World-class review of ballet and dance.
A lot can happen in a handful of days. You can find your Romeo or Juliet. Make a declaration of eternal love. You can be impetuous for nightfall. You can be drawn into a portentous duel in a market place. You can come up against history and a family feud that has little to do with you. You can be sentenced to exile. You can be grief-stricken. It can all end in the Capulet family crypt.
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The Koch Theater was packed to the rafters for the New York City Ballet’s 10th Fall Fashion Gala. The evening’s honoree and mastermind, Sarah Jessica Parker, was unfortunately absent (due to a death in the family), but everyone else sure turned out: the evening raised a record-setting 3.4 million dollars. It was good to see the house stuffed to the fifth ring; the repertory performance I saw the Wednesday prior was a ghost town. I’m guessing the fabulously clad crowd was there for the fashion, but I was most eager to see Kyle Abraham’s new piece. His 2018 entry, “The Runaway,”...
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30 years ago this year, a small independent film, by a first time director, and an unknown cast, hit our screens. That film was Strictly Ballroom. And so, for our final episode of Season 2 of Talking Pointes, I’m speaking with the legendary Paul Mercurio. Paul was born in Swan Hill in regional Victoria and started dancing after he saw his elder sister in a local dance class. With dad off the scene early, the family moved to Perth where Paul continued to train at the John Curtin Senior High School as it was known then, before, at 18, being accepted in the Australian Ballet School in...
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Choreography is often described as a kind of drawing crafted from the materials of time, space, and flesh. In describing “Crowd,” choreographer Gisèle Vienne expands on this idea, likening her work for fifteen dancers taking part in a rave on a stage to “paintings where you have thousands of characters and the details are kind of overwhelming.” The dancers narrate their individual stories kinetically as the piece unfolds like an all night party, their movements modulating between different feelings of time.
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In physics, the motion of a pendulum can be described as: θ(t) = θocos (ωt). In choreography and composition, the motion of a pendulum can also be described as Lucy Guerin and Matthias Schack-Arnott’s “Pendulum: a mesmerising dance with gravity.” In both, the data of time, length, and gravity come together in simple harmonic solution.
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There’s a lot going on in Yvonne Rainer’s “Hellzapoppin’ What about the bees?” performed by eight dance artists and actress Kathleen Chalfant as special guest. A founding member of Judson Dance Theater, writer, and experimental filmmaker, Rainer’s wit and breadth spans several mediums in her newest work. At 87, with two Guggenheims and the MacArthur Fellowship under her belt, Rainer claims this show is her finale.
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“Mayerling,” Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s 1978 ballet about Austria’s Crown Prince Rudolf, is steeped in death. The show is bookended by funeral scenes and centres on a grisly murder-suicide. MacMillan himself actually died backstage during a performance in 1992. And now, 30 years later, a revival meant to mark that national loss unfolds amid another one. Opening night was the Royal Ballet’s first performance since Queen Elizabeth II’s passing.
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It happens that three of the programs I was most interested in seeing this season fell in the same week. One (Oct. 5) consisted of a medley of pieces to the music of Stravinsky; another (Oct. 6) combined the 1959 work “Episodes,” set to four works by Anton von Webern with the sumptuous “Vienna Waltzes,” from 1977; and the last (Oct. 7) included two of the company’s major “hits” of the last decade-and-a-half, Alexei Ratmansky’s “Concerto DSCH” and Justin Peck’s “Everywhere We Go.”
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Today I’m speaking with the divine Jenna Roberts. Jenna grew up in Newcastle and started dancing only because a local ballet studio set up shop on the same street as her family home. But as fortune would have it, that local studio happened to be the Marie Walton Mahon Dance Academy, as it was known back then. And so Jenna, and little sister Callie, started dancing. For any outsider, it was clear the Robert’s sisters were born to dance—with high arches and long, lean legs, genetics almost pre-determined their careers. By the time Jenna was a teen, she was winning...
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The spectacle is the existing orders' discourse about itself, it's laudatory monologue. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
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Darrah Carr Dance entered the stage like sunlight pouring gently into a sleeping room: a wave of bodies stepping onto an empty stage softly but swiftly conquering the space with exuberance. Seán Curran and Darrah Carr's "Céilí," which premiered in the new state of the art Irish Arts Center in Hell's Kitchen, refers to the Irish word for a house party. The set (by Mark Randall) is an outline of a house, with golden-brown roof beams hanging from above, a window positioned stage right, and wooden benches lining both sides of the stage. A collaboration between the two Irish American...
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Queensland Ballet staged Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon”—a rarity in and of itself. It is not every day that a MacMillan piece graces an Australian stage, and when it does you know that it was by no means an easy feat to get it there. Expectations were set high for this premiere; “Manon” was pitched as the diamond of the company’s season and promised to fully immerse the audience in the absolute wealth and passion of the tale. A promise, it seems, that Queensland Ballet was fully justified to make.
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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