World-class review of ballet and dance.
One of the gems of New York City’s dance landscape is the Graham Studio Series, a programming cycle that offers behind-the-scenes interaction with the work of the Graham Company in their studio space. In early January, the series presented a Graham Deconstructed event exploring Martha Graham’s modernist masterwork “Cave of the Heart.”
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Although Arlene Croce was not a trained dancer (her afterschool arts training in childhood was as a painter) she took dancing seriously as both an occasion for pleasure and a cultural endeavor, and she took writing about it to be a serious cultural action as well, at least as important to the mental health of the public as some of the verbiage by politicians and their editors.
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Philadelphia witnessed two Gala celebrations of dance and performance on opposite sides of town in October. It seemed like a tale of two cities. One in the center where much of the cultural events take place and the other on the fringes, down by the riverside.
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Love will always win, absolutely, over war and everything else” says dancer Marta Kaliandruk keenly, her pure blue eyes sparkling as she speaks to me in the wings of the theatre, during dress rehearsal for the Grand Kyiv Ballet’s Australian and New Zealand tour.
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During a bombing of Berlin in World War II, the young dancer Ludmilla Chiriaeff (née Otzoup Gorny) waited in a makeshift bomb shelter with her father. Alexander Otzoup was a writer and poet with a powerful imagination, who gathered regularly with other Russian émigrés to share work and talk.
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Dance asks much of its spectators: there is a need for the intellectual side to work in tandem with the visceral. Which is why Yorke Dance Project's glorious film Dance Revolutionaries is a triumph from top to bottom—it's a feast for the senses. Filmed in various locations during the pandemic, there is as much to sate the casual dance fan as an aficionado. Director David Stewart has created a multifaceted work.
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This year marks the tenth anniversary of Cathy Weis' “Sundays on Broadway,” a performance series that welcomes experimentation from a curated group of seasoned and emerging artists hosted intimately in Weis’ SoHo loft.
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My first exposure to “Appalachian Spring” was the music—a sixth grade fieldtrip to the Denver Symphony Orchestra—long before I heard about Martha Graham.
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In her 1951 autobiography Dance to the Piper, Agnes de Mille spends seven pages describing in colorful detail what it was like to be on the road with the Ballets Russes.
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Six dancers enter from stage left and position themselves along the rear wall, their backs to the audience. Today, the light through a row of windows casts them in silhouette.
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The 92NY hosted a star-studded evening of dance on March 12th with performances by the Limón, Martha Graham, and Alvin Ailey II companies, as well as contemporary choreographers Omar Román de Jesús, Jamar Roberts, and Hope Boykin.
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Lorie O’Toole steps back slightly, scanning the scene in front of her with a discerning eye. Eleven dancers move together, their limbs and torsos taking on the quality of water, their collective image becoming something like the ocean’s surf.
FREE ARTICLEWatching Matthew Bourne's reworked version of the “star-cross'd lovers,” I was briefly reminded of Veronica, played by Winona Ryder, in the dark 1988 comedy by Daniel Waters and Michael Lehmann, Heathers, and her line, “my teen angst bullshit has a body count.” Yes, this is the darker side of Bourne's repertoire,...
Continue ReadingThe choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.
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Beneath blue California skies, manicured trees, and the occasional hum of an overhead airplane, Tamara Rojo took the Frost Amphitheater stage at Stanford University to introduce herself as the new artistic director of San Francisco Ballet.
Continue ReadingAfter a week of the well-balanced meal that is “Jewels”—the nutritive, potentially tedious, leafy greens of “Emeralds,” the gamy, carnivorous “Rubies,” and the decadent, shiny white mountains of meringue in “Diamonds”—the New York City Ballet continued its 75th Anniversary All-Balanchine Fall Season with rather more dyspeptic fare.
Continue ReadingAn “Ajiaco” is a type of soup common to Colombia, Cuba, and Peru that combines a variety of different vegetables, spices, and meats.
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