World-class review of ballet and dance.
A close-up image of white cloth undulates gently on a large projection screen set upstage. In front of it, a cameraman sits behind a table, facing the audience. His lens is trained on the bundle of white cloth draped on an easy chair set immediately downstage, its back to the audience. Underneath the fabric, dancer Albert Silindokuhle IBOKWE Khoza is wrapped up like a mummified king.
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This return of Miami City Ballet felt like lifting the curtain on a new, wide-open moment. Fifteen years have passed since MCB last visited Berkeley’s Cal Performances; ten years have passed since MCB founding artistic director Edward Villella stepped down. The world is now post-covid (sort of), and the dance world is post-leadership changes at its Balanchine bastion, New York City Ballet. And so, we Californians had a clean stage for seeing what Lourdes Lopez has done with Miami’s Balanchine legacy over her decade of helming the 52-member troupe. What a refreshing view it was.
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Meg Howrey’s engaging new novel, They’re Going to Love You—her fourth—immerses readers in the ballet world. As a former ballerina, this is a place with which Howrey is intimately familiar. The plot revolves around a 40-something choreographer/erstwhile dancer, Carlisle, and her estranged father and his partner, James, both of whom are also in the dance world.
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Today I’m speaking with Mary Li, ballet mistress and principal répétiteur at the Queensland Ballet. Mary's story to the stage is an unlikely one—one of eight children, Mary grew up in a small town in Central Queensland called Rockhampton. She was the first person in her family to try ballet, but by the age of 16—the day after completing her Solo Seal exam—she flew to London after being accepted into Royal Ballet School. Her star continued to rise, on graduation Mary was accepted into London Festival Ballet, now the English National Ballet—and was made principal within four years. But it...
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“Do you feel you’ve changed as an artist?” Peter Boal, the artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet asked the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky at a pre-performance talk here in Seattle recently. The two men had been discussing Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, the country in which Ratmansky spent his early years, and where his parents still live. Ratmansky hesitated, then responded, “I’m definitely changed as a person.” Earlier he had said that he had never considered himself a political artist. Asked what that phrase, political artist, meant to him, he demurred. “I’m not sure yet.”
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A three-quarter-mile stroll through grounds once devoted to horses led audience members, toting lawn chairs and picnic fare, to a broad meadow set with an outdoor stage, gleaming grand piano perched atop, purple shades of the Catskill range visible in the distance. The late summer day could not have been more perfect for the opening of Kaatsbaan Cultural Park’s Fall Festival 2022 in Tivoli, NY, where “The Glass Etudes at Kaatsbaan Celebrating Philip Glass’s 85th Birthday” was performed by five piano artists and five sets of choreographers and dancers as the sun set over an idyllic Hudson Valley.
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The aesthetic is clear: a laboratory, all clean, ergonomic surfaces and clinical shiny spaces. Like any future focusing corporation, this is full of smiley, benign worker ants in preppy, GAP like workwear. But this is no prosaic company—this is Nu Life, run by the sinister, megolamaniacal Dr Coppelius. Prototypes of a new doll litter the workspace: arms, heads and swipable screens, where a sex doll—very reminiscent of cinematic babes a la Metropolis, The Fifth Element or Akira are being produced, en masse. Welcome to a clone for the dystopian tomorrow we've been warned about.
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Australasian Dance Collective revived their sold-out production of “Aftermath” for Brisbane Festival—the city’s annual multi-arts festival that runs for the month of September. Created by Amy Hollingsworth and Jack Lister, the production was a collaboration performed by the company to the score composed by vocalist and songwriter Danny Harley of the Kite String Tangle. One part electric-synth concert, two parts sensory exploration, “Aftermath” hooked the audience from the first explosion of light and didn’t let go until it had said all it needed to say.
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Today I am speaking with the Artistic Director of the Tanya Pearson Academy, Lucinda Dunn. Lucinda started her life in dance destined for London’s West End - where her mum had been a performer, but a chance meeting with a ballet teacher named Tanya Pearson saw a change of direction, and at 15 she flew to Tokyo to compete in the Prix de Lausanne—and Lucinda’s life changed. In our conversation Lucinda shares her life story—how she joined the Royal Ballet School, broke her back, before being offered a contract with the Australian Ballet—a partnership which lasted nearly 23 years and...
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Last night, in the Upstairs Studio of Dancehouse, Emily Bowman and Joey Lehrer performing as [ two for now ] became an ocean conveyor belt in “Weathering.” ‘You be the warm shallow current, and I’ll be the cold and salty deep current,’ Bowman might have said to Lehrer before they ran in a clockwise direction. ‘Together, we’ll feel what it is like to be an ocean gyre in the Northern Hemisphere. We’ll run in a spiral like the currents formed by wind patterns and forces created by the Earth in rotation.’ Together, a thermohaline circulation was revealed. Together, [ two...
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There’s something about an outdoor venue that fills a performance with possibility, ease, and the right energy for change and open mindedness. Maybe it’s the open air—which pops the confines of the proscenium like a bubble—that creates a place where dance-goers can relax: stretching out on a blanket, feeling their toes in the grass and the sun on their skin.
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At dawn on September 11th, the Josie Robertson Plaza at Lincoln Center was quiet and still. Only the fountain glistened in the subtle light of morning, and the tan and gray stone ground was cool to the touch. All of a sudden, at 8:15am, the stone began to heat up. The sun had risen, but the warmth was coming from somewhere else: A call was made from a pink conch shell whose sound expanded into the atmosphere and summoned a hurricane of white to encircle the plaza. Hundreds of bare feet dashed around and around the fountain, surrounding the space...
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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