Glimpsing Nureyev
Nureyev and Friends, a recent tribute event at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, opened with an introduction from Charles Jude, the longtime protégé of Rudolf Nureyev at the Paris Opera Ballet.
Continue ReadingWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
All around me, things are beginning to ‘return to normal’ which is misleading in both meaning and reality for things cannot return to normal; what was normal—what was before—was precisely the problem. In our separation from nature, and a balanced system of replenishment, driven by our greed and need for super-sized efficiency, our grand-scale consumerism, as Arundhati Roy writes, “another world . . . . She is on her way.” And how she forms, it is up to us all. “As the ice caps melt, as oceans heat up, and water tables plunge, as we rip through the delicate web of interdependence that sustains life on earth, as our formidable intelligence leads us to breach the boundaries between humans and machines, and our even more formidable hubris undermines our ability to connect the survival of our planet to our survival as a species,” we need to change the way we live, the way we manage the land, the way we are. Through our actions, and through “our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different” from the ones we are being fed through algorithms. Stories from different voices. In the “collective silence” as we take “inventory of ourselves, our lives, the world; the value systems in place” as Heather Lang, freelance artist, describes in the film “Shelter,” we need to care for the environment so it can again care for us, and in doing so, avoid the worst effects of the climate emergency.
As dancers gradually return to classes in the studios at the Australian Ballet Centre, there is still no word as to when and how we may be able to see the company perform on stage. These steps are small, but important. Everything is linked, root to tip, from the biggest of big things to the tiniest ladybug poised on my fingertip; social justice is climate justice.[note]/“social justice concerns are always intertwined with public policy—and absolutely central to climate policy.” Julian Brave NoiseCat, “No, climate action can't be separated from social justice,” The Guardian, June 11, 2019, accessed June 17, 2020.[/note] As the many dance classes now available online indicate and afford, the Australian Ballet and Sydney Dance Company included, a reconnection to our bodies through movement, to dance, is just what is needed right now.
Performance
Place
Words
Sydney Dance Company x SSO collaboration. Photograph by Rafael Bonachela
“Uncommonly intelligent, substantial coverage.”
Your weekly source for world-class dance reviews, interviews, articles, and more.
Already a paid subscriber? Login
Nureyev and Friends, a recent tribute event at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, opened with an introduction from Charles Jude, the longtime protégé of Rudolf Nureyev at the Paris Opera Ballet.
Continue ReadingListening to John Cage’s “Three Dances (for prepared piano)” is a wonderfully contradictory experience. The composer disrupts our auditory expectations by placing an assortment of small objects such as erasers, screws, and bolts, among the piano strings. A musician plays the piano in the typical manner, but instead of a harmonic tone, we hear more percussive sounds of kettle drums, timpani, xylophone, tin cans, even bells. One can imagine how an artist like Lucinda Childs, who was part of the Judson Dance Theater radicals in the ‘60s, might be attracted to such a composition. The choreographer is perhaps best known...
Continue ReadingIt is always exciting when the New York City Ballet kicks off a season with an all-Balanchine program. However, the Spring Season’s opening quartet of Balanchine ballets—all strong in their own right—didn’t hang together as well as some other combos.
Continue ReadingMoreso than many Balanchine offshoot companies, the Dance Theater of Harlem—founded by the New York City Ballet principal dancer Arthur Mitchell in 1969—keeps the Balanchine ethos at the forefront of its programming.
Continue Reading
comments