15 Minutes of FRAME

This time yesterday I was sat on the floor. This time yesterday, at 3pm, in the van Praagh studio, named after Peggy van Praagh, the Australian Ballet’s founding artistic director, at the Primrose Potter Australian Ballet Centre, I was unsure what I’d see, in the truest and best sense of being uncertain. Having taken the lift to level five, the path ahead was unfixed, something of which many tales of curiosity require. I was there to experience “An Afternoon of Work-in Progress Studio Showings” presented by the Australian Ballet as part of the inaugural 2023 FRAME festival program.

Kylin’s Garden

Some years ago, I wrote, “Dance has the power to stir the viewer's innermost longings and outermost visceral reactions. Few choreographers reach into those sensibilities as effectively as Kun-Yang Lin. With quiet power, he arrives at the essence of an emotion—humor, spirituality, anguish, ecstasy—extracts it raw, and then, with quicksilver speed, subtly refines it.”*

When Beauty Awoke

Avenging Angels

“I’m really into vengeance, sadly,” Maurya Kerr told the 92nd Street Y’s Harkness Dance Center director Taryn Kaschock Russell following Kerr’s “black calls to dark calls to deep underneath.” “I try to get it out in my work instead of in person,” Kerr added.

Khansa, Warsha and the Queering of Lebanese Dance

Mo Khansa, who works simply as Khansa, is a radical young Lebanese dance artist, choreographer and singer who interrogates ideas about identity, place, gender, sexuality and autonomy in his incredible work. Influenced by his mother, herself a more traditional type of dancer, and iconic artists like Arca, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bjork and FKA Twigs, his is a singular path. Watching him move feels like being let in on a secret, one which could blow things apart—such is his power.

Friends in High Places

This mixed bill takes its name from the daily barre classes Tiler Peck started hosting on Instagram Live during the 2020 lockdown, an impromptu venture that soon had 15,000 people tuning in to #turnitoutwithtiler. The New York City ballet superstar is a much-loved luminary, known for her sunny energy on and off stage. That vim comes through in this fizzing programme of new and recent work, Peck’s London debut, giving it a warmth that’s often missing from the contemporary ballet sphere, including in NYCB’s slick neoclassical house style.

Naharin’s Enigmatic Hora

The Batsheva Dance Company returned to New York City after a four year hiatus for a two-week engagement (February 28-March 12) at the Joyce Theater to perform “Hora,” created by Ohad Naharin. The renowned choreographer, having led this premier dance company of Israel from 1990 to 2018 as artistic director, has shaped an extraordinary company of dancers—creatives in their own right—through his nurturing leadership, visionary approach to dance practice, and his distinctive movement language and toolbox called Gaga. In his current role as house choreographer, he continues to endow Batsheva with a repertoire of bold, characteristic works that are recognized...

Shallow Waters

On Friday March 3, Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House transformed into Pina Bausch’s fantasy of Brazil via “Água.” For nearly three hours, the charismatic dancers of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, now under the direction of Boris Charmatz, rollicked through classic Bausch terrain—an endless parade of dreamy solos, comedic vignettes, and raucous ensemble scenes—inside a dynamic set.

Know Your Audience

After an absence of six years, the New York City Ballet revived Peter Martins’s “The Sleeping Beauty” to close out the Winter Season. A lot has changed at the ballet in that interim, including the departure of Martins himself. But I hadn’t seen this “Beauty” from the front in over 20 years (though I danced 11 different roles in the production in that span)—so for me, it was like seeing a premiere. I’d had it in my mind that Martins’s “Sleeping Beauty” was by far the best of his classical full-lengths (the others being “Romeo and Juliet” and “Swan Lake”),...

Dressed to Kill

It’s about style. Yes, it’s about men, it’s about men after war, it’s about Birmingham, it’s about working-class identity. But “Peaky Blinders” is also about style. It’s a slow-motion prowl under the metal beams of a hot spitting factory, a cocksure gaze beneath a flat cap, with long coats flapping and the orange stab from a lit cigarette.

Smooth as Silk, Strong as Steel

The style Kyle Abraham has honed over the years is unmistakable: a silken coordination of the body in which ripples and undulations pass through skin and sinew; an expressive use of the back; hands that touch, and really feel; impulses that start here but find their way there, and then there; a deep sensitivity to music coupled with an intelligent response to lyrics; a penchant for melancholy, leavened with sass. 

Dohee Lee Reimagines a Korean Ritual to Heal

“I was born on this island of conflict, where beauty and trauma collide,” sings Dohee Lee referring to her native Jeju Island off the coast of South Korea. With sung narrative, she invites the presence of her Korean ancestors and the ancestral land itself for her world premiere of “Chilseong Saenamgut (Duringut): Ritual for Sickness.” Wearing a white cotton robe layered with strips of white paper and a white turban, she rings the shaman’s bell and opens her arms welcoming the audience members at Gibney Center in New York City (February 23-25) to heal along with her in a potent...