World-class review of ballet and dance.
And just like that, another spring season has ended at New York City Ballet. There was much to celebrate, in particular the rise of a new generation of dancers. All at once, the company looks renewed. And in particular, the corps de ballet and soloists, individually and as a whole, rose to challenge after challenge, looking technically strong, assured, full of promise, joyful.
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If you thought Akram Khan’s 2016 update of “Giselle”—which resituated the 1841 classic to apply to modern migrant workers in a haunted garment factory—was radical, you should see Joshua Beamish’s 2019 “@giselle,” which takes place almost entirely over social media. I should clarify. This is not an online viewing situation, one watches “@giselle” in-person at an actual theater. (To be specific: the NY premiere of “@giselle” was held at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College.) But projections of Instagram-esque formatting, by Brianna Amore, were cast onto a scrim and framed nearly every scene. The flesh-and-blood performers danced...
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The year was 1983 when Sister Beth Burns of the order of St. Joseph of Orange began teaching children to dance in a summer pilot program for at-risk youth. The program was an immediate success, with Burns’ vision eventually becoming the Wooden Floor, a non-profit organization that provides tutoring, academic services, counseling and dance education to low-income youth at no cost.
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The South African contemporary choreographer Dada Masilo, based at Johannesburg’s The Dance Factory, has re-imagined some of the most familiar works in the western canon, including “Giselle” and “Swan Lake,” through an African lens. In “The Sacrifice,” she takes a juggernaut of early 20th century modernism, “The Rite of Spring.” But it is more complicated than that; as Masilo writes in her program note, she is responding not to Nijinsky and Stravinsky but to Pina Bausch, whose punishing 1975 “Rite of Spring” for the Paris Opéra is a juggernaut of its own. (Bausch’s work comes to the Park Avenue Armory...
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Since receiving a transformative financial infusion in 2020, Gibney Company has been charging forward at a dizzying pace. The company, led by founder and artistic director Gina Gibney and company director Gilbert T. Small II, has doubled its roster of dancers while it voraciously acquires and commissions challenging works, rolls out two annual seasons in New York, and tours nationally and abroad. For its NYC spring season at the Joyce, Gibney presented a program of works by three distinct choreographers. Whether in the studio or on stage, the thirteen Gibney artistic associates are an immensely capable and technically versatile group...
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Most mid-size US ballet troupes went through a thing or two during the pandemic, of course, but Sacramento Ballet’s passage was especially rough. When Covid hit, the troupe was just settling in with new artistic director Amy Seiwert after a bitter struggle between the board and the company’s longtime leaders, Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda. Seiwert was then abruptly let go, for reasons the board would not comment on. Anthony Krutzkamp, a former Cincinnati Ballet dancer who had been serving as executive director, took her place.
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Trisha Brown said her conversations with former French Minister of Culture Michel Guy occurred “outside of time.” Brown and Guy, who was the founder of the avant-garde international Festival d'Automne, would sit for hours discussing dance and art. Brown said during those discussion, Guy would have to adjust the blinds more than once to accommodate the changes in daylight.
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On one of the strongest lineups of the spring season, the New York City Ballet bookended Balanchine’s 1957 masterpiece, “Agon,” with the first and last ballets choreographed by Jerome Robbins: “Fancy Free” (1944) and “Brandenburg” (1997). “Fancy,” a theatrical Fleet Week farce, is starting to show its age. Though some tonal tweaks have been made, the scene in which the trio of sailors steals a woman’s red purse and playfully yanks her around doesn’t get the laughs it used to. Running concurrently across the plaza at the Met this month, coincidentally, is the powerful new opera “Champion.” It also has...
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Science fiction met real-time emotional animation in Australasian Dance Collective’s “Lucie in the Sky.” When the company released news of this work, there was resounding excitement—bold, pioneering, and arguably the most ambitious artistic choice ADC has made to date. From the outset, one question hovered over “Lucie in the Sky:” can we, as artists, anthropomorphise objects using choreography and spatial empathy to elicit an emotional response from our audience? A question that was answered with three words: emotionally coded drones.
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The Indian dance company Nrityagram, which specializes in the East Indian dance form Odissi, has been a frequent visitor to New York since the nineties. Each visit has been revelatory in some way. For years that revelatory quality seemed intimately linked to the choreographic relationship between the company’s director and choreographer, Surupa Sen, and its main star, Bijayini Satpathy. The two have performed solos and duets of breathtaking beauty and complexity during which time seemed to stop, and the audience tried not to blink for fear of missing something.
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All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female. “I Sing The Body Electric” - Walt Whitman
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Talk about a radical retelling of a classic story! In Benjamin Millepied’s “Romeo & Juliet Suite,” performed by members of LA Dance Project, the troupe he founded in 2012, there are three casts playing the title roles: a traditional heterosexual couple, two men, and two women. And, as if that weren’t a major departure from your standard issue “R & J,” this evening-length rendering has much of the action captured through projections from a Steadicam while the cast navigates myriad areas of the theater.
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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