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REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Taylor Revamped

This November, the Paul Taylor Dance Company returned to the Koch Theater for the first time since 2019 under the tagline “Taylor: A New Era.” They’ve had a rough go of it since 2018, when Taylor passed away, at age 88, months after handing the reins over to former company member Michael Novak. Then, just as the troupe was restructuring after the loss of its founder, a pesky virus you may have heard of set them back again. But now, like a phoenix rising from the ashes of so very many brushfires, they have emerged on the other side with...

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Haunting Hospitality

Dramatic set designs and sweeping contemporary ballet combine in this mixed bill from Birmingham Royal Ballet, which pieces together three new additions to BRB’s rep, each with a live orchestral score. Jiří Kylián’s “Forgotten Land,” created on the Stuttgart Ballet in the 80s, sends six couples wafting through the wilds of Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da requiem, while Uwe Scholz marshals the stateliness of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in a like-titled ensemble ballet from 1990. The hardest-hitting piece, “Hotel,” a new commission from Morgann Runacre-Temple, isn’t as musically driven as its companions, though Mikael Karlsson’s score slickly informs its eerie mood. Either...

REVIEWS | By Karen Hildebrand

Migrations

Not all the reasons to celebrate Zvi Gotheiner’s newest work were immediately visible as the company of seven dancers took to the black box stage at New York Live Arts last week. “Migrations” is the first work Gotheiner has made since suffering a stroke in March 2021. That he is able to choreograph at this stage of his healing process is a credit to his dancers, including associate artistic director Doron Perk, and other longtime collaborators. Also, the announcement that Gotheiner’s long-running Maggie Black inspired ballet class has returned in person to City Center is welcome news to many who...

REVIEWS | By April Deocariza

Purity and Power

Cincinnati Ballet’s “Carmina Burana” and “Extremely Close” formed the second program of its 2022-2023 season, led by new artistic director, Jodie Gates. Pairing Nicolo Fonte’s powerful “Carmina Burana” with Alejandro Cerrudo’s tantalizing “Extremely Close” was a match made in heaven, showcasing the breadth and versatility of the company’s dancers.

INTERVIEWS | By Apollinaire Scherr

Making Meaning with Neil Greenberg

In 1994, at the peak of the AIDS crisis, Neil Greenberg premiered what has become his best- known work, “Not-About-AIDS-Dance.” Over the heads of the five dancers, surtitles narrated—in sans serif type and the most laconic terms—what had been happening in the dancers’ lives outside rehearsal as well as what was happening right before us on the stage: the wide lunges, wheeling legs, windmilling arms, supplicant kneels, reckless penchés, and bouts of stillness more rash than anything you’d see in Cunningham, with whom Greenberg had danced for seven years, beginning in 1979.

FEATURES | By Victoria Looseleaf

Reunited in Dance

In 2019, Xander Parish, then principal dancer with the Mariinsky Ballet—the first and only British dancer in the troupe’s history—was awarded an OBE for services to dance and to UK/Russia cultural relations. Fast forward to November 2022 and the world has, to say the least, radically changed. While a global pandemic still factors into daily life, in February of this year, Russia did the unspeakable by invading Ukraine.

REVIEWS | By Marina Harss

That Elusive Magic

We all know the sensation that comes once in a while during a performance, when something extraordinary happens onstage, time stops, and the audience and performers seem to co-exist within the same thrilling, elevated bubble. That magic only happens in live performance. But during the pandemic, one dance for online consumption, came close, and that was Ayodele Casel’s tap evening “Chasing Magic.”

REVIEWS | By Karen Hildebrand

Stories of Soil

In her career as a performer, Stefanie Batten Bland assembled a CV filled with prestigious dancemakers. She has worked with Bill T. Jones, Lar Lubovitch, Sean Curran, Angelin Preljocaj, Julie Taymor, and Pina Bausch, any of which may have left an imprint on her creative process. In the case of “Embarqued: Stories of Soil” I couldn’t help but feel an echo of Bausch’s Tans Theater Wuppertal, both in its structure and production values. Batten Bland, an award-winning choreographer and filmmaker in her own right, makes good magic with elegant costuming, sculptural props, original sound score, delicious abstract movement, and a...

REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Flash of Light

Watching Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan in “13 Tongues,” two impressions dominate. The first is that the dancers use their bodies like calligraphers, producing a constant trailing of elegant lines that linger in the mind’s eye like brushstrokes. The second impression is that, as a group, the dancers roil like mercury around the stage, a soloist or duo pulling away only to be sucked back into the mass via forces of atomic attraction.

FEATURES | By Chava Pearl Lansky

Art to Action

Dancers in mushroom hats frolicking in a forest; hands cupped around a sapling waiting for a lake’s lapping waters; a sandy pas de deux divided by a volleyball net; adolescent girls reaching earnestly toward the sky. These are some of the many impactful moments in Art 2 Action, Artists Climate Collective’s most recent film series aiming to bridge the gap between dance and climate change. The collection—featuring choreography by Cameron Fraser-Monroe, Yuri Zhukov (with direction by Emma Rubinowitz), Makino Hayashi, and Darian Kane—is available for viewing on Vimeo through November 7, with proceeds going to partner organizations GRID Alternatives, Sunrise...

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Dance Migrations

Two nights before I saw the third and final instalment of DanceX, presented by the Australian Ballet, a juvenile Bar-tailed Godwit set the world record for continuous flight, flying 13,560km (8,435 miles) from Alaska to Tasmania.[note]Graham Readfearn, ‘Bar-tailed godwit sets world record with 13,560km continuous flight from Alaska to southern Australia’, The Guardian, October 27, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/27/bar-tailed-godwit-sets-world-record-with-13560km-continuous-flight-from-alaska-to-southern-australia, accessed October 30, 2022.[/note] Satellite tag number 234684 completed their marathon voyage in 11 days. By shrinking their internal organs to make room for fat stores, Bar-tailed Godwits are astonishing.

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Becoming the Music

Talk about in-your-face ballet! “Be Here Now,” a one-hour abstract work choreographed by Benjamin Millepied, who founded his L.A. Dance Project in 2012, was thrilling, energetic and insanely beautiful. Under the banner of “Dance Reflections,” and presented in partnership with Van Cleef & Arpels (would that the French luxury jewelry company spread its baubles/euros around to more L.A.-based dance troupes), the company premiered the work in June at its black box studio in the City of Angels and was mounted there again last week. (The troupe also did a brief stint at Paris’ Théatre du Châtelet in mid-October, when “Be...

Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Lorna Irvine

Teenage Angst and Institutions

Watching 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,...

INTERVIEWS | Marina Harss

The Me of Today

The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.

REVIEWS | Rachel Howard

Starry Nights

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.

REVIEWS | Faye Arthurs

America, F**K Yeah

After 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.

REVIEWS | Emily May

Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup

An “Ajiaco” is a type of soup common to Colombia, Cuba, and Peru that combines a variety of different vegetables, spices, and meats.