World-class review of ballet and dance.
The New York City Ballet’s fall season opened with a nicely varied all-Balanchine program. The man had range. The peasant campiness of “Donizetti Variations” led right into the romantic tremolos of “Ballade,” and his abridged version of the dramatic juggernaut “Swan Lake” followed the lone intermission.
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When viewing any work of art, patience may be a necessity, rather than a virtue alone. At least, in New York City Center’s second program for its annual Fall for Dance Festival, instant gratification is discouraged, with a slate of three works that reward viewers as they build, gradually, to ecstasy, horror, and mania.
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At a time when masked ICE thugs are conducting raids up and down California, and the Supreme Court has just decreed the US government can continue arresting people based on the color of their skin, it was entirely appropriate that Rogelio Lopez’s new show opened with a voice over acknowledgement of the “horrors” besieging America’s Latino communities.
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There’s a dash of madness and oodles of heart in this 2022 dance theatre work from the choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan, who takes us on a whistlestop tour through his biography, including his childhood in 1970s Dublin and his breakthrough years as a dancer (and eventual dancemaker) in ‘90s London.
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According to her program notes, Sharon Chohi Kim was inspired by murmurations—“both spontaneous flocks of starlings and a collection of low, continuous sounds”—in her premiere (one-night only) of the same name.
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We enter the cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory to an oblong stage area flanked by seating on the long sides, emulating the sightline of Anna Wintour and her corps of high couture fashionistas at Fashion Week.
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London City Ballet returned to Sadler’s Wells last weekend with a programme of rarely seen works by Balanchine, Ratmansky, Scarlett, and Melac. Still in the early stages of its revival—the company originally folded in 1996 and relaunched just last year—it was a daring offering, and one that more than delivered.
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Two years ago Jonathan Watkins, choreographer and former dancer with the Royal Ballet, founded a new venture: Ballet Queer.
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It was a picture-perfect evening at the Hollywood Bowl for music and dance under the stars. The last concert of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s classical series, it was to have featured conductor and former Dudamel Fellow, Jonathan Heyward, but the Franco-British maestra, Stephanie Childress, led the ensemble instead.
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The life of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky does not lack melodramatic potential. The composer of ballet classics such as “Swan Lake,” “Sleeping Beauty” and “The Nutcracker” was celebrated by Imperial Russia for his compositions yet simultaneously forced to hide his homosexuality.
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I’m not weathering well. Are you? Individually and globally, it seems to me the last five years left many of us in a vague sort of freefall, in a theatrum mundi that becomes more and more desperate.
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The New York City Ballet's summer residency at Saratoga Performing Arts Center captured a year of company anniversaries.
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.
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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.
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.
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