World-class review of ballet and dance.
An ubiquitous presence on the cultural scene for many decades, Bill T. Jones, at 63, has conquered Broadway, winning Tonys for “Fela!” and “Spring Awakenings,” as well as the world’s most elite concert halls. Snagging boatloads of awards along the way, including last year’s Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, several Bessies, and a 2010 Kennedy Center Honor, he has also been the artistic director of New York Live Arts since 2011.
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Is there anything prima ballerina Diana Vishneva cannot do? Having recently turned 39, this reigning Goddess of the dance world (one who also commissions works made expressly for her), seems to be at the height of her powers—physically, emotionally and, possibly even spiritually—as she infuses every step, every swoop of her arms, indeed, her entire being, with breathtaking beauty, grace and a generous humanity.
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One of the greatest challenges—and for me, joys—of being a dance critic is navigating the not infrequent clash between contemporary values and those embraced in classical ballet, a centuries-old institution that venerates ‘tradition’ in all its old-world, patriarchal glory. How should a world increasingly concerned with racial diversity respond to an establishment that in 2015 remains overwhelmingly white? How can an art form that worships prescriptive gender roles address the growing call for LGBT inclusivity? What messages of value can women divine from stories that glorify female fragility and are primarily written and directed by men?
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I want to find dance’s “fundamental feature” [note]Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (abbreviated CL). Translated from the French by Richard Howard. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010 paperback edition), 9[/note] as Roland Barthes, in his 1980 Camera Lucida, did for photography. [note]Please see essay #1 of “Between the Dancer and the Dance” for what the French critic Roland Barthes has to do with anything. [/note] I’ll begin, like him, with the peculiar mechanism by which the idiom (photography for him, dance for me) transmutes its raw material into art. The machinery, if not the alchemy, of sign-making, as the...
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She’s twitchy, she’s testy, she’s Twyla! In this, her fiftieth year of dancemaking, Twyla Tharp barely needs a last name. And instead of going gently into that good night at age 74 and presenting a greatest hits concert for 12 dancers (plus one understudy), the choreographer has opted to make two new lengthy works, “Preludes and Fugues,” and “Yowzie,” each introduced by a John Zorn-composed fanfare as part of a 10-week, 15-city anniversary tour.
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In mid-July the grove on Amsterdam Avenue in front of the David H. Koch Theater was littered with cigarette butts. This wasn't anything out of the ordinary; the trees are adjacent to the stage entrance, and it's always where the dancers and musicians go for smoking breaks. The cigarette butts on this particular occasion, however, were a flaming red, making it look like a burst of confetti had just settled to the ground. No party had been thrown. It was just that the cigarettes, instead of the usual Parliaments or Marlboros, were Chinese, and the smokers were members of the...
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In his own cabinet of natural curiosities, the Amsterdam-based pharmacist, Albertus Seba (1665–1736), placed exotic plants and corals, birds and butterflies, and slithering snakes alongside shells in fantastical fanned formations to delight the eye. In the Australian Ballet’s Artistic Director, David McAllister’s first full-length production and choreographic debut with a staging of Petipa and Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty,” it is not hard to surmise that as a long-term former dancer with the company and now at the helm as director for his fifteenth year, McAllister himself has constructed something of his own golden ‘wunderkammer’ with this work. A production replete...
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In 2010, author Jonathan Safran Foer took Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles and sculpted it into a new story: Tree of Codes. By die-cutting each page, Foer removed most of Schulz's words, but he left behind “a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities” on a single page. He tracked down “a small quick heartbeat, delicate and impatient.”[note]Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes, (London: Visual Editions, 2010)64[/note] And he carved out—literally—“an awkward undecided direction, a shaky and uncertain line of indefinite basic sadness.”
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In today’s high-tech world, where trends blow up the Twittersphere and Facebook like a Tesla on Insane Mode—going from 0 to 60 in under three seconds—the current dance scene also has its share of fast moving choreographic innovators: Think Christopher Wheeldon, Justin Peck or Crystal Pite of Vancouver’s Kidd Pivot.
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Perpetual motion, states the first and second laws of thermodynamics, is believed impossible to produce, yet I unwittingly found it nesting within “20:21,” the Australian Ballet’s recent triple bill. The continuous motion within George Balanchine’s “Symphony in Three Movements” (1972), Tim Harbour’s new work “Filigree and Shadow” (2015) and Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room” (1986) circumvents such laws. Physicists, I’ll hear no more about it; you’ve been looking in the wrong places. There is a device that can make motion unstoppable and it can be found at the core of these three ballets.
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Is there such a thing as “Englishness?” What would be at the heart of such a quality—habits and customs, the time reserved for a late-afternoon snack, the famously reserved sense of humor? I'm writing this from America, a country that can only define its people by their plurality and multifariousness, the "anything goes" mentality which frequently manifests itself as aberrant exceptionalism. But contemporary scholars and thinkers shun the idea that a national stock or stereotype even exists. Characterizing a country's people reveals more about the observer's bias and preconceptions than it does anything else. According to this line of thought,...
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This week, I found myself curled up in the corner of my kitchen, shaking. It comes over me swiftly, sometimes, thunderously, always—a wave of weight. My partner knows this routine well by now, and slips into his role: he hovers over me, cups my ears, lifts my chin, and has me look into his eyes. Slowly, softly, it feels—no, I feel—lighter.
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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