World-class review of ballet and dance.
With his peerless vocabulary of postmodern abstract moves—or, as he’s called it, “gumbo style,” which blends Black dance with classical ballet techniques—Kyle Abraham, a 2013 MacArthur Genius grant awardee, has been making thought-provoking works for decades.
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Can art save civilization? The question matters deeply to Brenda Way, who has dedicated her life to the arts in San Francisco.
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At this year’s Resolution Festival in London, one of the city’s major events of the dance calendar, I found myself in a conversation about the state of affairs of dance internationally.
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While the television show Severance has been exploring the pitfalls of a complete division between people’s work and home lives, Sara Mearns’s recent solo show at New York City Center presented the dangers of the inverse.
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Reggie Wilson's “The Reclamation” opens in a waiting room. The stage is bare, and one dancer wanders downstage alone, as if his number's been called.
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The Royal Ballet, with their polite style and emphasis on purity of line, does not always make for the best interpreter of George Balanchine’s works.
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Oona Doherty is a choreographer that increasingly needs no introduction. The London-born Belfast native, who worked as a dancer across Europe, roared onto the scene as a choreographer with her solo work “Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus,” a searing examination of masculine culture that had the contemporary dance world abuzz.
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In Ballet West’s most recent triple bill, which featured Jiří Kylián’s “Symphony of Psalms,” George Balanchine’s “Apollo,” and Nicolo Fonte’s “The Rite of Spring,” the dancers shone brighter than the choreographers.
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In 1982, Bebe Miller made her debut as a dancemaker when Ishmael Houston-Jones invited her into his Parallels series that featured Black choreographers who were experimenting in new forms.
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The bubble machine is the first thing that hits you as you enter. There are bubbles everywhere. The second is the energy—families with babies and small children are crammed into every corner, bringing a kinetic force to the auditorium. It's pandemonium—all going off like popcorn in a pan.
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Programming, like staging and choreography, is an art, and Ángel Corella surpassed himself with all three in this early spring show featuring all new works.
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In some ways, dance could be considered an extreme sport: it meets many of the same criteria, featuring (at times) high speeds, significant risk, and the potential for severe injury. French choreographer Rachid Ouramdane seeks to reinforce this parallel in his new work “Outsider,” which received its UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells on March 26th as part of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels.
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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