World-class review of ballet and dance.
This double bill has similar thematic concerns: group dynamics; ritual, intimacy, humanity. In spite of very different approaches, there's a sense of being at one with, or up against, the elements, of nature and rebirth, and our complicated relationship with the planet. As issues around climate change have been pushed front and centre in the news, these two contrasting pieces feel very much of the zeitgeist.
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“Balanchine is my life, my destiny.” Suzanne Farrell still talks about George Balanchine in present tense. Hailed as the most influential ballerina of the 20th-century, Farrell has dedicated her career and her life to preserving and promoting the legacy of the great ballet master. In her dancing days, she was New York City Ballet’s brightest star—and one of the most important muses to Balanchine. They formed the greatest artistic partnerships between a choreographer and a dancer in the history of ballet. An epitome of the ideal Balanchine ballerina, Farrell was his perfect creative instrument and a source of inspiration for...
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Modern dance audiences should learn how to roar. Until then, companies must collaborate with indie rock stars if they want to take bows with fans on their feet screaming.
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Eleanor Sikorski, Flora Wellesley Wesley and Stephanie McMann, the charming dancers behind the London-based trio Nora, routinely invite guest choreographers to create new work on them. The approach is useful for showcasing their versatility as performers, particularly their flair for theatre, but makes it difficult to identify stylistic through-lines in their rep. Previous pieces shown at the Lilian Baylis have been hugely disparate, their moods ranging from jovial to irreverent to tranquil. With its abstract, contemplative tenor, the troupe’s newest work, “Where Home Is,” by Deborah Hay, adds another contrasting number to the mix.
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Janet Eilber, the Martha Graham Company’s artistic director, appeared in the audience with a microphone to give helpful pre-show program notes during her troupe’s run at the Joyce this month. This was a good idea, not only because she is supremely elegant in voice and bearing—she should record books on tape or host an arts talk show—but also because the programs were challenging and a little hand-holding goes a long way. The current season is titled “The EVE Project” in honor of the upcoming centenary of women’s suffrage. Every program explored the power of women and, remarkably, all of the...
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We are inside the Sydney Opera House for what is perhaps the most anticipated Australian Ballet performance of the year—opening night of the Australian Ballet’s contemporary triple bill for the 2019 season, “Verve.”
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It wasn’t exactly Coachella, but the crowds—if not all of the performances—were inspired. Most inspired of all, perhaps, was the producer and champion of dance in Los Angeles, Deborah Brockus. An unsung hero who is not only a choreographer, artistic director and teacher, the fiery redhead is also an indefatigable impresario who continues to make sure that local dance troupes are seen on stages throughout L.A.
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The small group of dancers that comprise BalletBoyz, in decidedly flammable-looking and garish shellsuits (scourge of fashionistas everywhere in late ’80s-early ’90s Britain) flex, clench fists, and strike up archery poses. It's all about the posturing, here. This provocative, playful piece, “Them,” a collaborative, improvised piece by the company, is all gestural, indicative and suggestive of the shapes teenage boys throw when trying to win over their peers. It's not about mating, or anything cumbersome like that; rather, it is a bonding process between ‘bros.’
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To give an idea of Cunningham—the heightened attention his dances afford, at the base of which is a faith that every atom of life counts, though it may skitter by too fast to be counted—I sometimes turn to Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The farmer is behind his plough, the shepherd has turned from his flock to gaze abstractedly at a leafy tree, the merchant ship rushes toward the bright horizon with the wind bowling the sails, when Icarus drowns. In Cunningham, Icarus would go unnamed—no myth to add import to a boy’s drop into a smudge of...
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Sydney Dance Company celebrates its 50th anniversary this year with a program of three vibrant and divergent works. The celebratory performance is titled Season One: Bonachela/Nankivell/Lane, somewhat quirkily, neither alphabetical nor the order in which the works are performed. Oddities aside, it features brand new dances by Rafael Bonachela, who is celebrating ten years as the company's artistic director; a new work by Gabrielle Nankivell who previously choreographed “Wilderbeest” to great acclaim for SDC; and finally “WOOF” by Melanie Lane. “WOOF” was commissioned for Bonachela’s choreographic development program New Breed in 2017, and on opening night it made its mainstage...
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Wings have long held a special significance in ballet. In “Swan Lake,” Odette’s feathery port de bras become a devastating symbol of her captivity; in “La Sylphide” the titular sylph loses her wings, and her life, in an ill-fated embrace. Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s “Broken Wings” is one of the latest ballets to harness this freighted imagery, albeit more loosely. Created in 2016 for English National Ballet and reprised as part of ENB’s new “She Persisted” bill, the production is a vibrant tribute to the painter Frida Kahlo, capturing the existential heartbreak she suffered when a bus crash at the age...
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Having retired as a dancer from Scottish Ballet in 2017, artist-in-residence choreographer Sophie Laplane always delights in anything she turns her hands to. Her new world premiere, created to mark the company's fifty year anniversary, “Dextera,” is really rather special, characterised by her typically wicked wit and imagination.
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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