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REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Ailey Ascendant

New York City Center’s 75th anniversary celebration gets more rollicking by the day. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is currently in a five-week residency at the theatre, where it is celebrating its own 60-year legacy. The season, titled Ailey Ascending, includes an impressive mix of works from decades past, and offers three world premieres as well as a company premiere. True to the billing, the newest works shone brightest. But Ailey’s great legacy loomed large over the proceedings, and it particularly informed Ronald K. Brown’s stunning new dance, “The Call.”

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Soliloquy

Pad through sound as if it were a light dusting of colour pigment that changes with the flicker of notes and feel within a mist of sea foam, a dusting of blush pink, a nuzzle of red. Inward. Radiate a gleam of gold, a wink of turquoise, generated by sound. Outward. Fantasia.

REVIEWS | By Merilyn Jackson

Three for the Money

The versatility and adventurousness of BalletX's dancers and its leading lady, artistic and executive director, Christine Cox, are matchless. Cox has just helmed the company into its new studio. Built from the ground up over the last year, the Center for World Premiere Choreography went live last month in South Philadelphia, where hundreds of the city’s dancers live.

INTERVIEWS | By Merli V. Guerra

Women of the Hour

This Friday and Saturday, Boston Dance Theater (BDT) makes its home city debut, with performances at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Mass., presented by World Music/CRASHarts. Although Boston-based, the new company has local and international connections, with co-direction by Boston dancer and director Jessie Jeanne Stinnett, and Itzik Galili, award-winning Dutch-Israeli choreographer.

REVIEWS | By Merilyn Jackson

Back and Forward

With her company nearing its 50th anniversary, Philadanco’s intrepid and indefatigable founding leader, Joan Myers Brown, decided to take one step back and two steps forward for her fall program at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. Philadanco! (Yes, with an exclamation point!) has been dance company-in-residence at the Kimmel’s Perelman Theater since it opened in 2001.

REVIEWS | By Rachel Elderkin

Til Death do us Part

Marriage is one of those long-standing rituals woven deep into society and yet for each person it means something different. It can be a joyful or serious occasion, a spectacle or intimate. It can be a celebration of two people’s love, or it can be political; a formal arrangement, a powerful alliance. It can, at long last, be between people of the same or different genders—at least in some countries.

REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

A Glorious Half Century

He's on impish form tonight, Richard Alston, and so should he be. This tour (possibly one of the company's last) goes out on a high, as he celebrates fifty years of innovative choreography. “Mid Century Modern” is like a greatest hits compilation, with all of the stunning sculptural work we have come to expect from his repertoire. He twinkles and jokes about “getting it right,” his influences and so forth, and there's even a moment halfway through the show, when his recorded voice deadpans mischievously, “No, this isn't . . . an interval . . . Just . . ....

REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Touching From A Distance

Celebrating 100 years of the Estonian National Ballet, this trio of raw and intimate pieces explores ideas around relationships and communication. All three works, created by Estonian choreographers, take very disparate approaches, but contain similar jumping-off points. This is presented as part of the Estonia Now festival of arts.

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Hearts on Fire

“Layla and Majnun” is the biggest love story you’ve never heard of. Once dubbed “the Romeo and Juliet of the East,” the ancient Persian tale has a rich, winding history, with regional versions sprouting across Pakistan, Turkey, India and more throughout the centuries. Its titular characters are star-crossed lovers whose passion abounds even as fate and their families conspire to keep them apart.

FEATURES | By Merilyn Jackson

Is all that jazzy modern dance Jewish?

With a Jewish population of more than a quarter million and a rich dance culture that boasts five internationally known professional companies in as many ethnicities and dance genres, Philadelphia is a likely stage for a Jewish dance company. Jewish dancers, choreographers, presenters, entrepreneurs, critics, and even arts editors of prominent publications have largely shaped the city’s cultural dancescape over the past century. But, in fact, the first truly Jewish dance company, Koresh Dance Company, (KDC) was founded by Israeli Yemenite choreographer Ronen (Roni) Koresh in 1991. On its own, the company most represents Jewish dance in Philadelphia and nationally....

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

Colorful Dances

American Ballet Theatre’s fall season brought back Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room”—an exhilarating cornucopia of energy, movement and sound, rightly regarded as one of Tharp’s greatest hits. It was a thrill to see this piece entering the company’s repertory after more than a decade-long hiatus. The dance, which Tharp created for her own company—Twyla Tharp Dance—in 1986, with its over-the-top trappings, may look a bit worn and quaint after all these years. But as the spirited performance of this Tharpian classic revealed—the piece still has a “wow effect” on the viewers; it still delivers a full-bodied invigorating punch and...

INTERVIEWS | By Merli V. Guerra

City of Others

In the realm of dance and social change, Sankofa Danzafro is making its powerful choreographic voice well-heard, one continent at a time. The Afro-Colombian company, founded by Rafael Palacios in 1997 on the Pacific coast of Colombia, brings its internationally acclaimed 2010 production “The City of Others” to the Celebrity Series of Boston, to be performed in New England Conservatory’s (NEC) newly completed Plimpton Shattuck Black Box Theatre on November 3 & 4. Performed by a cast of 20 dancers, “City” addresses social issues of wealth disparity, gender identity, sexual orientation, and racism in Colombia in an impactful mix of dance, music and...

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.