Pretty Woman
“La Dame aux camélias” conveys the pain of the tragic love story between the celebrated, generous and doomed courtesan Marguerite Gautier and the passionate, idealistic and tormented Armand Duval.
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World-class review of ballet and dance.
“La Dame aux camélias” conveys the pain of the tragic love story between the celebrated, generous and doomed courtesan Marguerite Gautier and the passionate, idealistic and tormented Armand Duval.
Continue ReadingFittingly, I caught Kaori Ito’s charming production “An Upside Down World” on Children’s Day, a national holiday in Japan.
Continue ReadingJoy is the goal of Parsons Dance. That is immediately apparent from the opening of the program for its New York season at the Joyce Theater: “Ludwig,” a brand-new David Parsons original, features all nine company dancers, smiling and dressed in varying shades of sunset oranges and yellows, moving vigorously to the second movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony.
Continue ReadingCathy Weis’ SoHo loft is haunted. This is not because of the skeleton that dangles on the wall, or the iron hand that floats ominously above the piano. 537 Broadway—or Weis Acres, as the multi-media artist Weis dubs it—is enchanted by spirits of artists and eccentrics past.
Continue ReadingSuccess, as so many artists know, can be a devilishly mixed blessing. On the San Francisco Bay Area’s aerial dance scene, which counts site-specific innovators Joanna Haigood and Jo Kreiter among its many notables, the company formerly known as Project Bandaloop has long attracted national attention for dances that scale Seattle’s Space Needle, or rappel down a 2500-foot-high rock face in Yosemite.
Continue ReadingOliver Savariego presents a collage of parts still moving, and perhaps ever destined to always be so, in a new solo work-in-progress, “Slapdash,” at the conclusion of his Front Studio Residency at Temperance Hall.
Continue ReadingI was first introduced to the work of Margot Gelber when she submitted a film she choreographed and directed to Dare to Dance in Public Film Festival (D2D), the LA based, international Dance Film Festival that I founded.
Continue ReadingEvery year since 1881 in the forests of northern California, a secretive club of male elites in the world of politics, finance, and culture gather to burn an effigy in front of a giant statue of an owl in order to leave behind the worries of the past.
Continue ReadingMen: You can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t let ‘em die! Seriously, “Giselle,” the über-Romantic dance that premiered in Paris in 1841 and was the peak of the pre-Tchaikovsky ballets (before, for example, “Swan Lake”), was first presented by Los Angeles Ballet in its fifth season.
Continue ReadingWhat gives a dance staying power? What makes any work of art continue to be relevant over time? These are questions I pondered while revisiting Andrea Miller’s “Blush,” performed by her company, Gallim, at 92NY’s Harkness Mainstage Series this spring.
Continue ReadingAsami Maki’s 2004 reworking of Marius Pepita’s “Raymonda” for the National Ballet of Japan dials up the wow-factor at every level.
Continue ReadingYou can hear it before you see it. The sound of chatter, sneakers squeaking against the floor, the booming DJs reverberating through space.
Continue ReadingThe title of this dance interpretation of The Tempest highlights a notable departure from canon. In “We Caliban,” Shobana Jeyasingh imagines Shakespeare’s titular native in the collective sense—a tribe, a spirit and a place at once.
Continue ReadingLong before the dancers take the stage, Dance Theatre of Harlem’s season at New York City Center feels like one of the most energizing cultural events of the spring.
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It is rare for George Balanchine’s grand, bedazzled “Symphony in C” to open a program. Its champagne-popping finale for 52 dancers tends to be a nightcap.
Continue ReadingWhen we think of countries that have shaped the world of dance our mind will often drift to the United States, Russia, or Germany. But what of Luxembourg?
Continue ReadingIn times of rapid change, predicting the road ahead can seem to be a fool’s errand. But on a spring afternoon at Lincoln Center, I feel confident in this assertion: the future of dance is very bright.
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