Make Your Own World
Five minutes late to the world premiere of Lucy Guerin’s “Make Your Own World” and I had to wait to be admitted into the Magic Theatre of the North Melbourne Town Hall.
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New Horizons
I caught the final showing of the New Combinations program over the closing weekend of the New York City Ballet’s winter season. It happened to fall on one of the Art Series nights, on which discounted tickets and a mid-performance demonstration draw a young, fashionable crowd. The evening had a bustling energy. But the biggest buzz of the week was the announcement of another new combination: the appointment of Jonathan Stafford and Wendy Whelan to the helm of the company, as artistic director and associate artistic director, respectively.
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Hope is the Thing With Feathers
The theatre/dance show that is “Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake” is by now a global institution. There has been so much written about it over the decades, that I may need to find new language to define why it endures so much, some twenty-four years later from its Sadler's Wells premiere. There are several strands to this iconic production.
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Man Power
Dancer and choreographer Shaun Parker, hailing from Mildura, Victoria, has had a near two-decade career as a dancer with prominent Australian contemporary companies such as Meryl Tankard's Australian Dance Theatre, Force Majeure, Chunky Move and Sydney Dance Company. Now his company, Shaun Parker & Company, performs to sold-out theatres internationally. His newest work is “King,” an all-male exploration of patriarchal power, and socio-sexual and political structures. The world premiere took place in Sydney as part of the 2019 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival.
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And still I rise
Recently at the Joyce Theater in New York, Camille A. Brown and Dancers presented “ink,” the final installation in her trilogy of concert works: “Mr. TOL E. RAncE” (2012) explored minstrelsy past and present and the mask that black people wear merely to survive in the world; “Black Girl: Linguistic Play” (2015), featuring an all female cast, took us behind the mask and revealed the beautiful complexity of black female youth and joy. It could be said that “ink” is the period on the sentence, or more apropos, a ribbon that ties all three in a bow.
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In Praise of Pam Tanowitz
There’s praise and then there’s praise! Indeed, it’s safe to say that the celebrated New York-based choreographer, Pam Tanowitz, is having a moment now. Not only did the New York Times’ Alastair Macaulay recently cite her “Four Quartets,” as one of the top 10 works of 2018, but in reviewing it last July, he declared it to be, “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.”
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What Else is There to Say?
The question of new work has loomed large over Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch since its eminent founder passed away in 2009. Determined to uphold the late Pina Bausch’s legacy, her troupe has spent the past decade restaging her greatest hits in an effort to pass them on to a new generation of dancers and audiences. This year marks a new course for the company, as it expands its repertoire to include material from outside artists for the first time. Norwegian playwright and choreographer Alan Lucien Øyen is one of the chosen few: his “Bon Voyage, Bob . . .” joins...
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Dance Dialogues
Join London-based dance artist and writer Rachel Elderkin for Dance Dialogues: A Podcast. Each episode a guest from the dance world will join us to discuss their life, work and what matters in the dance world right now. From artists and choreographers, to directors and critics, this lively, conversational podcast has the dance world covered. Listen to the latest episode here or find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.
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When Angels Fall
Hailing from France and presented by not one but three organizations for its North American premiere, Raphaëlle Boitel’s “When Angels Fall” masterfully blends contemporary dance, theatre, and circus arts in a war against the machine—peering into a bleak future should our reliance on technology suffuse our natural ability to communicate as humans.
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Briefly Dark, Then Light and Bouncy
BODYTRAFFIC, the ten-year-old Los Angeles-based dance troupe, is touring nationally and made a stop at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts recently. The show featured two choreographers with Philadelphia connections. Sidra Bell, who teaches at the University of the Arts, and BalletX co-founder and Pennsylvania Ballet resident choreographer, Matthew Neenan. BODYTRAFFIC returns to Philadelphia’s Annenberg Center in April with a slightly different program that includes the Philadelphia premiere of Neenan’s “A Million Voices.”
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Yorke Dance Project turns Twenty
There are few project-based companies (at least in the UK and outside of the ballet world) that focus on presenting the work of past masters alongside that of emerging choreographers. Yet Yorke Dance Project, now celebrating its twentieth year, has built its reputation by doing just that. Founded by artistic director Yolande Yorke-Edgell in Los Angeles, the company has been based in London since 2009, and this year was nominated for National Dance Award for best independent company.
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Flights of Fancy
Sassy lasses and frisky creatures abound in this double bill from the Royal Ballet, which pairs a restaging of Frederick Ashton’s 1961 “The Two Pigeons” with the premiere of Liam Scarlett’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.” The latter has been created on students from the Royal Ballet School, and marks the first time since 2010 (and second time ever) that the institution has given its pupils a professional turn on Covent Garden’s main stage.
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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,...
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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