World-class review of ballet and dance.
Los Angeles, often dubbed the ‘city of the future,’ is not a town known for honoring its past. But with the Music Center having recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, it seemed the ideal venue for four local dance troupes to perform simultaneous, site-specific works on and around its Grand Avenue campus, one that’s been, on occasion, likened to New York City’s Lincoln Center.
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Anyone who has visited Cuba will know it is a country full of music and movement. The country’s first ballet company, the Ballet Alicia Alonso, was founded in 1948 by the renowned ballerina of the same name, Alicia Alonso (the company went on to become the Ballet Nacional de Cuba). Contemporary or modern dance, as it is known in the West, was only introduced in the early 60s after Cuba’s revolution. With trade embargos meaning the world has seen little of the Cuban dance scene, when Cuban dance company Ballet Revolución decided to include Australia in its world tour, the opportunity to attend opening night...
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As befits the dreamscape of a fairy tale, the chance to revisit an encore Melbourne-only 2015 season of Alexei Ratmansky’s “Cinderella”[note]I wondered what I would see this time around—would the frame within a frame staging still toy with my sense of space and time? Would the celestial planets, in lieu of a pumpkin coach, continue to entrance with their circular orbit about the stage/through the cosmos? Would the ticking of the clock as time is suspended, chased, and distorted remain visible in the choreography melded to the score?—and I marvelled at the clever sorcery that made October 2013 feel like...
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An energetic air rippled through the crowd on opening night of “Platform,” a showcase of recent work assembled by Just Us Dance Theatre. The bill marks one of the Greenwich-based collective's first full-length offerings on a London stage, and a quick introduction by co-founders Joseph Toonga and Ricardo Da Silva, in which they implored the audience to “please be open about our efforts,” suggested a lot was riding on its reception.
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American Ballet Theatre’s brand new production of “The Sleeping Beauty” proved the most anticipated and talked about event of the ABT’s spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House, and the highest point of the company’s 75th anniversary celebrations. This birthday gift was orchestrated by Alexei Ratmansky, one of the most prominent and prolific choreographers in today’s ballet. Russian-born Ratmansky has been ABT’s artist-in-residence since 2009; “The Sleeping Beauty” is his most ambitious undertaking for the company to date.
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Last week Richard Alston Dance Company came full circle in its national tour, rounding off its recent string of performances around the UK in London, the same city where it had kicked off proceedings. The 'at home' bit of “Alston At Home” doesn't just refer to the company's hometown; it's a specific credit to The Place, where Richard Alston started his career as a dancer (as one of the first students at London Contemporary Dance School) and is now artistic director. The bill commemorates the twentieth anniversary of RADC, which Alston launched following, among many other successes, a twelve-year tenure...
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New York City Ballet culminated its spring season at the David H. Koch Theater with George Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”—a masterpiece of witty comedy and brilliant dancing.
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A decidedly polarizing figure that prides himself on creating what he calls, “a new type of theater—Russian psychological ballet theater,” Boris Eifman, according to naysayers, indulges in bombast, his storytelling skills often as thin as prosciutto and his choice of pastiche musical accompaniments (always heard on tape), enigmatic and frustrating to the point of being bizarre.
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American Ballet Theatre’s “La Bayadère” has just turned 35 years old, standing as one of the most enduring of the nineteenth century classics in the company’s repertory. Such impressive longevity can be attributed to the uniqueness of the current staging, mounted for the company in 1980 by Russian prima ballerina Natalia Makarova, who danced the ballet, originally created by Marius Petipa, during her years with the Mariinsky Ballet of St. Petersburg (then called Kirov Ballet). Makarova acquired her knowledge of the interpretive nuances of the choreography as a manner of genuine artistic succession, learning the role of Nikiya, the ballet’s...
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In an astonishing display of courage, fortitude and wit, three dancers performed solos and with each other to a packed house in “Flower of the Season,” a series now in its 12th year presented by Body Weather Laboratory. B.W.L., a forum for investigating kinesthetic and movement research that was initiated by dancer/farmer and improvisateur, Min Tanaka, and is offered by exponents worldwide, is led in Venice by Oguri, the Japan-born performer who goes by one name only.
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The third—and final—instalment of the New York City Ballet’s “Balanchine Black & White” festival offered three abstract ballets: “Square Dance,” “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” and “Stravinsky Violin Concerto,” in a program dedicated to Balanchine’s famed minimalist aesthetics. If the costumes of the dancers were simple and stage décor was absent, the stylistic and dramatic variety of the choreography was rich, vibrant and powerful.
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Guillaume Côté's new ballet, “Being and Nothingness” made its premiere alongside two-thirds of Alexei Ratmansky's “Shostakovich Trilogy.” Two quite different pieces to put together and yet the bill was a success. Côté's existential mood allowed the dancers to explore darker shades in vingettes, while Ratmansky's “Shostakovich Trilogy” kept a steady flow of movement.
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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