World-class review of ballet and dance.
“Will you hold this, please?” I look up from my notebook to see a young woman pressing a length of string into my hands. A beat later she slinks away, leaving me to fumble with the thread as its other end is pulled taut by a man swaying across the room.
Continue Reading
“We invite you to stay for a post-performance conversation”—these are dividing words. After a recent performance, all but one of my seatmates—several friends and acquaintances—decided against staying. I wavered for a minute as I considered keeping my friend company and the possibility of hearing the choreographers and performers discuss their processes, inspirations, and attachments—all interiors that I love. But in the end I joined the exodus, citing my own rule not to attend post-performance talks for shows I am reviewing, in service of my oxymoronic goals of maintaining objectivity and developing a singular, personal response to the work.
Continue Reading
One of the greatest challenges—and for me, joys—of being a dance critic is navigating the not infrequent clash between contemporary values and those embraced in classical ballet, a centuries-old institution that venerates ‘tradition’ in all its old-world, patriarchal glory. How should a world increasingly concerned with racial diversity respond to an establishment that in 2015 remains overwhelmingly white? How can an art form that worships prescriptive gender roles address the growing call for LGBT inclusivity? What messages of value can women divine from stories that glorify female fragility and are primarily written and directed by men?
Continue Reading
I want to find dance’s “fundamental feature” [note]Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (abbreviated CL). Translated from the French by Richard Howard. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010 paperback edition), 9[/note] as Roland Barthes, in his 1980 Camera Lucida, did for photography. [note]Please see essay #1 of “Between the Dancer and the Dance” for what the French critic Roland Barthes has to do with anything. [/note] I’ll begin, like him, with the peculiar mechanism by which the idiom (photography for him, dance for me) transmutes its raw material into art. The machinery, if not the alchemy, of sign-making, as the...
Continue Reading
Six years ago, when I began teaching at the Fashion Institute of Technology for applied and not-so-applied arts, the professors hiring me asked if I might like to try my hand at a course that prepared graphic design students for the workplace—or at least got them in the door.
Continue Reading
In the following essay, Stephanie Jordan elucidates the method and meaning of the music selected for Frederick Ashton's “A Month in the Country” It comes from Following Sir Fred's Steps - Ashton's Legacy, the published proceedings of the conference on the choreographer and his work, held at Roehampton University in 1994, and edited by Stephanie Jordan and Andrée Grau. This essay is expanded upon in Stephanie Jordan's 2000 publication, Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet (London: Dance Books), pages 245-64.
Continue ReadingWatching 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.
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading