All – Tagged "REVIEWS" – Page 85

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REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Editrix Royale

When Queen Victoria died in 1901, her youngest daughter, Beatrice, took it upon herself to ‘edit’ her late mother’s diaries for the public—a deed once deemed “the greatest act of censorship in history.” For better or worse, Beatrice revised the unsavoury aspects of Victoria’s memoir and excised others altogether, shaping the triumphant biography that lives on today. This process of transcription—in particular, the dilution that occurs when we reinforce attenuated versions of truth—drives Cathy Marston’s new production for Northern Ballet, a metanarrative that filters Victoria’s life story through the dual lens of her own recorded memories and Beatrice’s revamp. It’s...

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

The Poetry of Apollo

“Apollo” is about poetry, poetry in the sense of a brilliant, sensuous, daring, and powerful activity of our nature . . . Balanchine has told this metaphysical story in the concrete terms of classical dancing, in a series of episodes of rising power and brilliance. Extraordinary is the richness with which he can, with only four dancers, create a sustained and more and more satisfying impression of the grandness of man’s creative genius . . .”[note]Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)[/note] So wrote Edwin Denby, eloquently and incisively describing the very essence of George...

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Dusty Angel Dust

Let’s be frank: “I Married an Angel” is a terrible musical. It has mediocre songs, a cockamamie plot, a bad book, and seriously dated jokes. But I think everyone involved in the current Encores! revival knew that going into it. The reason for its resurrection overlooked these factors. City Center’s 75th anniversary season includes many tributes to George Balanchine, who choreographed the original “Angel” production for his first wife Vera Zorina. In a kismet confluence, Broadway choreographer Joshua Bergasse helmed this incarnation and made the dances for his new wife, the New York City Ballet principal Sara Mearns, in her...

REVIEWS | By Oksana Khadarina

The Erik Bruhn Prize

Catherine Hurlin, a soloist with American Ballet Theatre, and Siphesihle November, a corps de ballet dancer with the National Ballet of Canada, each won the 13th International Competition for the Erik Bruhn Prize held on Saturday, March 23, at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Dark Night

It is the smell of composted ingredients I notice first as I make my way along the passage. A blend of animal manure, rainforest mulch, leaf mould, washed river sand, and loam, giving off that warm garden smell. A mound of steamy soil, piled high in the Magdalen laundry[note] Magdalen laundries, Abbotsford Convent, accessed March 22, 2019 [/note] of the Abbotsford Convent; a soil mix for holding moisture in a space still damp from its history. Soil might be a source of nutrients for growth, but in the dirt and dust and sadness of the laundry, its steam is overpowering...

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Distant Sky

Thirteen dances. Thirteen stages. “13 meditations on death and loss.” Stephanie Lake’s new work, “Skeleton Tree” is about death and loss, and in being about death and loss it is also about love and hope. Someone to farewell, to grieve over, an ache to feel and perhaps to heal. A recognition of presence: I existed; I ended. I live on, hopefully. I am remembered; remember me.

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Lady Example

Women of the world, take over, because if you don’t the world will come to an end and we haven’t got long.

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Make Your Own World

Five minutes late to the world premiere of Lucy Guerin’s “Make Your Own World” and I had to wait to be admitted into the Magic Theatre of the North Melbourne Town Hall.

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

New Horizons

I caught the final showing of the New Combinations program over the closing weekend of the New York City Ballet’s winter season. It happened to fall on one of the Art Series nights, on which discounted tickets and a mid-performance demonstration draw a young, fashionable crowd. The evening had a bustling energy. But the biggest buzz of the week was the announcement of another new combination: the appointment of Jonathan Stafford and Wendy Whelan to the helm of the company, as artistic director and associate artistic director, respectively.

REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Hope is the Thing With Feathers

The theatre/dance show that is “Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake” is by now a global institution. There has been so much written about it over the decades, that I may need to find new language to define why it endures so much, some twenty-four years later from its Sadler's Wells premiere. There are several strands to this iconic production.

REVIEWS | By Claudia Lawson

Man Power

Dancer and choreographer Shaun Parker, hailing from Mildura, Victoria, has had a near two-decade career as a dancer with prominent Australian contemporary companies such as Meryl Tankard's Australian Dance Theatre, Force Majeure, Chunky Move and Sydney Dance Company. Now his company, Shaun Parker & Company, performs to sold-out theatres internationally. His newest work is “King,” an all-male exploration of patriarchal power, and socio-sexual and political structures. The world premiere took place in Sydney as part of the 2019 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival.

REVIEWS | By Theresa Ruth Howard

And still I rise

Recently at the Joyce Theater in New York, Camille A. Brown and Dancers presented “ink,” the final installation in her trilogy of concert works: “Mr. TOL E. RAncE” (2012) explored minstrelsy past and present and the mask that black people wear merely to survive in the world; “Black Girl: Linguistic Play” (2015), featuring an all female cast, took us behind the mask and revealed the beautiful complexity of black female youth and joy. It could be said that “ink” is the period on the sentence, or more apropos, a ribbon that ties all three in a bow.

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.