lawrence. These are the spirits invoked by artistic director Dante Puleio for “Women’s Stories.”
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The Sarasota Ballet is nothing if not ambitious. Under the artistic leadership of Iain Webb and Margaret Barbieri, the company has performed large nineteenth-century works like “La Sylphide” and “Giselle,” but also major works by Frederick Ashton like “La Fille Mal Gardée” and assorted ballets by Kenneth MacMillan, Antony Tudor, Paul Taylor, and George Balanchine.
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In one corner of the black-box stage, three musicians adjust their instruments: drums, double bass, clarinet. As each performer enters barefoot, they set down a pair of sneakers with toes lined against the back wall.
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The Tiffany Mills Company and Ensemble Ipse recently teamed up for a weekend of shows at the National Sawdust Theater.
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It’s the end of the year! How did we get here? I don’t think I’m alone in the impression that January was just yesterday.
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Despite what Fox News wants the rest of the United States to believe about a “doom loop” in San Francisco, the reality in many of the city’s neighborhoods refuses to fit the media spin.
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Leslie Cuyjet’s “With Marion” opens with a very particular coming-of-age tradition: the cotillion ball. In the the Kitchen’s temporary home at Westbeth, Cuyjet takes over the center of the loft space with a rectangle of screens.
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Astonish me,” said impresario Serge Diaghilev to choreographers, composers and collaborators of his famed Ballets Russes, the bespoke company that reigned supreme from 1909 through 1929.
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One of the reasons to see “Is it Thursday Yet?,” the new collaboration between choreographers Sonya Tayeh and Jenn Freeman inspired by Freeman’s diagnosis with Autism Spectrum Disorder, has little to do with the show itself.
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Casting is central to the most recent revival of Pina Bausch’s “The Rite of Spring.” Touring with a new duet entitled “common ground[s],” the mixed bill was put together as an homage to Bausch. While Bausch’s 1975 masterwork features 34 extremely talented, diversely trained dancers from 14 African countries, “common ground[s]” creates an entire universe with just two captivating dancers in their seventies: Senegalese-French choreographer Germaine Acogny, founder of the international education center for traditional and contemporary African dances, Ecole des Sables, and the French dancer Malou Airaudo, who is a former member of Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. The show, co-produced...
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To fell a tree, after determining the fall path, you need to make a notch in the side of the trunk with your chainsaw.
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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