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Shanghai Story
REVIEWS | By Rachel Elderkin

Shanghai Story

In an elegant tulle dress, she backs on stage, hunched and creeping. The articulate movements of her arms and upper body are filled with tension, the occasional convulsion resounding through her body. Upstage, under a cold spotlight, stands a lady clothed in a burnt orange gown, her gaze sad and distant. A man enters and dances between these two women. Against the steadily pulsating music the slow, drawn out movements of the trio have a sorrowful air. Each dancer appears absorbed in their individual world, yet there is a sense that these characters are intrinsically connected—a story waiting to unfold....

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Scottish Ballet
REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Body was Made

It's not often I feel left a little cold by beautiful male dancers moving in a space. But the first twenty minutes of Angelin Preljocaj's “MC 14/22 (Ceci est mon corps)” feels like a series of empty gesturesand takes a while to develop, presenting as it does a ritual cleansing to one side of the stage and to the other, dancers on trolleys, packaged and contorted like meat in containers. They seem to be merely posturing, and it's a little trite- bodies are ultimately meat: yes, we know. That's well-worn territory in dance.The whispering, too, is distracting. However, by the third scene,...

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Les 7 Doigts de la Main
REVIEWS | By Merli V. Guerra

What's Cooking?

Les 7 Doigts de la Main (or “The 7 Fingers,” as it’s referred to by its English-speaking audiences) is frequently classified as a group of circus performers. Yet after watching one of the company’s elaborate productions, it becomes clear that this categorization is hardly enough to define it alone. The men and women onstage are circus performers, yes, but they are also dancers, actors, comedians, and—perhaps most surprising of all—they are people. People with stories and appetites.

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Glitz and Glam
REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Glitz and Glam

Glitter—this was one of the first details I noticed when I arrived at Wilderness Festival last Friday. The shimmery stuff was everywhere, winking at me from eyelashes, cheeks, t-shirts, bunting. Poking out of pockets and tumbling out of tents, glinting and gleaming in the hot August sun. By the time I’d settled into the campsite, I’d come across a fair few sequins, rhinestones and feathers too.

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Holy Body Tattoo
REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Lift Yr Skinny Fists

As the audience files in to the genteel space of the Edinburgh Playhouse on this night, ominous bells chime—a portent of something truly disquieting. This sound acts as a warning that the show will not be an easy ride. What follows is breathtaking—and divisive. Vancouver's Holy Body Tattoo, along with enigmatic post-rock band from Montreal, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, are a deadly combination, an eerie evocation of the end of days. GY!BE have always had an epic, uncompromising ethos, so this is an exceptional and inspired pairing.

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American Style & Crepuscular Ambivalences
REVIEWS | By Alessandra Tribotti

American Style & Crepuscular Ambivalences

A very American Paris Opera season—the first programmed by the now-former director Benjamin Millepied—ended at Bastille the way it had started, i.e. with yet another American double bill, reuniting an eagerly-awaited creation by the so-called NYCB enfant prodige Justin Peck with a great classic by his major source of inspiration: George Balanchine. Two choreographers, one similar theme, some mixed results and an inevitable sense of fatigue, generated by a season overflowing with a limited choreographic set of possibilities that is typical of NYCB but not of Paris Opera Ballet.

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Bolshoi Ballet
REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Best Beware My Sting

Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew has long been plagued by its thorny gender politics. For decades, critics have debated the play’s depiction of female submission—is Petruchio’s ‘taming’ of Katharina straightforward sexism or satirical social commentary? In either case, the implicit likening of opinionated women to wild horses—strong-willed creatures that need to be broken—remains central to the plot, in which a roguish man is challenged to conquer a brassy woman so her charming (read: more compliant) younger sister can get married.

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REDCAT
REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

New, Hot, NOW

“Hot time, summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirty and gritty.” Here’s to the steamy summer solstice in L.A., and although there was no sign of the Lovin Spoonful at REDCAT’s three-week annual NOW festival (nine premieres by some of the city’s foremost dance, theater, music and multimedia artists), there was decidedly some heat on stage—not all of which was fabulous, however—during the festival’s second week (the festival continues August 4-6 with three new works).

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Mythili Prakash
REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Visions of Enlightenment

Mythili Prakash, an exquisite purveyor of the South Indian classical dance form, bharata natyam, characterized by elaborate arm and hand gestures, mimetic acting and intricate foot-slapping, is no stranger to portraying demonic characters in Buddhist literature. With “Mara,” she has crafted a spectacle inspired by Deepak Chopra’s novel, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment, that was part Bollywood mash-up, part musical extravaganza and part psychedelic-inspired cinema.

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Sara Mearns
REVIEWS | By Jade Larine

A Midsummer Night’s Breeze

As France was mourning the loss of its Nice fellow citizens, the warm tribute which the New York City Ballet paid to French musical heritage with an all-French-composers evening proved heartening. It doesn't matter that the program was planned long before the attacks happened; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly. Performing “Walpurgisnacht,” “Sonatine,” “La Valse” and “Symphony in C,” the NYCB tour in Paris drew to a close with rose petals and Champagne bubbles. It was just what everyone needed at that time.

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Sara Renda La Scala
REVIEWS | By Alessandra Tribotti

Young Stars on a Summer Night

At the Roman Amphitheatre in Fiesole, a town on a hill that dominates Florence from above, the sidereal luminosity of a cloudless night, married with the soft (for once) hum of the cicadas and the breathtaking roman and etruscan stones reminiscent of classical artistic glory, provide the ideal setting for a dance gala.

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Paris Opera Ballet
REVIEWS | By Jade Larine

A Tricolore Anthem

When the French-born but American at heart Benjamin Millepied took over the Paris Opera Ballet in 2014, he stated that the tri-centenarian company was aging in every way. Even though the troupe’s repertoire offered one of the world's widest ranges of ballets, from Nureyev’s masterpieces and Lacotte’s reconstructions to Preljocaj, Teshigawara or Bausch's iconoclastic works, the departing artistic director intended to dust off the supposedly stiff institution. Loudly and clearly. To start with, he nurtured a brand new generation of soloists in their early twenties, whom he brought into the spotlight: Léonore Baulac, Hannah O'Neill and Hugo Marchand. Then he...

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