Human Movement
In one corner of the black-box stage, three musicians adjust their instruments: drums, double bass, clarinet. As each performer enters barefoot, they set down a pair of sneakers with toes lined against the back wall.
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The Eyes Have It
The Tiffany Mills Company and Ensemble Ipse recently teamed up for a weekend of shows at the National Sawdust Theater.
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Lost History
Despite what Fox News wants the rest of the United States to believe about a “doom loop” in San Francisco, the reality in many of the city’s neighborhoods refuses to fit the media spin.
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With Marion
Leslie Cuyjet’s “With Marion” opens with a very particular coming-of-age tradition: the cotillion ball. In the the Kitchen’s temporary home at Westbeth, Cuyjet takes over the center of the loft space with a rectangle of screens.
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Thursdays are for Dancing
One of the reasons to see “Is it Thursday Yet?,” the new collaboration between choreographers Sonya Tayeh and Jenn Freeman inspired by Freeman’s diagnosis with Autism Spectrum Disorder, has little to do with the show itself.
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Down to Earth
Casting is central to the most recent revival of Pina Bausch’s “The Rite of Spring.” Touring with a new duet entitled “common ground[s],” the mixed bill was put together as an homage to Bausch. While Bausch’s 1975 masterwork features 34 extremely talented, diversely trained dancers from 14 African countries, “common ground[s]” creates an entire universe with just two captivating dancers in their seventies: Senegalese-French choreographer Germaine Acogny, founder of the international education center for traditional and contemporary African dances, Ecole des Sables, and the French dancer Malou Airaudo, who is a former member of Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. The show, co-produced...
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We All Fall Down
To fell a tree, after determining the fall path, you need to make a notch in the side of the trunk with your chainsaw.
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An American Choreographer in Paris
Paris Opera Ballet presented an all-Robbins program at the Garnier from October 24 to November 10: “En Sol,” “In the Night,” and “The Concert,” all works Jerome Robbins made for New York City Ballet.
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Glass Pieces
This week at the Joyce, the Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Reflections Festival presented its starriest program yet: “Dancing with Glass: The Piano Etudes.”
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A Tree Grows
Watching George Balanchine’s “The Nutcracker” the other night at New York City Ballet, I was struck, once again, by the sense of balance it both portrays and embodies.
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By Moonlight
As the lights dim in Sadler’s Wells, I am struck by how dark the theatre I’m sitting in is. These few moments before a show begins create a unique situation of near complete trust on the audience; there’s no light, natural or artificial.
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Giant Leaps
During the past ten years, Jody Sperling has created a portfolio of dance works that calls for action to protect and preserve the environment. She has traveled to the Arctic to dance on disappearing ice.
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Teenage Angst and Institutions
Watching 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,...
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The Me of Today
The 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.
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America, F**K Yeah
After 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.
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Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup
An “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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