Parks and Rec
The haute joaillerie house Van Cleef & Arpels has a long history of supporting dance, since Louis Arpels attended the Paris Opera Ballet in the 1920s.
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School Report
This year’s San Francisco Ballet School Spring Festival offered a moment to say hello to the company’s next generation of dancers, and goodbye to the leader who shaped them: Patrick Armand, who took over the Trainee Program in 2010 and directed the school since 2017, has just stepped down. In the stark architecture of the Blue Shield Theater lobby, glass cases held photos of Armand, during the dashing prime of his Ballet Theatre Francais career, taking bows alongside Nureyev after a performance of Bejart’s “Song of a Wayfarer.” Meanwhile onstage, a pas de deux by school faculty Viktor Plotnikov best...
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New Meanings
And just like that, another spring season has ended at New York City Ballet. There was much to celebrate, in particular the rise of a new generation of dancers. All at once, the company looks renewed. And in particular, the corps de ballet and soloists, individually and as a whole, rose to challenge after challenge, looking technically strong, assured, full of promise, joyful.
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Gram Technique
If you thought Akram Khan’s 2016 update of “Giselle”—which resituated the 1841 classic to apply to modern migrant workers in a haunted garment factory—was radical, you should see Joshua Beamish’s 2019 “@giselle,” which takes place almost entirely over social media. I should clarify. This is not an online viewing situation, one watches “@giselle” in-person at an actual theater. (To be specific: the NY premiere of “@giselle” was held at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College.) But projections of Instagram-esque formatting, by Brianna Amore, were cast onto a scrim and framed nearly every scene. The flesh-and-blood performers danced...
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Do Not Go Gently
The South African contemporary choreographer Dada Masilo, based at Johannesburg’s The Dance Factory, has re-imagined some of the most familiar works in the western canon, including “Giselle” and “Swan Lake,” through an African lens. In “The Sacrifice,” she takes a juggernaut of early 20th century modernism, “The Rite of Spring.” But it is more complicated than that; as Masilo writes in her program note, she is responding not to Nijinsky and Stravinsky but to Pina Bausch, whose punishing 1975 “Rite of Spring” for the Paris Opéra is a juggernaut of its own. (Bausch’s work comes to the Park Avenue Armory...
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Leaps and Bounds
Since receiving a transformative financial infusion in 2020, Gibney Company has been charging forward at a dizzying pace. The company, led by founder and artistic director Gina Gibney and company director Gilbert T. Small II, has doubled its roster of dancers while it voraciously acquires and commissions challenging works, rolls out two annual seasons in New York, and tours nationally and abroad. For its NYC spring season at the Joyce, Gibney presented a program of works by three distinct choreographers. Whether in the studio or on stage, the thirteen Gibney artistic associates are an immensely capable and technically versatile group...
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Re-Emergence
Most mid-size US ballet troupes went through a thing or two during the pandemic, of course, but Sacramento Ballet’s passage was especially rough. When Covid hit, the troupe was just settling in with new artistic director Amy Seiwert after a bitter struggle between the board and the company’s longtime leaders, Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda. Seiwert was then abruptly let go, for reasons the board would not comment on. Anthony Krutzkamp, a former Cincinnati Ballet dancer who had been serving as executive director, took her place.
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Timeless
Trisha Brown said her conversations with former French Minister of Culture Michel Guy occurred “outside of time.” Brown and Guy, who was the founder of the avant-garde international Festival d'Automne, would sit for hours discussing dance and art. Brown said during those discussion, Guy would have to adjust the blinds more than once to accommodate the changes in daylight.
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The Power of Three
On one of the strongest lineups of the spring season, the New York City Ballet bookended Balanchine’s 1957 masterpiece, “Agon,” with the first and last ballets choreographed by Jerome Robbins: “Fancy Free” (1944) and “Brandenburg” (1997). “Fancy,” a theatrical Fleet Week farce, is starting to show its age. Though some tonal tweaks have been made, the scene in which the trio of sailors steals a woman’s red purse and playfully yanks her around doesn’t get the laughs it used to. Running concurrently across the plaza at the Met this month, coincidentally, is the powerful new opera “Champion.” It also has...
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With Diamonds
Science fiction met real-time emotional animation in Australasian Dance Collective’s “Lucie in the Sky.” When the company released news of this work, there was resounding excitement—bold, pioneering, and arguably the most ambitious artistic choice ADC has made to date. From the outset, one question hovered over “Lucie in the Sky:” can we, as artists, anthropomorphise objects using choreography and spatial empathy to elicit an emotional response from our audience? A question that was answered with three words: emotionally coded drones.
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Entrances and Exits
The Indian dance company Nrityagram, which specializes in the East Indian dance form Odissi, has been a frequent visitor to New York since the nineties. Each visit has been revelatory in some way. For years that revelatory quality seemed intimately linked to the choreographic relationship between the company’s director and choreographer, Surupa Sen, and its main star, Bijayini Satpathy. The two have performed solos and duets of breathtaking beauty and complexity during which time seemed to stop, and the audience tried not to blink for fear of missing something.
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She Sang the Body Electric
All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female. “I Sing The Body Electric” - Walt Whitman
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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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