World-class review of ballet and dance.
Catherine Hurlin, a soloist with American Ballet Theatre, and Siphesihle November, a corps de ballet dancer with the National Ballet of Canada, each won the 13th International Competition for the Erik Bruhn Prize held on Saturday, March 23, at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.
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It is the smell of composted ingredients I notice first as I make my way along the passage. A blend of animal manure, rainforest mulch, leaf mould, washed river sand, and loam, giving off that warm garden smell. A mound of steamy soil, piled high in the Magdalen laundry[note] Magdalen laundries, Abbotsford Convent, accessed March 22, 2019 [/note] of the Abbotsford Convent; a soil mix for holding moisture in a space still damp from its history. Soil might be a source of nutrients for growth, but in the dirt and dust and sadness of the laundry, its steam is overpowering...
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Thirteen dances. Thirteen stages. “13 meditations on death and loss.” Stephanie Lake’s new work, “Skeleton Tree” is about death and loss, and in being about death and loss it is also about love and hope. Someone to farewell, to grieve over, an ache to feel and perhaps to heal. A recognition of presence: I existed; I ended. I live on, hopefully. I am remembered; remember me.
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Women of the world, take over, because if you don’t the world will come to an end and we haven’t got long.
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Five minutes late to the world premiere of Lucy Guerin’s “Make Your Own World” and I had to wait to be admitted into the Magic Theatre of the North Melbourne Town Hall.
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I caught the final showing of the New Combinations program over the closing weekend of the New York City Ballet’s winter season. It happened to fall on one of the Art Series nights, on which discounted tickets and a mid-performance demonstration draw a young, fashionable crowd. The evening had a bustling energy. But the biggest buzz of the week was the announcement of another new combination: the appointment of Jonathan Stafford and Wendy Whelan to the helm of the company, as artistic director and associate artistic director, respectively.
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The theatre/dance show that is “Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake” is by now a global institution. There has been so much written about it over the decades, that I may need to find new language to define why it endures so much, some twenty-four years later from its Sadler's Wells premiere. There are several strands to this iconic production.
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Dancer and choreographer Shaun Parker, hailing from Mildura, Victoria, has had a near two-decade career as a dancer with prominent Australian contemporary companies such as Meryl Tankard's Australian Dance Theatre, Force Majeure, Chunky Move and Sydney Dance Company. Now his company, Shaun Parker & Company, performs to sold-out theatres internationally. His newest work is “King,” an all-male exploration of patriarchal power, and socio-sexual and political structures. The world premiere took place in Sydney as part of the 2019 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival.
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Recently at the Joyce Theater in New York, Camille A. Brown and Dancers presented “ink,” the final installation in her trilogy of concert works: “Mr. TOL E. RAncE” (2012) explored minstrelsy past and present and the mask that black people wear merely to survive in the world; “Black Girl: Linguistic Play” (2015), featuring an all female cast, took us behind the mask and revealed the beautiful complexity of black female youth and joy. It could be said that “ink” is the period on the sentence, or more apropos, a ribbon that ties all three in a bow.
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There’s praise and then there’s praise! Indeed, it’s safe to say that the celebrated New York-based choreographer, Pam Tanowitz, is having a moment now. Not only did the New York Times’ Alastair Macaulay recently cite her “Four Quartets,” as one of the top 10 works of 2018, but in reviewing it last July, he declared it to be, “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.”
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The question of new work has loomed large over Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch since its eminent founder passed away in 2009. Determined to uphold the late Pina Bausch’s legacy, her troupe has spent the past decade restaging her greatest hits in an effort to pass them on to a new generation of dancers and audiences. This year marks a new course for the company, as it expands its repertoire to include material from outside artists for the first time. Norwegian playwright and choreographer Alan Lucien Øyen is one of the chosen few: his “Bon Voyage, Bob . . .” joins...
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Join London-based dance artist and writer Rachel Elderkin for Dance Dialogues: A Podcast. Each episode a guest from the dance world will join us to discuss their life, work and what matters in the dance world right now. From artists and choreographers, to directors and critics, this lively, conversational podcast has the dance world covered. Listen to the latest episode here or find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.
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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