All – Tagged "REVIEWS" – Page 68

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REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Return to Form

It was a historic event. The New York City Ballet performed at the David H. Koch Theater on Tuesday, September 21st for the first time in 18 months. The audience was entirely vaccinated, entirely masked, and even more revved up than a Fall for Dance crowd. Dance legends were scattered all around, Edward Villella sat prominently in the first row. It was a cathartic evening. The outpouring of love for the dancers and the musicians was immense. Each ballet received three curtain calls and a standing ovation. Confetti fell from the rafters at the end. It was wondrous to behold. Was...

REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Swell, Magnifique!

Gene Kelly, what can ya say? A class act. Timeless and evergreen, he is still notching up homages on films and television; and millions of hits on YouTube to subsequent new generations, twenty-five years after his passing. A legend of Hollywood, from the time of wise guys and sassy dames: he was a singer, dancer, actor—the triple threat, the epitome of an all-rounder.

REVIEWS | By Merilyn Jackson

BalletX takes Flight

Pago Pago, Samoa, January 11, 1938: Pan American Captain Edwin Musick piloted the inaugural airmail flight from Hawaii to New Zealand in December 1937. Beginning the return flight to Honolulu and home to Seattle, his plane caught fire, exploding midair. No remains of the seven onboard were found among the wreckage located later that day. The previous year, Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific along with navigator Fred Noonan who had earlier navigated the China Clipper on its first flight between San Francisco and Honolulu, piloted by Musick.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Consumer Durables

What makes German choreographer/performer Frauke Requardt's work so special is that she never uses spectacle for its own sake—there are always enough ideas to accompany her own vivid, inventive choreography, which scratches both itches of live art and contemporary dance at once.

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Anatomy Of Dance

London-born dancer Matthew Hawkins has always been a singular force of nature, so it makes sense for him to collaborate with the iconoclastic Scottish musicians Red Note Ensemble and lithe, soulful French dancer Soraya Ham. For this film, Iconnotations, the setting is the beautiful Greyfriars Kirk in the “old town” side of Edinburgh, a spacious and ornate parish church. It has been previously performed in St. Magnus Cathedral in Orkney, the island where Maxwell Davies lived laterally. The main piece, Vesalii Icones, features a musical score from late English composer Peter Maxwell Davies from 1969, which is filled with so...

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Cecilia Whalen

Bringing the World

Battery Dance Festival returned to the stage last week in celebration of its 40th anniversary, presenting six days of international dance live and livestreamed from the spectacular Robert F. Wagner park in lower Manhattan. The festival ran Aug. 12th through 20th and featured 56 total performances, including 16 dance films which opened the first three days of the festival online.

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

BAANDing Together

Five NYC-based dance companies (Ballet Hispánico, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem) joined forces to put on 5 outdoor shows in the Damrosch Park area of Lincoln Center this past week. NY Senator Brian Benjamin, who co-introduced the performance, said that Covid-19 “created a lot of trauma in our lives, but it also provided opportunity for collaboration.” We are not yet on the other side of this plague, but even in the midst of the Delta surge there are already signs of rebirth. Much has been made of how...

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Spirit

“Your body is a repository of memory,” says the voiceover in Retrace-Retract, Gregory Maqoma's film which is part of the Dancing In The Streets series for the Edinburgh International Festival, focusing on the issue of home. ”I am your compass. . . The spirit will guide you.” Threaded throughout this beautiful, inspiring film, directed and choreographed by Maqoma, is the poetry of Jefferson Tshabalala, which interrogates issues around poverty, inequality and strategies for survival; but also of selfhood and spirituality. These particular streets—Soweto's bustling streets in South Africa—are the backdrop. They signify the return to the source, the retracing of...

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

The Chandelier

In real estate, it’s all about location, location, location. And so it’s been with Los Angeles-based site-specific goddess, Heidi Duckler, who founded her eponymous troupe in 1985. The intrepid choreographer has staged more than 200 works in places as far flung as Australia, Russia and Hong Kong and in such disparate—and iconic—L.A. locations as an abandoned jail (“C’opera,” from 2006, which took place at the Police Academy), “Governing Bodies” (2010), set at City Hall and, more recently, “Hildegard Herself,” a gorgeous 2019 work inspired by 12th-century abbess, composer and mystic Hildegard von Bingen, performed at the 1925 Gothic Revival-style St....

DANCE FILM | REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Testimonials

I am scratched, punched, kicked and bruised watching Mele Broomes in her extraordinary film Wrapped Up In This. I am compelled by the multitudes within the stories, I feel consumed by its power. I'm disgusted by the real life accounts of racism endured by the womxn Broomes interviewed whilst researching this piece, whose voices are heard as it develops. Yet, it is not without hope, it grows and amplifies. It is utterly visceral and political. It feels radical, revolutionary in its intent. It is discourse, dance, and demonstration all wrapped up at once.

REVIEWS | By Candice Thompson

Cue Landscape

As I walked in the blazing early evening sun to the subway this past Monday evening, I wondered how the performers of Andrea Miller’s “You Are Here” would fare in such heat. As if to immediately put my mind to rest, the show began with instant catharsis as the dancers plunged into the large rectangular pool upon entering Lincoln Center’s Hearst Plaza. In unison, they stomped and hopped their way through the water, clasping their own hands together, arms slashing to a driving beat. The steps had a folk dance feel, and their motions felt intentional, grounded, almost sacred. A...

REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Tahoe Dance Camp

A recent Dance Data Project survey reports what everyone in the ballet world knows: Women are grossly under-represented in ballet leadership. Just one of the top 10 largest ballet companies in the U.S. is led by a woman, and only 30 percent of the top 50 companies are. Retiring ballerinas, we know, are far more likely to become ballet mistresses and school faculty than artistic directors.

Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Lorna Irvine

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,...

INTERVIEWS | Marina Harss

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.

REVIEWS | Rachel Howard

Starry Nights

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.

REVIEWS | Faye Arthurs

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.

REVIEWS | Emily May

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.