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REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Redrawing the Map

Desolate. Exuberant. What do we do now? We dance, of course. From a callout in November, 2021, eight applicants were selected to develop a work of up to 20-minutes in a five-month period (February to June) in 2022, for the fifth edition of the biennial Keir Choreographic Award (KCA). The eight commissioned works included Alan Schacher and WeiZen Ho, Tra Mi Dinh, Alice Will Caroline, and Jenni Large, in Week One at Dancehouse, Melbourne. With Lucky Lartey, Rebecca Jensen, Joshua Pether, and Raghav Handa to follow in Week Two, at the culmination of which, the $50,000 prize will be awarded...

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Long Wait for the Train

Pacific Northwest Ballet finally made good on its long-planned tour to New York City this week, exactly two years after its intended run. Covid was still, unfortunately, plaguing the troupe: many last-minute principal replacements were announced in both the dancing ranks and those of the PNB orchestra—who were also, impressively, along for the tour. Poor, lovely Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan danced in two pieces while taking a mask on and off depending on whether she was in proximity to other dancers’ faces. (What a lot to keep track of! Did she have a mask waiting in every wing?) Despite these pandemic remnants,...

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Harlequin and Clown

In Alexei Ratmansky’s revival of Marius Petipa’s lost classic “Harlequinade,” we have the familiar characters Pierrot and Pierette, Harlequin and Columbine. Known from paintings, figurines, pantomimes, other ballets, sweets, and from the commedia dell’arte. With a chorus of characters, young and old, coloured by collective, ever-changing memory over the centuries, the Australian Ballet presents “Harlequinade” a co-production with American Ballet Theatre. This merry romp, a light-hearted play, a confection for the senses. True to history, “Harlequinade’s” appeal lies in its quick-change movements of the familiar, stock characters and the quick-change movements of the story. In his pre-curtain address, on opening...

INTERVIEWS | By Karen Greenspan

Jacob’s Pillow Honors Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

I drive the winding ascent to the bucolic grounds of Jacob’s Pillow on opening day of the longest-running dance festival in the United States. The historic farmstead in the foothills of the Massachusetts Berkshire Mountains was purchased in 1930 by modern dance pioneer Ted Shawn. Today it is abuzz with activity gearing up for its 90th anniversary season and gala. The Pillow’s artistic and executive director Pamela Tatge gives me a rundown of what has been accomplished in the 90 years since Ted Shawn and his all-male company began holding “Tea Lecture Demonstrations” in 1933─the beginning of what was to evolve into the...

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Character Study

Who is Marta Carrasco? Her bio says that she’s a “celebrated Catalan artist who moves between theater, dance and the visual arts as a performer, dancer, choreographer and director.” She also formed her own company in 1995 and has taken home a fistful of awards, including the National Dance Prize of Catalonia and several Max awards. But in what was billed as Carrasco’s farewell performance at Los Angeles Theatre Center, in a mind-blowing 11-day run presented by the Latino Theater Company, Carrasco delivered a gut-punch to the soul in her never less than astonishing, “Perra de Nadie.”

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Everything Everywhere All at Once

George Balanchine famously said, “there are no mothers-in-law in ballet.” Well, fifteen minutes into “Of Love and Rage,” Alexei Ratmansky’s new full-length production for the American Ballet Theater, there was one mother-in-law pacing the stage and two fathers-in-law in a reconciliation dance. By the intermission, the leading lady Callirhoe (Catherine Hurlin, exquisite) had been married twice, impregnated, threatened into a coma (huh?), buried alive, and abducted by pirates. In Act II she was nearly kidnapped twice more. She was saved only by the deus ex machina intrusion of a war that required the services of all the men in the...

INTERVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Peter Boal, Devoted to Dance

Born in 1965 and raised in the town of Bedford in Westchester, New York, Peter Boal began studying ballet at the School of American Ballet at age nine. His life has been devoted to the art ever since. Boal joined New York City Ballet’s corps in 1983 and became a principal dancer six years later. In 2003, while still at City Ballet, he founded the eponymous Peter Boal and Company, a risk-taking chamber ensemble that commissioned original works, often from little-known postmodern choreographers. (He had also been a full-time faculty member at his alma mater since 1997.)

REVIEWS | By Cecilia Whalen

Gibney Up Close

At the end of Yin Yue's “A Measurable Existence” on June 15, Marla Phelan and Kevin Pajarillaga walked stoically forward and back, one downstage and one upstage, standing in a glow of orange lighting. The piece is a feat of clever partnering and energetic contemporary phrase work that is intricate and challenging. In New York Live Arts' intimate space, we can see even the beads of sweat that drip off of the dancers' chins. Performing up close can be risky; but the Gibney dancers up close are perhaps even more remarkable than afar, as we witness in immediacy their precision,...

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Serious Play

Remember me. Remember me. The comfort that floats behind the heartache of Henry Purcell’s Lament from “Dido and Aeneas,” When I am laid in the earth: remember me. Be now, in the present, remember me. So begins “Kunstkamer,” originally commissioned in 2019 for the 60th anniversary of Netherlands Dans Theater, and presented for the first time outside of the Netherlands by the Australian Ballet.

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Giselle Retold

I have often wondered why few troupes revive the classic story ballets the way Orson Welles restaged Shakespeare—as when he boldly set “Macbeth” in Haiti, or when he put an anti-fascist spin on “Julius Caesar” right on the cusp of WWII. The answer probably lies in funding difficulties: ballet is a hard enough sell that people don’t like to mess with the sacred cash cows. Against the odds, the English National Ballet’s 2016 production of “Giselle,” which had its NY premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, dares to be timely. Of all the narrative stalwarts, “Giselle”—which depicts...

REVIEWS | By Marina Harss

Sevillana

It’s been three years since American Ballet Theatre last stepped onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, three years since it rolled out its well-worn productions of evening-length story ballets. The Met season is a kind of hit parade, and the current run is no different: It begins with the festive pseudo-Spanish extravaganza “Don Quixote” and ends with Kenneth MacMillan’s tear-jerker “Romeo and Juliet.” With, in the middle, no less than twelve performances of “Swan Lake.” The exceptions to this succession of super-familiar works are Ratmansky’s new “Of Love and Rage,” which opens next week, and a mixed bill...

INTERVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Global Moves with Margaret Jenkins

On June 16th, San Francisco’s Margaret Jenkins Dance Company will premiere perhaps its most ambitious work yet, “Global Moves.” An indoor/outdoor site-specific work moving between more than a dozen “stations” at the Presidio Theater, with its view across the Presidio National Park, “Global Moves” extends its horizons far beyond the Pacific Ocean. For nearly two years, Jenkins has been working with India’s Tanusree Shankar Dance Company, China’s Cross Move Lab, and dancers emeritus from Israel’s Kolben Dance Company. She has collaborated with these dancers separately since 2006, but this is the first work to draw the creators from all four...

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.