World-class review of ballet and dance.
I’m in the audience of the Pit to watch Kaori Ito’s solo performance, “Robot, l'amour éternel.” It’s in the blackbox performing space at the New National Theatre Tokyo, intimate and close. The stage is an open, raised platform, gauzy white fabric covering the floor.
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Architects often use scale, along with other design principles such as light, rhythm, and form, to subtly guide a person's eye and body through a space—to take the gaze at street level to the highest point of a building, or to the horizon and beyond.
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An enchanted forest, a love gone wrong, and a swarm of women in long white tutus—when a formula works, it really works. Such is the case of “La Sylphide,” the nearly 200-year-old Romantic ballet which first premiered in 1832.
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In 1954, George Balanchine created a “Nutcracker” that was based on the classical Mariinsky production he danced in his childhood, utilizing the neoclassical style he honed in NYC. His version has become so renowned that in 1993, his name and the trademark symbol have been added to the title (even on the merch).
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What is he looking at? The dancer in a blue biketard bounds around the stage, his curly hair flip-flopping as his head snaps right, left, and center.
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Two 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.
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Will 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 accompanies a multimedia installation at the Kitchen, a book published by Wendy’s Subway, and an album published by the artist. With a creative process reaching back to 2018, the work delves explicitly into pandemic-era energies and inertias with focused intimacy and a pervasive sense of instability.
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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).
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Zvidance 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.
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He’s a choreographer, movement composer and trans-media storyteller: He’s d. Sabela grimes, who grew up in Lompoc, California, and didn’t know that his true calling would be as a dancer, choreographer and teller of tales until he moved to Philadelphia in the late 1990s and met Rennie Harris of Rennie Harris Puremovement.
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Here where I live in California, San Francisco Ballet will soon gear up for a revival of its massive ballet about Artificial Intelligence, a spectacle that ends on a note flattering to the tech bros in nearby Silicon Valley: strife gives way to eternal hope, and the vision of a sleek, luminous future reigns. Well, up the coast in Seattle they’ve got a different take on unregulated AI, and I’m here for it.
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Piece by piece, spanning two decades, Lucy Guerin Inc’s “Pieces” continues to grow. An invitation extended to a selection of choreographers to give shape to adventurous ideas and create a new choreographic work within a supportive framework has expanded from a five- to ten-minute work presented in the Lucy Guerin Inc studios to a twenty-minute piece on the University of Melbourne Art and Culture (UMAC) stage.
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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