Audacity of Dance
If there’s anybody who embodies ‘rizz’—charisma in today’s coolspeak—it’s dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Benjamin Millepied.
Continue ReadingWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
There’s a devastating moment that arrives about two-thirds into “Symphony #9,” the first and most powerful panel in Alexei Ratmansky’s “Shostakovich Trilogy,” danced by Mathilde Froustey and Luke Ingham during one of the final performances in San Francisco Ballet’s spring season. The ensemble rushes in with their happy little flexed-foot peasant dances, their movements—penchée splits like ironing boards, hands touching the floor—becoming unabashedly vulgar. Amid the creepily murky lighting, Ingham lifts Froustey, and her feet beat in twittering exuberance as her head, neck and arms hang dead above. The image sears: rarely has art shown us more powerful testimony to the horror of the soul killed by coercion.
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San Francisco Ballet in Alexei Ratmansky's “Piano Concerto #1” from “Shostakovich Trilogy.” Photograph by Erik Tomasson
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If there’s anybody who embodies ‘rizz’—charisma in today’s coolspeak—it’s dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Benjamin Millepied.
Continue ReadingOne might easily mistake the prevailing mood as light-hearted, heading into intermission after two premieres by Brenda Way and Kimi Okada for ODC/Dance’s annual Dance Downtown season. Maybe this is just what we need to counter world events, you may think. But there is much more to consider beneath the high production values of this beautifully wrought program. Okada, for instance, folds a dark message into her cartoon inspired “Inkwell.” And KT Nelson’s “Dead Reckoning” from 2015 reminds us the outlook for climate change looms ever large.
Continue ReadingIt’s not every choreographer who works with economists, anthropologists, neuroscientists and cognitive scientists, not to mention collaborating with the Google Arts & Culture Lab and the Swedish pop group ABBA, but Wayne McGregor wouldn’t have it any other way.
Continue ReadingDance scholars have been remarking on the great Trisha Brown nearly from the day she first stepped into Robert Dunn’s class—the genesis of Judson Dance Theater—in the 1960s.
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