World-class review of ballet and dance.
For fifteen years, Duke Dang has been the bright, capable force behind Works & Process, a series that offers behind-the-scenes conversations about the creative process. Regularly, choreographers, composers, and designers have converged upon the postage-stamp-sized theater beneath the Guggenheim Museum to discuss their work and to show sneak peeks of premieres.[1]
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Belinda McGuire is a dance artist who splits her time between her native Toronto and Brooklyn. As a teen she danced with Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre, before going on to build a career as an independent dance artist. A creative force, Belinda has produced and launched several one-woman shows, and performed as a company member with Doug Varone and Dancers, Gallim Dance, the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, Anne Plamondon, and Joshua Beamish's MoveTheCompany.
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On April 22, Moscow’s Concert Hall “Zaryadye” hosted the award ceremony of the winners of the XXVII Golden Mask Award. The three-hour-long celebration took place before a limited-capacity live audience and was streamed via various online platforms of the festival.
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Ballet22 is a new pick-up company in the San Francisco Bay Area born of one dancer with extraordinarily strong feet. Growing up in Puerto Rico, Roberto Vega Ortiz longed to dance on pointe, but his teachers said that wasn’t acceptable. So he practiced in private. Obsessively. And his pointe work became very, very good.
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For Red Sky Performance, dance is deeply connected to oral traditions, ceremony, and place—the land and water of Turtle Island, a name that many Indigenous communities in Canada use to refer to the continent and the ancestral territories where they live, work, and create today.
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The New York City Ballet’s Digital Spring Season continued this week with the premiere of the dance film When We Fell, choreographed by Kyle Abraham and co-directed by Abraham and Ryan Marie Helfant. This was an ambitious departure from the old performance recordings and Zoom rehearsal footage of the first three weeks of the season. It was also an about-face from the first ensemble work Abraham made for the company: 2018’s splashy, rap-scored “The Runaway.” When We Fell is somber and distilled. No matter which vein Abraham is working in, his singular choreographic voice and clear messaging come through.
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In early April, the Australian Ballet returned to the main stage of the Sydney Opera House for the first time in over a year. Like companies the world over, they were on hiatus while the pandemic raged. With Australia now essentially Covid-free, the company returns to a packed house, and a “new era.” In 2020, former American Ballet Theatre star David Hallberg took over from longtime artistic director David McAllister, and this is his Sydney debut. The programme throws back to Hallberg's roots, a triple bill called “New York Dialects.”
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Queensland Ballet opened their 2021 Season with a belated celebration. The company performed their 60th Anniversary Gala—a production which, like most others around the globe, was cancelled last year due to coronavirus. It paid homage to Queensland Ballet’s history. It listed the contributions made by previous Artistic Directors and, on the surface, showcased the technical might of the dancers. Underneath all this glamour, however, lies a very specific subliminal message; one that could be easily misread or overlooked entirely. The production acted as a teaser to its audience of where Queensland Ballet, and the artistic team, wishes to head in...
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I’m having a pandemic love affair with Pacific Northwest Ballet. It’s most unexpected, as so many of the emotional complexities of the past year have been. I live in California’s Bay Area; San Francisco Ballet has been my “home” company for two decades; I feel a loyalty to them. Yet it cannot be denied that when it comes to meeting the many challenges of these times with grace, authenticity, and whole-heartedness, Pacific Northwest Ballet has proven not just impressive but exceptionally endearing. It’s their behind-the-scenes glimpses of the dancers in each program’s “Five Minute Call” that carve a place in...
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It's always fascinating when a production asks serious and intellectual questions of the audience. What is the role of dance? How does it reflect our lives and the world in which we live? How can it viscerally change us as human beings?
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The Bolshoi Ballet recently unveiled a world premiere of “Orlando”—a two-act ballet based on the famous novel by English writer Virginia Woolf. The premiere took place on the Bolshoi Theater’s New Stage on March 24, with the cast led by the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina, Olga Smirnova, in the title role. The ballet was choreographed by Christian Spuck, a German dance-maker, who is currently artistic director of Ballet Zurich.
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Like all the dancers at New York City Ballet, Taylor Stanley has been away from the company’s studios for much of the last year. Most of that time, he’s been in New York, where he lives with his sweet dog, Theo. The break has given him time to reflect, but that’s nothing new. Stanley is as thoughtful offstage as he is internal onstage. He dances as if he were digging toward some very deep and quiet place within. For a few years, he has been exploring different ways of moving, outside of ballet. He’s attracted to Ohad Naharin’s Gaga technique,...
Continue ReadingTwo performers crawl in on hands and knees wearing neon green, hooded coveralls—the lightweight papery kind made for working in a sterile environment—and clusters of balloons pinned to their backs.
Continue ReadingWill Rawls makes boundaries visible by defying them. Known for the disciplinary and topical range of his projects, the choreographer, director, and performer approaches issues of representation in “[siccer],” a multi-part, multi-site work co-presented by L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival. A live performance at Performance Space New York...
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It is always interesting when multiple theme steps emerge over the course of a mixed repertory evening, but it is uncanny on one featuring five different ballets, each with a different choreographer and composer, covering a twenty-year span (2005-2025).
Continue ReadingZvidance premiered its new work “Dandelion” mid-November at New York Live Arts. Founded by Zvi Gotheiner in 1989, Zvidance has been a steady presence in the New York contemporary dance scene, a reliable source of compositional integrity, and a magnet for wonderful dancers.
Continue ReadingCleveland native Dianne McIntrye received a hometown hero's welcome during her curtain speech prior to her eponymous dance group thrilling the audience in her latest work, “In the Same Tongue.”
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