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REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Love Triangles

Few narratives are as compelling as the love triangle. Throw in a baby bump and you’ve struck tabloid fodder gold. Such was the juicy premise of “Verklärte Nacht” (Transfigured Night) by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, performed by her company Rosas at the Baryshnikov Arts Center January 30 to February 3. It is danced to Arnold Shönberg’s 1899 string sextet of the same title, which in turn takes its name and inspiration from an 1896 poem by the German Symbolist Richard Dehmel. In the poem a woman in a moonlit grove confesses to the man she loves that she is pregnant with...

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

All for One

Today, when democracy, some would say, is being attacked by various forces both large and small, it’s good to know that French choreographer Jérôme Bel is wholeheartedly embracing the democratization of dance. Or is it? In Bel’s 2015 work, “Gala,” which landed at the Theatre at Ace Hotel for one performance on a blustery and rainy Saturday night in Los Angeles, a mixed-ability cast of nineteen locals, including several professional dancers and together known as Company Company, performed a series of moves for some ninety minutes under a constantly leaky ceiling that provided an extra jolt of, well, weirdness.

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Dancing Qweens

There is a photo of me dancing in the lounge room of my family home. My arms are flung wide overhead, making the Y shape to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” My mouth is parted in a smile, mid pronunciation of the letter Y. Caught in a moment of bliss and expression on the imaginary dancefloor before the fireplace. I am dancing with my younger cousin, following the playful choreography. The letter M: let your elbows point like rabbit ears on your head. The letter C: hug a beach ball to the left-hand side. The letter A: arms overhead once more,...

REVIEWS | By Rachel Elderkin

Asphodel Meadows returns

When “Asphodel Meadows” premiered in 2010, it marked choreographer Liam Scarlett’s first commission for the Royal Opera House main stage. The ballet received an enthusiastic response from both audience and critics, and won the National Dance Award for Best Classical Choreography. Although revived in 2011 it has not been shown since—Scarlett’s name and choreography is, on the other hand, now well associated with the company.

REVIEWS | By Kosta Karakashyan

Love & Contradiction

L-E-V’s “Love Chapter II” at the Joyce Theater starts with a harsh knocking sound, and tender, sinewy bodies already holding vulnerable parts of themselves. With one hand protecting a throat, belly or rib, the other reaches up while bevelled feet root the six dancers to the floor. They grow and grow in (almost) unison tormented by the thumping beat of DJ Ori Lichtik’s thrilling live score.

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Imagination is Everything

Watching Jack Ferver’s “Everything is Imaginable” is akin to armchair cliff diving. This thrilling dance/theater piece—which returned to New York Live Arts from January 7-12 after a critically acclaimed run last April—showcases both the highs and lows of queer experience. Act 1 closes on four men in colorful fringe dresses lip syncing for their lives and grinding on each other in glee. Act 2 closes on a solitary man (Ferver) in black contemplating his suicidal urges. Though vertigo-inducing, these two halves prove to be profoundly complementary.

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Dreamy, Dazzling Hubbard Street Dance

Collaborations can sometimes be risky business. But in the right hands—and feet—they can have wondrous results. Case in point: Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Third Coast Percussion, also Chicago-based, brought a dreamy, sometimes dazzling, sometimes delirious blend of music and dance to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts over the weekend.

REVIEWS | By Sara Veale

Satin and Plume

The festive lights have been switched off and the Christmas trees kicked to the curb, but sparkle can still be found this side of the holidays in English National Ballet’s glittering “Swan Lake.” Derek Deane’s production, devised in 1997, is rich in detail and spirit, a glossy vehicle for Marius Petipa’s nineteenth-century classic. There are times when its busyness verges on hectic, and when the staging reveals itself as more suited to Deane’s original in-the-round conception than the London Coliseum’s proscenium set-up, but the show’s lustrous veneer outshines these weaknesses, capturing the sugary splendour that keeps “Swan Lake” at the...

INTERVIEWS | By Kosta Karakashyan

Works & Process: Caleb Teicher

Nonchalance, inventive choreography and genre-bending collaboration are the hallmarks of New York-based tapper Caleb Teicher’s work. Teicher first made waves as a founding member of Michelle Dorrance’s innovative tap dance company, Dorrance Dance. Lauded by the New York Times for his “switchblade feet,” in 2011 Teicher took home a Bessie Award for outstanding individual performance. In 2015, Teicher founded his own troupe, Caleb Teicher & Company. CT & Co blends tap, vernacular jazz, Lindy Hop, and other American dance styles to reflect “a collective conscience within modern American culture.”

REVIEWS | By Claudia Lawson

Revealed

We are not at your usual end-of-year concert. We are at Carriageworks, Sydney’s coolest performance space to witness graduating students of Sydney Dance Company’s pre-professional year in “Revealed.” An initiative of SDC, PPY is a platform for ballet and contemporary dance students to take the next step, preparing themselves for a career in dance or choreography.

REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Ailey Ascendant

New York City Center’s 75th anniversary celebration gets more rollicking by the day. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is currently in a five-week residency at the theatre, where it is celebrating its own 60-year legacy. The season, titled Ailey Ascending, includes an impressive mix of works from decades past, and offers three world premieres as well as a company premiere. True to the billing, the newest works shone brightest. But Ailey’s great legacy loomed large over the proceedings, and it particularly informed Ronald K. Brown’s stunning new dance, “The Call.”

REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Soliloquy

Pad through sound as if it were a light dusting of colour pigment that changes with the flicker of notes and feel within a mist of sea foam, a dusting of blush pink, a nuzzle of red. Inward. Radiate a gleam of gold, a wink of turquoise, generated by sound. Outward. Fantasia.

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.