World-class review of ballet and dance.
Feminism, queer theory, ontology, postcolonialism—these subjects and more cropped up in the whirlwind 90 minutes I recently spent interviewing Cecilia Lisa Eliceche ahead of the UK premiere of her latest work, “Unison.” The Argentine choreographer is an avid political activist and well versed in the academia behind the issues she’s drawn to, which range from wealth inequality to racism, sexism and international human rights abuse.
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It’s been nearly 35 years since Steve Paxton, whom the New York Times once dubbed “a titan of the 1960s and 70s avant-garde,” created and performed his solo work, “Bound.” But who’s counting?
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Usually based in Melbourne, the Australian Ballet is currently residing at the Sydney Opera House for the first of two Sydney seasons this year. They have premiered two ambitious works: first delivering a month-long season of Stephen Baynes’ “Swan Lake,” followed by “Vitesse,” a triple bill of contemporary works, including William Forsythe’s “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated.” In the very same week of “Vitesse’s” premiere, the Australian Ballet gave us “Symphony in C,” an evening of divertissements followed by George Balanchine's stunning ballet from 1947, lending its name to the programme. For the third opening night within a month, I’m sure it wasn’t just me...
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Cue mermaids, businessmen and gumboot dancers, as well as a host of other characters, including the sultry cigarette girl, Carmen. Welcome to the wild and wonderful world of Daniel Ezralow, and his 75-minute intermissionless work, “Open,” which had its West coast premiere at the Wallis in Beverly Hills over the weekend. Ezralow, who has been a movement/theatrical pioneer for some four decades—from dancing with Paul Taylor and as an original member/choreographer of Momix (with Moses Pendleton), to founding ISO Dance and working with Julie Taymor on an array of projects, including the film Across the Universe and Broadway’s “Spiderman: Turn...
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“You—you alone will have the stars as no one else has them . . .” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince in all its aphoristic wisdom will soon be on stage in the form of a ballet, to be performed by the National Ballet of Canada.
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What is life if not one long memento mori? This is the question Trevor Nunn and William Trevitt—co-founders of the all-male troupe BalletBoyz—have posed with their latest bill, “Life,” which reflects on mortality with two diverse, thoughtful works. It’s terrain the pair has trekked before, most recently with 2015’s “Young Men,” a meditation on the violence and emotional trauma of war. Here they uphold their knack for picking bold, engaging commissions that highlight their ten dancers’ impressive emotional range.
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Miami City Ballet’s week-long engagement at the Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater was full of wonderful surprises, rewards, and revelations. Watching the two mixed-bill programs the company presented during the run, I couldn’t help but notice just how much at home the Miami dancers looked on the stage that is invariably associated with the illustrious New York City Ballet.
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Twenty years after their last production of “Swan Lake,” Scottish Ballet return with this tough but tender spin on the iconic ballet, created by internationally acclaimed Amsterdam-based choreographer David Dawson. Composer Tchaikovsky described the swan as “femininity in its purest form,” and Dawson's approach is certainly suggestive of this.
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In commissioning “She Said,” a triple bill featuring three new ballets by female choreographers, English National Ballet’s artistic director and lead principal dancer Tamara Rojo has challenged the status quo of contemporary ballet in two major ways. The first is a rebuke of its notoriously, dispiritingly male-dominated upper ranks (consider this: in her 20 years as a professional dancer Rojo, one of today’s most famous and decorated ballerinas, has never performed in a ballet choreographed by a woman). “We need those female voices on stage, those emotions,” Rojo notes in the programme. “We need all ways of expressing feeling.” Her...
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It is often said that one of a dancer’s unsung partners is the floor. In Isabelle Schad’s and Laurent Goldring’s 45-minute opus, “Der Bau,” one might consider Schad’s partner to be large swaths of fabric that she manipulates during the course of a physically intense, metaphorically-driven work. Based on Kafka’s unfinished novella, The Burrow (Der Bau), a tale describing the universe of an animal entrenched in a place to make it feel protected, the piece deals with the relationship between body and space.
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Celebrating the contemporary dance community in the City of Angels, the indefatigable Deborah Brockus has mounted her latest iteration of the LA Dance Festival since founding it in 2012. Bringing together 28 troupes over four nights (with nine separate performances)—as well as offering classes—Brockus has been producing events like these for years, including the Spectrum Dance in LA series, which received a Lester Horton award for “Outstanding Production of a Festival or Series” back in 2002.
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What do gestures become when stripped of their in-the-moment communicative purposes? South American choreographer Luis Garay borrows the word “maneries” from Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who, in his book The Coming Community, analyses the word’s etymology and comes to a conclusion that is mirrored by Garay’s program notes on the dance: “‘Maneries’ refers to neither a universal nor a particular; it embraces both, like an example.”
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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