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Malpaso Dance Company brought a vibrant slice of Cuban life to the Joyce last week: virtuosic dance, live music, humor, and of course, the salsa—an element that was ever-present as a through-line for the evening.
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Gentlemen’s Club
Not for the first time at the Fall for Dance Festival, now in its 20th year, Chippendale’s emerged as the theme of the night. There were 32 male dancers across the three works on the festival’s third program, 31 of whom danced shirtless.
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Match Point
In 1913, a few weeks before the premiere of his revolutionary “Rite of Spring,” Nijinsky created another, smaller ballet for the Ballets Russes.
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A Season of Balanchine
The ballets of George Balanchine are a window into the company he, with the help and support of Lincoln Kirstein, created three quarters of a century ago. The fact that they and the company are still here is a kind of miracle if one thinks of the short afterlife of most ballets. How lucky we are that the two men met, and that Kirstein convinced Balanchine to try his luck in New York.
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Going Whole Hog
Backdropped in layers of flowy plastic sheeting, an enormous inflatable nut brown sow dominates the stage. Projected video make it appear uncannily as if it’s breathing.
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Sticks and Stones
For remote fans of Pacific Northwest Ballet, the curiosity increases as the calendar days tick further beyond the pandemic: How is the company still offering digital recordings of so much of its programming? And how much longer can the company keep offering these? The dread of losing digital access is felt especially after PNB’s latest streaming wonder, a tribute to the theatrical brilliance of Nederlands Dans Theater, danced with such mirth and fluency that you might suspect the performance had been filmed in Amsterdam rather than in Seattle’s McCaw Hall.
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Animal Kingdom
It may not be the height of fashion—a dull grey hoodie worn upside down and backwards—but it certainly served a higher purpose in, “These Are the Ones We Fell Among,” a one-hour duet seen last weekend at the UCLA Nimoy Theater. (Formerly the Crest Theatre, the reimagined movie hall named for the late actor, director, and philanthropist Leonard Nimoy, has a full slate of performances scheduled for its inaugural 2023-24 season.)
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Sunday at the Ballet with George
The elegant woman seated next to me at the Sunday matinee was excited to see Sara Mearns in “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” This was high praise, as she had fond memories of Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell in the piece—the ballet’s original 1968 cast.
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Serendipity
There seems to be no clear organizing principle behind the programs at the yearly Fall for Dance festival at New York City Center.
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Awakenings
The fall season at New York City Ballet, devoted to the works of Balanchine, has been full of débuts.
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Punch Line
If you’ve ever laughed at the wrong moment, or at a joke that wasn’t funny, or to break the tension, then you will appreciate the theme of Shannon Gillen’s “Punch Line,” performed by the physical dance theater group Vim Vigor, that opened the Gibney performance 2023-24 season in September.
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Hope on the Horizon
With a bang it begins, the explosion of a star, on stage at the Playhouse, Arts Centre. Bangarra Dance Theatre’s “Yuldea” has arrived on Wurundjeri Country (Melbourne) with a supernova to outshine entire galaxies, before heading to Bendigo, Djaara Country, for the final quivering leg and jutting arm of shifting gas and particles.
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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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