World-class review of ballet and dance.
“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.
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading
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...
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading
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”),...
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading
“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...
Continue Reading
Ballet has long been imbued with a mysterious air. It’s a closed-off world, one that—despite many hopefuls—admits only a select few. Audiences are led to believe that what goes on behind its closed doors is a kind of magic. And when the curtain closes, the beauty they’ve experienced remains.
Continue Reading
Richmond Ballet’s pairing of George Balanchine’s “Serenade” and Ma Cong’s one-act “Firebird” encapsulates the beauty and quintessential oddness of ballet. The drama and simplicity of “Serenade’s” opening startled the audience into eager applause. The Richmond Ballet dancers built a community before our eyes and graciously welcomed us in. As the dance shifted through its four sections with many entrances and exits and varying numbers, I felt sad to see the corps go and a little thrill when they returned. This is not to dismiss the performance of accomplished soloists, guest artist Kristina Kadashevych in particular dancing with assurance the combination...
Continue Reading
Some choreographers integrate visuals, text and moods seemingly effortlessly. Colette Sadler is one such artist, as she has long created singular work which straddles performance art, visual art and dance. So it is with her gorgeous and meditative riposte to Daphne's punishment from Apollo, “Oracle Leaves.” In the original myth, while attempting to escape Apollo's brutal advances, Daphne is transformed into a tree. This piece pushes back, embracing an alternative vision, with a rebellious spirit at its core. It is a long, langorous stretch of limbs, a slow-burning beauty. Once you become attuned to its sparse setting, slow pace and...
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