World-class review of ballet and dance.
The 1972 Stravinsky Festival at New York City Ballet is one of those mythical moments people speak of with glowing tones of wonderment: 30 ballets! 20 premieres! New works by Balanchine, Robbins, John Taras, Todd Bolender, and more! Not to mention the fact that it was the occasion of the creation of two the greatest Stravinsky ballets ever made: “Symphony in Three Movements” and “Stravinsky Violin Concerto.”
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The dancers of Sasha Waltz & Guests and the musicians of Bang on a Can All-Stars walked onstage in silence, their forms making dark silhouettes against a saturated pink backdrop. For a few minutes they milled about, reconfiguring into different pairs, groups, and lines before the musicians eventually settled themselves at their instruments and the dancers found their marks. A bright chime sound, coming from percussionist David Cossin, set the the driving beat that propels Terry Riley’s iconic minimalist score “In C” forward. As more lights came up and the dancers warmed up with rhythmic shoulder rolls and head turns,...
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Dozens of ballet luminaries including Hamburg Ballet director John Neumeier, Joffrey Ballet director Ashley Wheater, and recently retired New York City Ballet principal Gonzalo Garcia gathered here last week on a confetti-blasted opera house stage to mark the end of an era. Helgi Tomasson, artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet since 1985, is about to finish his final season. The larger ballet world’s moment of overwhelming change, with the revamp in leadership at New York City Ballet, and Kevin McKenzie’s impending retirement at American Ballet Theatre, feels magnified here. Tomasson has served seven years longer than McKenzie has led...
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George Balanchine’s “Divertimento No. 15” is a ballet one longs to see, but seldom comes out of the theater fully satisfied by. “Arlene Croce quipped that ‘Divertimento No. 15’ is one of those ballets that are famous for not being done well,” Nancy Goldner writes in her essential volume More Balanchine Variations. “My experience with it would prompt me to amend that to ‘not done well enough.’” I tend to agree with the latter assessment. It is an extraordinary ballet, sophisticated, pure, both light and transparent in its construction. But it seldom achieves the kind of transcendence and flow suggested...
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It’s almost 18 months since David Hallberg, the South Dakota native and long-time New Yorker, took over as artistic director at the Australian Ballet, and it finally feels as though the Covid shackles are off. To date, there hasn’t been a true opportunity to see what he might bring to Australia. But here it is: “Kunstkamer,” a wildly ambitious contemporary work, it feels like a make or break work for the new artistic director. And, with it David Hallberg's dramatic return to the stage.
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The first edition of the “Gala Fracci,” an initiative of ballet director Manuel Legris, took place at La Scala as a commemorative evening. In her beloved theatre our prima ballerina assoluta was raised but was refused as a ballet director. The calling for a series of masterclasses on “Giselle” just before her death and this very sincere Gala has healed past wounds. In a packed house, Beppe Menegatti, Fracci’s husband, was missing, due to illness or maybe to the fear to be overwhelmed by emotions. A pity, as he was the Pygmalion of the ballerina’s extraordinary career, well retraced by...
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In March 2020, just as the Flamenco Festival was rolling into town, the world shut down. The dancers packed up their flamenco shoes and went home. The festival’s return, two years later, then, is also a welcome return to one of the city’s most celebratory yearly rituals. (This is the festival’s twentieth anniversary.) Even if this year’s edition is smaller than earlier ones, with just two dance shows at City Center versus four or five or more, the overwhelming sense is one of relief. The flamencos are back.
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The 1971 ballet “Goldberg Variations,” by Jerome Robbins, has a reputation for being long, and, for that reason, one of the choreographer’s “difficult” ballets. Robbins used all thirty of the keyboard variations Bach developed on a simple, mournful theme. With the exception of three in G minor they are in a single key, G major. Almost perversely, Robbins kept all the repeats. The music is played at a more leisurely pace than in most keyboard recitals. And in the first half of the ballet, there are few large ensembles or showy steps. “Goldberg” is a ballet that asks us to...
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There was a celebratory spirit in the packed house on opening night for Shamel Pitts’ and Tribe’s New York Live Arts season. As people located their seats, energetic jazz riffs played over the sound system and projected white specks of light floated in a circular formation on the black stage floor simulating the cosmic phenomenon of a black hole. At long last, the final instalment of Pitts’ “Black Trilogy,” titled “Black Hole: Trilogy and Triathlon,” was having its pandemic-delayed New York premiere.
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As it approaches the 30-year mark, New York-based Complexions Contemporary Ballet, which was co-founded in 1994 by Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson (both former Alvin Ailey dancers), the troupe is at the top of its game—and then some, if that’s even possible. But seeing is believing, and watching the 15-member company on Friday night at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, proved an enlightening experience on multiple levels. (The troupe will also be at the Irvine Barclay Theatre April 29.)
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Presenting a curious combination of repertoire and new work on April 9th, Martha Graham Dance Company’s 96th season continued this spring as part of the City Center Dance Festival, which also featured Paul Taylor, Ballet Hispanico, and Dance Theatre of Harlem. Including a Martha Graham classic, a world premiere from UK-based choreographer Hofesh Shechter, and the New York premiere of a dance that actually merged archival choreography from Graham with contemporary choreographers, the evening showcased the undiluted power of the Graham technique, as well as its limits, particularly when applied to new, looser-limbed movement vocabulary.
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With the dust settling on the recent infamous UK royal family allegations around Prince Andrew, Scottish Ballet's artistic director Christopher Hampson and director Gary Harris' adaptation of the controversial Kenneth MacMillan ballet from 1978 feels timely indeed. Based on a true story which shocked society to the core, the plot centres on the wanton destruction in the royal court of Austria in 1889 caused by the Crown Prince Rudolf, his many mistresses, wife, and his ultimate demise. It's a wild study in toxic masculinity in general.
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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