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The inaugural Unite Ballet Festival, directed by Calvin Royal III, took place at the Joyce Theater from August 13-18, 2024.
FREE ARTICLEWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
Past the Gallery Kitchen, which for tonight has become an open mic Poets Café, I swim through the swirling 100-metre-long, multi-panelled Mun-Dirra (Maningrida Fish Fence), woven by 13 Burarra women weavers, which hovers above the floor and makes the gallery a waterway. I arrive to find Rosalind Crisp in the moment before the first of her two ten-minute performances, behind artist Hugh Hayden’s salvaged wood classroom ecosystem. Map still in my hand, for the locating of events communicating not just with the voice, but with the body, through dance, I am at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), after hours, for the Night of Ideas (La Nuit des Idées), an initiative of the French Embassy in partnership with the NGV and the Institut Français, taking place in various locations on the ground level of the NGV’s Triennial. Crisp’s legs and feet are instantly recognisable behind the blackboard of Hayden’s The End. Hidden in plain sight from both the extinct dodos in the installation and the wandering audience, a water bottle and a Guest Artist gallery lanyard by her feet, the gallery as a dance venue presents a distinct challenge. She pads the space, and I think about how hard it must be when the backstage is improvised.
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The inaugural Unite Ballet Festival, directed by Calvin Royal III, took place at the Joyce Theater from August 13-18, 2024.
FREE ARTICLEBefore digital audio, compact discs, cassette tapes with their ribbons of sound sandwiched within a small case, and pressed vinyl records, came wax cylinders to record and reproduce sound, thanks to Thomas Edison’s 1877 invention of the hand-cranked phonograph.
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