World-class review of ballet and dance.
We are thrilled to announce the launch of our second printed edition Fjord Review #2! Contributed to by our brilliant cohort of writers, FR #2 is 160 pages of pure dance, in a totable, perfect-bound book, printed sustainably by carbon-offset certified printers Hemlock. We've stepped it up for FR#2 and will be releasing an incredible video in conjunction with this edition.
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There is an itchy sense of restlessness to Emanuel Gat's ephemeral piece with Scottish Dance Theatre, a heightened kind of hypervigilance with a dozen dancers onstage always looking over their shoulders. They appear primed to pounce at any time, all too aware of lurking predators. It's there in Gat's lighting design, which is hugely evocative of twilight corners. It's woven into the alertness of eyes, the scratchy shapes of arachnid hands twitching in the air and protective hunches on haunches, the groups of two or three, rearing up like horses on hind legs. This “fight or flight” stance is a...
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“I remember the day.” So begins Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang’s crowdsourced lament, a eulogy for the lost, an encomium for those still with us, a sorrowful remembrance of a bygone world, one forever changed when some 3,000 lives perished on that horrific Tuesday in September. Making use of a single day as metaphor to cut to the heart of humanity, the 2016 Lang composition, “the day,” was commissioned by contemporary cellist Maya Beiser as a prequel to Lang’s 2003 opus, “world to come,” which was composed in response to 9/11, with “The Day” receiving its West Coast premiere over...
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On a recent fall afternoon, the choreographer Karole Armitage was rehearsing her troupe at the Mana Contemporary cultural center in Jersey City, where she is an artist in residence. One wall of the studio is made of glass, so that everyone strolling through the galleries or stopping for a bite at the café can pause to watch Armitage and her dancers at work. It seems utterly natural for her art to be on display alongside John Chamberlain’s scrap-metal sculptures and Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light installations—even though her medium has a pulse.
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Jefta van Dinther, Swedish-German choreographer and dancer, has been making dances with and for contemporary luminaries (Mette Ingvartsen, Frédéric Gies, Kristine Slettevold, Keren Levi, Ivana Muller, LeineRoebana, and Xavier le Roy) for the past decade. Central to his work “is the question of what it means to be human,” and his choreography draws on themes of time, memory, alliance, and isolation. He is one of three choreographers to have been appointed to make dances exclusively for Cullberg, alongside Deborah Hay and Alma Söderberg, for the next two years. Veronica Posth met with Van Dinther in Graefekiez, Berlin, to discuss his...
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There’s a mythic quality to Angelin Preljocaj’s “La Fresque,” both in theme and aesthetic. The 2016 production, recently shown in the UK for the first time, is inspired by a medieval Chinese saga about Chu (Marius Delcourt), a man who delves into a mural and marries its subject before being booted back to reality. There are pounding drums and starry skies, hair coiled to evoke ancient deities. We see pilgrims scaling mountains, seraphim swinging from the heavens, Spartans squaring off for battle. The folkloric angle is right up Preljocaj’s alley: other works with his Aix-en-Provence-based company include “Snow White” and...
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There is an ineffable poignancy, a sense of subtle melancholy even, to this immersive and moving piece, “Bodies of Water” created by Saffy Setohy, Aya Kobayashi, Nicolette Macleod and Joanna Young for family audiences. It is dancers Setohy and Young who perform, and invite the audience into a quiet, dark but cosy space for interaction and dance. Tables are festooned with little clay pots created across Scottish communities over the course of a year. As pairs, we too are invited (with eyes closed) to create little makeshift pots of clay, something to contain water.
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George Balanchine’s unconventional, even shocking, “Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir,” revived for this fall season by New York City Ballet, shows the choreographer at his most avant-garde and unexpected and allows the audience to appreciate once again the extraordinary range of Balanchine’s creative genius and his daring musical choices.
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The scenography here, from the ever-inspiring designer Alison Brown, is truly striking: black confetti on a clinical white floor; spiky masked not-quite-human creatures, elusive faces turned away, eerie white bound furniture, which is decorative as well as functional. Brown's black and white flimsy costumes act as sheaths (called winding sheets in ancient Celtic culture) both encasing and exposing the slender bodies underneath. This is “Endling,” Rob Heaslip's disquieting Gaelic meditation on death and the ritual of condolences and care. The sounds, created by composer Michael John McCarthy, range from birdsong to guttural, slurping sounds, drones to choppy electronica, and there...
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I don’t live in Sacramento—state capital of California, the world’s sixth biggest economy—but I half wish I did after catching “Mozart in Motion,” the Sacramento Ballet’s mixed-bill opener for its second season under new artistic director Amy Seiwert. From a corner of Midtown Sac, the year-old, $29 million Sofia Center gleamed with twinkly lights against fashionably angled concrete. Inside, diverse patrons dressed in architect-chic took their glasses of Pinot Gris inside the well-equipped, pine-paneled and burnt-orange upholstered 365-seat theater, one of two performance spaces in the complex. Most appealing of all, when the curtain went up: A company of 21...
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Sixteen years in, City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival continues to deliver. The shows can sometimes be a mixed bag, but the variety of programming is always interesting and the theater is unfailingly abrim with positive energy. There’s good reason for this: with every seat in the house costing just $15, world class dance companies are as accessible as movie tickets. The entire run is sold out this year, as usual. On opening night the crowd was a balanced blend of young and old, the gussied up and the flip-flop-wearing. The diversity of the entertainers on the stage also translates...
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With the Berliner Festspiel under renovation on Berlin’s western end, artistic director, Virve Sutinen, spread this year’s Tanz im August festival (TIA)—its 33rd—throughout venues in the eastern part of the city. By theater and neighborhood, here are 15 of the shows I took in at this year’s TIA. Each theater has a bar, but not one has so much as a standing or ceiling fan to fend off sweltering heat. So it’s BYOF—Bring Your Own Fan.
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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