World-class review of ballet and dance.
Do we watch the classics with a scholar’s brain or a lover’s heart? Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Giselle” engages both, but a viewing of the company’s digital season stream leaves me feeling that the heart still has to triumph.
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“Dancing was about learning to disassociate,” the narrator of Lola Lafon’s 2022 novel Reeling informs us early on. “Feet like daggers, wrists like ribbons. Power and languor. Smiling despite persistent pain, smiling despite nausea.” This declaration, only five or so pages in, strikes as piercingly as the daggers Lafon imagines for feet. What in this compulsion towards violence, I wondered, is so imperative when telling a story about dance? Scarcely a narrative arises that is not characterized by gruesome extremes. Black Swan, with its body horror, comes to mind, as does Gelsey Kirkland’s 1986 memoir Dancing on My Grave, infamous...
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A groundbreaking collaboration is afoot involving New York City butoh dance company Vangeline Theater; founded by French-born butoh performer, choreographer, author, and teacher Vangeline; and a neuroscience team from the University of Houston, Rockefeller University, and City University of New York. The collaborating parties are researching the impact of butoh on brainwave activity in a pilot study. I am in Houston, Texas, at the university’s theater watching the culminating butoh performance as a group of neuroscientists (visibly stationed in the wings) record and download the activity in the dancers’ brains. Simultaneously, a multi-media artist is “artistically” projecting the dancers’ real-time brain activity onto...
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When I speak with Russian Tokyo-based photographer Yulia Skogoreva in a cozy coffee shop in the Yoyogi district of the Japanese capital, it becomes apparent very quickly that motion, or bodies in motion to be precise, is what she is essentially invested in. The Muscovite's ongoing projects with female sumo and contemporary dancers are, for her, much the same in that they celebrate the human body in a series of ritualistic, performance-focused or natural settings and her role is to be a spectator, a probenleiter who probes, pushes and guides the dancer to where they belong.
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How did you dance as a child in your bedroom? Before any kind of training, or the fumbling awkwardness of adolescence, I mean? In a series of wild routines, Katherina Radeva captures the feeling of dancing from when we were kids, governed by little more than energy, instinct and unabashed, uninhibited joy. It is this evocative spirit that permeates through her beautiful show, “40/40,” interrogating the spaces that women in middle-age take up. Our bodies, often sidelined, dismissed or ignored for more youthful figures in society, are repositories of life, love, complex emotions and boundaries, and we can only move...
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Philadelphia Ballet’s annual New Works series opened its 2023 season with a program called “Forward Motion” at the Kimmel Cultural Campus’ Perelman Theater last weekend. Over its 60-plus years, the company has seen many changes, including last year’s name change from Pennsylvania Ballet. It now dances its New Works program in the 627-seat theater with superb sightlines and, at intermissions, audience members can mingle in a new café seating area with window views of busy Spruce Street pedestrian traffic.
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In spring of 2017, Ellen Graff, Stuart Hodes, and Marnie Thomas Wood, all former members of the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Tony award-winning Broadway choreographer George Faison, set out to make dances for a group of older adults, many of whom had never performed onstage. Josefina Rotman Lyons, an older dancer herself, volunteered to film the project. The resulting documentary, “Revival,” is an honest and engaging take on what it’s like to dance in later life. Now available for streaming at Revivaldocumentary.com, the film won jury and audience awards when it made the rounds of film festivals. At a...
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She’s been a principal ballerina in companies that include the Joffrey Ballet, Frankfurt Ballet and Complexions Contemporary Ballet, as well as a principal guest artist with companies around the world such as the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia. From 2006-2013, she was a tenured professor of dance at UC Irvine, and in 2013 she was named the first Vice Dean and Director of the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. In addition, in 2006, she was the founder and artistic director of the Laguna Dance Festival. But Jodie Gates has never been an artistic director of a dance troupe—until...
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San Francisco Ballet, the U.S.’s oldest professional ballet company and second largest, is entering its 90th season at a moment of profound transition. Helgi Tomasson, artistic director for 37 years, has just handed the reins to Tamara Rojo, who arrives triumphantly after a decade of success raising the profile of the English National Ballet. Aside from both prizing the work of William Forsythe, the two are markedly different in their repertory interests, but Rojo’s programming direction—will the company still dance Balanchine and Robbins?—won’t be known until she announces the 2024 season this April. In the meantime, the company is dancing...
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“Horse, the solos” is yet another new work with a pandemic backstory. Deborah Hay created the work remotely from her living room in Austin, Texas while the dancers of Cullberg were in Stockholm, rehearsing in the studio with Jeanine Durning, who has previously performed in Hay’s works. The premiere, in an empty theater on March 2021, was also atypical and unique to the time; but perhaps, completely aligned with Hay’s postmodern ethos. She writes in a program note:
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On Wednesday night, the New York City Ballet premiered “Fortuitous Ash,” the first ballet choreographed by an Asian American woman, Keerati Jinakunwiphat, in the company’s history. It was set to the first score by a female Asian composer, Du Yun, to enter the repertory. Unfortunately, the overdue shattering of dual glass ceilings was more exciting than the work itself. When the curtain fell on the ballet’s final tableau, it came as a surprise; it felt like the piece was finally gearing up to say something. Before the gold fabric dropped, I thought the lights were dimming to signal the end...
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Justin Peck’s new ballet, “Copland Dance Episodes,” is a project Lincoln Kirstein would have embraced. Seventy-five minutes of great, unmistakably American music for a ballet company that in many ways reflects the country; with choreography by a young American dancemaker; framed by stage designs by an artist (Jeffrey Gibson) whose inspiration lies in the symbols and patterns of his Choctaw-Cherokee culture. Creating a new American ballet idiom was the aim of Kirstein’s short-lived company Ballet Caravan, which toured the US and Latin America. And it was Kirstein who, in 1938, commissioned “Billy the Kid” from Aaron Copland, and asked the...
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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