World-class review of ballet and dance.
Joffrey Ballet’s latest mixed bill programme, “Golden Hour,” unfurled into the still dark and snowy evening streets of Chicago in mid-February (‘Danger Ice Falling’ signs littering the pavements). This diverse mix of works contained two world premieres, including a co-production with Oregon Ballet Theatre titled “Princess and the Pea.”
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Nijinsky lives! Or at least it seemed that way in a commanding performance by the five dancers of “Bodysuit,” an extraordinary work created by the eternally intriguing Sharon Eyal, purveyor of Gaga, and British artist Georgy Rouy, with Eyal’s husband, Gai Behar, credited as co-creator.
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In 1936, Martha Graham was invited by the Nazi-controlled German Ministry of Culture to perform at the Olympic Games in Berlin. Courageously, Graham refused: “I would find it impossible to dance in Germany at the present time. So many artists whom I respect and admire have been persecuted, have been deprived of the right to work for ridiculous and unsatisfactory reasons, that I should consider it impossible to identify myself, by accepting the invitation, with the regime that has made such things possible.”
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To Vaslaz Nijinsky, the circle was the embodiment of a complete, perfect movement from which everything in life could be based. The intersection of two circles form an almond-like shape, and express the interdependence of opposing yet complimentary forces—life and death, heaven and earth.
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The curtain for “Vollmond,” one of the final works from the late Pina Bausch, created in 2006, opens on a colossal boulder that calls to mind a craggy sea stone, or maybe a hunk of spacerock. It could be either—the title translates to both ‘high tide’ and ‘full moon,’ and its concerns are as earthly as they are cosmic: love, ire, power, the stratospheric stuff of life.
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Okwui Okpokwasili’s arms undulate, reach, and circle in the near dark under an oval projection of rippling water. Her arms babble out from her expressive back, capable of relating tales both epic and intimate. Notably, this is how I first encountered her work, nearly a decade ago, in “Bronx Gothic”—through her incredibly articulate spine and upper body coming into its own, conveying the metamorphosis of adolescence.
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The United States is surreal at this moment. Dancers in black have been circling the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., performing Pina Bausch’s “Nelken Line” choreography to protest the self-proclaimed dictator making himself chair of the Center’s board. Choreographers are giving up hopes of National Endowment for the Arts funding now that guidelines demand “patriotic” art.
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Los Angeles-based Heidi Duckler, dubbed “Queen of Site-Specific Dance,” and whose Heidi Duckler Dance is celebrating 40 years of transforming spaces through the power of contemporary movement—kudos!—has stepped aside as artistic director, handing the reigns to associate artistic director, Raymond Ejiofor.
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“Tanz” opens on a ballet class like none I’ve ever attended. Onstage are two portable barres and four dancers in rehearsal clothes stretching and warming up. Eighty-three year old ballerina Beatrice Cordua teaches from a wheelchair, naked.
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John Scott Dance's “Begin Anywhere” started in the middle. A dancer walked to the center of the Irish Arts Center's JL Greene Theatre holding a discman, placed it on the floor, and pressed play.
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Today I have the immense privilege of speaking with Lucia Field. Lucia grew up with her family in Sydney, but with her dad, Anthony, as the original Blue Wiggle. It's not the childhood you might imagine. As the Wiggles became global superstars, Lucia didn't see her dad for nearly nine months a year. Instead, Lucia grew up alongside her mom, her brother, and her sister, dancing and dreaming of becoming a ballerina. And it was not just a dream. Lucia's star was already on the rise. And by 13, she was accepted into the Australian Ballet School. In this exceptionally...
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The story began with an impulse to go back and give something back—to the performing arts traditions of India. Acclaimed British dancer and choreographer of Bangladeshi descent, Akram Khan, long known for dancing between worlds—contemporary dance and classical Kathak, decided to return to his roots.
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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