World-class review of ballet and dance.
Saturday, January 24, was a big day for New York City Ballet as they held their annual birthday celebration for George Balanchine, called “Saturday at the Ballet with George,” which concluded with an evening bill that featured three timeless works from the great ballet master—“Serenade,” “Agon” and “Symphony in C.”
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On Saturday, January 24, New York City Ballet celebrated in style the 111th anniversary of company co-founder and choreographer George Balanchine, who was born on January 22, 1904. This was NYCB’s fifth annual birthday celebration for Mr. Balanchine, dubbed “Saturday at the Ballet with George,” and the festivities featured two all-Balanchine programs (2 p.m. and 8 p.m.) as well as other events, including live music performances by members of the NYCB orchestra and movement workshops for adults and children.
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With its tortured romance and soaring choreography, John Cranko’s “Onegin” feels right at home on the Royal Opera House stage. Cranko famously toyed with Pushkin’s plot when adapting the poet’s nineteenth-century verse-novel into a ballet back in 1965; even more famously he passed over Tchaikovsky’s opera “Eugene Onegin” when choosing his score, instead setting his work to a mish-mash of lesser-known Tchaikovsky variations. An element Cranko preserved from both works, however, was the pathos that cloaks Tatiana’s eventual rejection of Onegin—something the Royal Ballet takes to new heights here with an inspired and heart-wrenching final scene.
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Gymnastics, silk fans, cups of tea, creepy masks—there's a slight whiff of performance art to this eclectic triple bill, which marks the first ever UK performance for K-Arts Dance Company, the Korean National University of Arts' resident professional troupe. The approach is more playful than pretentious: you get the sense there's an implicit wink accompanying the antics here, one that invites the odd laugh and seeks to endear rather than distance the audience.
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Los Angeles, a town that loves the business of movies, television, pop music—and now art, with high-end galleries and museums flourishing—has a reputation for being notoriously inhospitable to homegrown concert dance. Presenters and venues are sorely lacking, and, indeed, the paper of record, the Los Angeles Times, rarely covers the local dance scene anymore.
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Music rarely takes a backseat to choreography for Richard Alston. The choreographer—a staple to Britain's modern dance scene and artistic director of Richard Alston Dance Company—is well known for crafting a symbiotic relationship between song and dance, his rep full of pieces in which these elements drink from and breathe life into one another in equal measure.
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The Mariinsky Ballet’s program, “Chopin: Dances for Piano,” which concluded the company’s season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, offered a sampler of three ballets, all set to Chopin’s piano music and created in different time periods: Michel Fokine’s “Chopiniana” (1908), Benjamin Millepied’s “Without” (2011) and Jerome Robbins’ “In the Night” (1970).
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A performance of “Swan Lake” by the Mariinsky Ballet is always an event in its own right. For 120 years this ballet has been a permanent fixture of the company’s repertory and a box-office magnet—the embodiment of the Mariinsky’s unique brand and style.
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Louise Lecavalier, erstwhile muse and star dancer of Édouard Lock’s Montréal-based troupe, La La La Human Steps from 1981 to 1999, rocks a hoodie and workout pants like nobody else. And while her expressive face and fastidious technique were the ideal vessel for Locke’s quicksilver choreographic vocabulary—her signature air pirouettes gasp-worthy—Lecavalier, now an astonishing 56 and mother to 12-year old twin girls and still a hoofing tsunami, has also thrown her chapeau into the choreography ring. (The Montreal native founded her own troupe,Fou Glorieux, in 2006.)
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Looking back, 2014 felt like a bumper year for dance, bringing with it a bevy of exceptional premieres and revivals alike. There were glittering fairy-tale ballets and gritty social dramas, cracking debuts and bittersweet final bows. As ever, there was grace in spades, but at the same time it seems the athleticism of the stage has never been greater, particularly on the ballet side of things, where precarious lifts are now king and 180-plus degree extensions the rule and not the exception.
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Before a new year is ushered in with fireworks and resolutions, there is just enough time to reflect on what has been, and prepare a list of dance highlights from 2014. The only trouble being, it quickly transpires, I am no good at list making. Some may rank higher, but all offered something; all enabled me to feel. My belief that you cannot see a work unfold without finding some gem to pocket was not tested this year, and so ‘if you look, you will find’ remains my unchallenged maxim.
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“The spaces we inhabit can frame our experience. How we see, and relate to each other and the world, inspire what we imagine, create, build and destroy. Hierarchies exist, however small, and we navigate them daily. And the body seems to tell all.” –Ros Warby[note]Ros Warby, “Tower Suites: Artistic Note,” Ros Warby website.[/note]
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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