This site has limited support for your browser. We recommend switching to Edge, Chrome, Safari, or Firefox.

Latest


Reframing
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Reframing

As Glasgow's famous Tramway venue remains closed until further notice, Unlimited have commissioned a short film screening for those missing this superb live dance festival. This particular film is a superb example of the artists who would be participating on the stage throughout the spring, and feels entirely apposite, given its overarching theme.

Continue Reading
Fleeting Beauty
REVIEWS | By Claudia Lawson

Fleeting Beauty

And here we are—in Sydney’s Roslyn Packer Theatre. Everyone is wearing masks, yet the theatre is buzzing. The anticipation is palpable—the Sydney Dance Company is about to take the main stage for the first time since late 2019. The work is Rafael Bonachela's “Impermanence.”

Continue Reading
Love & Strife
REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Love & Strife

The task at hand is a review of “Romeo and Juliet,” but more on that in a minute. What needs to be said first is this: In our moment of political and pandemic chaos, Peter Boal is doing an extraordinary job of connecting his company to its public with a spirit of empathy, vulnerability, and humility.

Continue Reading
Winter Festival
REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Winter Festival

The American Ballet Theatre Studio Company aired performances of new works and excerpted classics over two nights this week, for free on YouTube. Actually, the shows were billed as two halves of one Winter Festival performance, separated by a 23-hour intermission. I appreciated the digestibility of this scenario, for watching ballet online is not the same as watching it in person—it is much harder to focus on a computer screen than a massive stage.

Continue Reading
Dancing Out Loud
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Róisín O'Brien

Dancing Out Loud

Come for the choreographers, stay for the dancers. A collaboration between Sadler’s Wells and BBC Arts, Dancing Nation presents a selection of new and restaged works from emerging and established artists across the UK over 3 hour-long episodes. Most of the pre-recorded performances were filmed on grand stages across the UK (including the Sadler’s Wells main stage), but some pop up in the foyer or, in the case of Oona Doherty’s seminal work Hope Hunt & The Ascension into Lazarus, explode onto the streets of Belfast.

Continue Reading
Dance Camera West Drive-In
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Dance Camera West Drive-In

Dance Camera West (DCW), the festival dedicated to the intersection of cinematography and choreography, was co-founded in Los Angeles in 2001 by Lynette Kessler and Kelly Hargraves, proving that the art form has come a long way since Thomas Edison hand-tinted the swirling skirts of modern dance pioneer Loie Fuller in the film version of the 1905 Danse Serpentine. And while the festival has undergone several directorial changes since its inception, Hargraves once again became its executive and artistic helmer since 2018.

Continue Reading
Box of Dreams
REVIEWS | By Valentina Bonelli

Box of Dreams

Someday we will recognize the dance pieces created during the pandemic, conceived for the camera, performed by a few dancers, innervated by a sense of instability. It is the case with the new “I wonder where the dreams I don’t remember go,” staged by Yoann Bourgeois for NDT1, filmed without audience and streamed on demand in two performances on the website’s company. A piece that in the past we would have called a “video dance.” The French artist, trained as a circus acrobat and raised as a contemporary dancer, is quite in demand in Europe as a choreographer since his...

Continue Reading
A Joyous Nutcracker
REVIEWS | By Paul McInnes

A Joyous Nutcracker

As Tokyo and its surrounding areas prepare to go into a second lockdown, it's unclear what the immediate future of ballet and live events will be in the Japanese capital. Only last month, ballet, dance, opera and other performing arts had made a welcome return and the outlook was bright as companies regrouped and held performances around the city playing to sold out or near sold out venues. 

Continue Reading
Dance & Diplomacy
REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Dance & Diplomacy

Blessed be the diplomats and the grant writers! Seven years ago, Silicon Valley-based dancer and choreographer Philein Wang applied to the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and secured a $50,000 grant for a series of U.S.-China exchanges and tours. This year, confronted with anti-Asian racism in the U.S. and the police killing of George Floyd, she saw both a need and an opportunity and reached out to the State Department again.

Continue Reading
Season’s Greetings
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Season’s Greetings

The sputtering stop-start of lockdown measures in the U.K. has wiped most of the 2020 dance season from the calendar, including a few live holiday performances that were optimistically (and, in hindsight, unrealistically) scheduled this autumn, like a bill of world premieres from English National Ballet. But it’s the year of make-do, and few companies have the leadership and resources to salvage so much from the wreckage as ENB, who swiftly rejigged those new works into a series of pay-per-view films for homebound audiences. It might be an emergency stopgap, but the digital programme works hard to capture the versatility...

Continue Reading
Tanowitz at the Joyce
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Tanowitz at the Joyce

Solos and site-specific works were the dance world’s prevailing themes in 2020, for obvious reasons: people couldn’t touch each other or congregate. But the term site-specific can mean two different things. Sometimes it refers to a live event attended by a real, albeit limited, audience. For example, the LA Dance Project put on a series of drive-in shows, the Kaatsbaan summer festival offered spaced-out picnic blanket-seating, and Troy Schumacher and company are currently staging walk-through “Nutcracker” performances at the Wethersfield Mansion. But site-specific also refers to a dance choreographed for a particular place, which is then filmed and broadcast to...

Continue Reading
A Beautiful Toybox
DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

A Beautiful Toybox

It's not just little girls who dream of escaping into ballet. Created for the screen by Christopher Hampson and set and costume designer Lez Brotherston and filmed by directors Jess and Morgs, The Secret Theatre comes across as a Victorian toybox full of rich, endless surprises. When a young boy, played with exuberance and wonder by Leo Tetteh, finds his way into an empty theatre, he is taken on an adventure into the heart of Christmas ballet, where dancers cast spells before his eyes. Here, Scottish Ballet bring the viewer not one, but two, magical ballets for the festive season, as...

Continue Reading
Good Subscription Agency