A Parisian Dream
A participatory eagerness, a desire to be part of something sweet and beautiful, suffused the return of George Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to San Francisco Ballet on the cusp of spring.
Continue ReadingWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
A participatory eagerness, a desire to be part of something sweet and beautiful, suffused the return of George Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to San Francisco Ballet on the cusp of spring.
Continue ReadingEntering his 10th year as artistic director of Philadelphia Ballet, Ángel Corella put his artists through a ring of fire in their early spring concert at the Academy of Music.
Continue ReadingIn her 1951 autobiography Dance to the Piper, Agnes de Mille spends seven pages describing in colorful detail what it was like to be on the road with the Ballets Russes.
FREE ARTICLESix dancers enter from stage left and position themselves along the rear wall, their backs to the audience. Today, the light through a row of windows casts them in silhouette.
Continue ReadingMark Morris's “The Look of Love” begins with praise. Dancers stand in a circle facing inward with clasped hands and chests lifted as Burt Bacharach's “What the World Needs Now” resonates in the theatre.
FREE ARTICLEIf you believe, you can make yourself into Cerberus the three-headed dog-like monster, who guards the third circle of Hell, the circle of the gluttons, by buttoning together a couple of oversized shirts, and sitting together with two other people, in a huddle on the floor.
Continue ReadingIt is a kaleidoscope of references, a whirligig of Alices, I carry with me to the third Melbourne season of Christopher Wheeldon’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” presented by the Australian Ballet, at the State Theatre in Melbourne.
Continue ReadingNine hundred years ago in China, a renowned poet-artist named Su Dongpo (1037-1101) lived in Meishan, a city in Sichuan Province. He lived during the Song Dynasty, a prosperous period known for the proliferation of poetry and sophistication in visual arts underpinned by classical Chinese philosophy.
Continue ReadingThe 92NY hosted a star-studded evening of dance on March 12th with performances by the Limón, Martha Graham, and Alvin Ailey II companies, as well as contemporary choreographers Omar Román de Jesús, Jamar Roberts, and Hope Boykin.
FREE ARTICLETalk about your OG—or, in this case, Original Gatsby! Indeed, Los Angeles-based American Contemporary Ballet (ACB) has set the bar(re) oh-so-high, with its Original Gatsby concept/concert, “Jazz,” that even F. Scott Fitzgerald would have dug it.
Continue ReadingNearly spring and time for lightheartedness or hopefulness, and two of the three women choreographers in BalletX’s spring program gave us some sense of new beginnings.
Continue ReadingLorie O’Toole steps back slightly, scanning the scene in front of her with a discerning eye. Eleven dancers move together, their limbs and torsos taking on the quality of water, their collective image becoming something like the ocean’s surf.
FREE ARTICLEWatching 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,...
Continue ReadingThe choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.
Continue ReadingBeneath 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.
Continue ReadingAfter 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.
Continue ReadingAn “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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