World-class review of ballet and dance.
Dance, architecture and Hollywood came together in a big way when L.A. Dance Project began its residency (performances are also scheduled for the fall) at the new Ace Hotel. And no, this was not a site-specific work danced on the rooftop by the troupe Benjamin Millepied founded in 2012 as an artist collective along the lines of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, but a bona fide concert presented on stage of the hip hotel’s theatre.
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In the following essay, Stephanie Jordan elucidates the method and meaning of the music selected for Frederick Ashton's “A Month in the Country” It comes from Following Sir Fred's Steps - Ashton's Legacy, the published proceedings of the conference on the choreographer and his work, held at Roehampton University in 1994, and edited by Stephanie Jordan and Andrée Grau. This essay is expanded upon in Stephanie Jordan's 2000 publication, Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet (London: Dance Books), pages 245-64.
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I was introduced to Melbourne-based choreographer Nat Cursio via her work, “Blizzard,” created and performed at the lovingly restored utility-turned-arts-venue, the Substation, in Newport, Melbourne. It made the whole building sing. “Private Dances II” is the work of Nat Cursio as curator; the second piece I inhabited for a brief moment. Each has the effect of building a world around you, as the audience—although one feels slightly more privileged than the ordinary dance-goer with a Cursio work. Her upcoming work, “The Middle Room” is a piece for a single viewer (“participant”) at a time, set in her very own apartment....
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Ballet and jazz can make for some interesting, if occasionally odd bedfellows. Throw in some cookware and neo-Pina Bausch gestures, and a program could turn raucous, joyful and, well, neither balletic nor jazzy. At least that was the case when BJM took to the stage of the Wallis, Southern California’s newest entry into the performing arts arena, where, happily, its 500-seat Bram Goldsmith Theater is a welcome—and spectacular—venue for dance (theater and music also co-exist here in the heart of Beverly Hills).
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This is decidedly not your mother’s “Nutcracker!” Sure, there’s that big, beautiful Tchaikovsky score—played by the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra under the deft baton of Nicolas Brochot—as well as a little girl called Clara (an enchanting Anjara Ballesteros), who dreams that her toy soldier will one day be her main squeeze (Stéphan Bourgond). But as for Drosselmeyer, this is where any resemblance to those many “Nutcrackers” of Christmas Past ends.
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“The Inkomati (dis)cord”—a world-travelling collaboration between dance-theatre artists Boyzie Cekwana of Soweto and Panaibra Canda of Maputo, Mozambique—ends on a bright, sardonic note, with a multilingual game of “Telephone.” The words travel down a bench of performers—from Portuguese, Mozambique’s official language, to Sena, one of its native languages, back to Portuguese, and finally to South African English, all of which, including the English, appears in English surtitles on a screen behind the action. As for the story, a woman’s dangerous border-crossing becomes, by the end of the line, a bid for a boob job and a bucket of KFC.
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Every era has its balletic superstars. From the early 18th century rivals, Marie Sallé and Marie Camargo, through the Romantic period’s Marie Taglioni (the world’s first “La Sylphide”), who was so adored that a male fan allegedly ate her slipper, ballet has mostly been about feminine mystique, beauty and allure. The beginnings of the 20th century saw those ideals embodied in Anna Pavlova, whose “Dying Swan” captivated the world and who may have been the first ballerina to embrace branding, endorsing beauty products and department stores, as well as gracing the pages of fashion magazines.
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Beauty and anger co-exist in a restless evening of hard-driving dance and thrashing rock music in Susan Marshall’s “Play/Pause.” The Los Angeles premiere of the 75-minute, neo-rave-like work features an original score by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, David Lang (of Bang-On-A-Can fame and frequent Marshall collaborator), and marks only the second time that the New York-based troupe, currently in its 27th year, has performed at Royce Hall. (The work has its New York premiere at BAM Fisher November 20.)
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In art as in life, there is no such thing as being faithful enough. Fidelity is an absolute. It cannot be measured in numbers of steps or scenes preserved any more than a romantic betrayal can be calibrated by the quantity of lovers taken on the side, though the numbers do tell some kind of story. Rather, faithfulness to a text, whether choreographic or literary, is a question of spirit. We want a given “Swan Lake” or, in the present case, adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis to honour the heart of the work (as we understand it).
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Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Sergei Prokofiev’s beautifully eerie time keeping score. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. A row of conical hedges transform with one rotation into metronomes. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. A dancer’s leg strikes twelve, over and over. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. A leg can swing like a pendulum, oscillating back and forth from a central point. A body has become a clock, proving Salvador Dali true: “every portrait can be transformed into living room furniture,”[note]Espace Dali, Monmartre: http://www.daliparis.com/english/dali-designer.html[/note] and thus Mae West’s lips become a sofa on which to sit. The body can become an object and an object...
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“I continued for a long time to live in that delightful but short-lived state where love and innocence can co-exist in one heart. She had sent me away. Everything called me back to her, I had to return. This return decided my fate, and long before I came to possess her, I lived only for her and my whole life was in hers. Ah! if only I had satisfied her heart and she satisfied mine! What peaceful and delightful days we should have spent together! We did indeed have such days, but how brief and fleeting they were, and what...
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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,...
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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