World-class review of ballet and dance.
While the US Congress is still out on summer recess, CONGRESS VIII is alive and kicking, as well as spinning, vamping, breaking, and, well, blowing the roof off of the intimate L.A. Dance Project space, where eight cutting-edge commercial choreographers and a bevy of top-notch dancers dazzled the crowds in three sold-out performances over the weekend.
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For the fifty-seventh year of its summer residency in July at Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC), upstate in Saratoga Springs, the New York City Ballet brought three programs.
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Ilter Ibrahimof is the cofounder and artistic director of Toronto’s Fall for Dance North festival. Held annually since 2014, FFDN is a Canadian offshoot of the beloved New York City Center series.
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The inaugural season of “Escalator,” presented by Stephanie Lake Company in association with Abbotsford Convent, begins with the slow traction of Kady Mansour dressed head to toe in white as a tampon, replete with two strings around each ankle, and concludes with two dancers dressed as mirrored disco balls, declaring to the audience that they are “strong enough / to live without [us]” as they rewind and rotate on the dancefloor to Cher’s “Strong Enough.”
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In downtown Chicago, 100-foot-tall dancers glide along the Chicago River. Projected onto the enormous digital installation Art on The Mart, the dancers of the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project look like ancestral spirits keeping watch over the city.
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Has any choreographer extracted as much value from the chug step as Mark Morris? Jerome Robbins came close in “Glass Pieces,” and George Balanchine gave chugs some big moments in “Apollo,” but Morris consistently uses the simple move to demonstrate a profound musicality.
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For thirteen years, from 2011 until this summer of 2023, Virginia Johnson was Dance Theatre of Harlem’s artistic director.
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Adrian Danchig-Waring is a poet. His body articulates anticipation and pleasure, the tumult of ecstasy, and the ache of longing in Lar Lubovitch’s “Desire,” created as part of Lubovitch’s 80th birthday celebration in collaboration with the Guggenheim’s Works and Process series.
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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.
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George Balanchine’s 1967 ballet “Jewels”—in which each act is inspired by a different semi-precious gem—has proven a touring warhorse.
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For the third year in a row, five of New York City's most iconic dance companies—Ballet Hispánico, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem—joined forces for for the BAAND Together Dance Festival, hosted by Lincoln Center.
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The headline performance of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival’s Hip Hop Across the Pillow mini-festival—which took place from August 2-6, 2023 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip hop—was an abundance of embodied knowledge.
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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