A Birthday Suite
Complexions Contemporary Ballet turned 30 this year, and their two-week residency at the Joyce Theater was a party.
Continue ReadingWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
Complexions Contemporary Ballet turned 30 this year, and their two-week residency at the Joyce Theater was a party.
Continue ReadingBalletX concluded its 2024 season in its new home, the Suzanne Roberts Theatre across from the Wilma, a theater that had been its home for 18 years.
Continue ReadingLoïe Fuller, groundbreaking artist, dancer and theatrical maverick, is finally getting her due in the feature-length documentary, Obsessed with Light. Opening at New York’s Quad Cinema on December 6, the film, directed by Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbühl, is a meditation on light and the enduring passion to create.
FREE ARTICLEA duet featuring the choreographer himself was an unexpected treat when Boca Tuya, founded in 2018 by Omar Román de Jesús, took the stage at 92NY last week. De Jesús is a scintillating model for the liquid, undulating movement style that flows through all three works of the evening.
Continue ReadingDesigned to look at the process and art of writing dance criticism, this one-day event will feature panel discussions with Fjord Review writers, audience Q&A sessions, a conversation with a special guest choreographer, and networking reception.
FREE ARTICLECreating Urban Bush Women forty years ago—after having had a dream about her parents—Jawole Willa Jo Zollar may have stepped down as artistic director from the women-centered group dedicated to telling stories of the African diaspora through traditional and modern Africanist dance forms, but she’s busier than ever.
FREE ARTICLEGeorge Balanchine loved American culture because he loved America. He had lived through tyranny and chaos as a boy in the Russian Revolution, and though his displays of affection for his adopted homeland could border on silly (like the Western bolo ties he favored as fashion statements), he never took for granted the possibilities he found here, never stopped extolling America’s freshness and energy.
Continue ReadingPhiladelphia witnessed two Gala celebrations of dance and performance on opposite sides of town in October. It seemed like a tale of two cities. One in the center where much of the cultural events take place and the other on the fringes, down by the riverside.
Continue ReadingHello Lauren! We haven’t spoken since June, when I interviewed you for a School of American Ballet Connoisseurship Series program about the Workshop performances.
Continue ReadingMidway through “Frontera,” the dancers of Animals of Distinction, a multimedia dance company based out of Montreal, press their bodies into each other to form a line at the bottom of a large rectangle of blue light.
Continue Reading“Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” said Mickey Rooney to Judy Garland in the definitive Depression-era musical film, Babes in Arms, lo those many years ago. Well, if Denna Thomsen and Zak Ryan Schlegel had been around back then, what a show they would have mounted!
Continue ReadingAll too often it seems the human memory is too short. History is easily forgotten and, in a week where Americans are still processing the results of the presidential election, it is hard not to feel like we are doomed to repeat ourselves.
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.
Continue ReadingBeneath 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.
Continue Reading