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REVIEWS | By Faye Arthurs

Twinkle Twinkle, Little Stars

It’s hard to explain the School of American Ballet’s annual Workshop performances to outsiders. Workshop is a year-end ballet recital, but when the students’ families gather in the lobby afterwards to shower their children with flowers and tell them that they were wonderful—and just like real ballerinas—they are speaking the truth. This year, the advanced levels at SAB danced the Fourth Movement and Finale from George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” a feat that many professional companies cannot pull off. It is a technically demanding piece that requires at least forty bodies, including twelve men who can do triple pirouettes. Many...

INTERVIEWS | By Cecilia Whalen

Radical Dance with Dana Mills

Dana Mills is an activist and political theorist who has written extensively on dance, history, and politics. Her first book from 2016, Dance and Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries, examines a range of historical dances within their political contexts. Her new book, Dance and Activism: A Century of Radical Dance, which was published in January of this year by Bloomsbury Press, further explores the role of dance in social justice.

REVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Beyond the End

In the chaotic, dirty heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, in a fuchsia building that once housed a porn palace, stands a venue named CounterPulse. I’m always curious what’s going on at CounterPulse because the place seems to welcome subversion with an edge of sexiness, because it prioritizes racial equity in a way that goes way beyond lip service, and because you never know when you’re going to discover something mind-blowing there. That all proved true again in early June, when I was lured to the culminating performances of CounterPulse’s ARC Edge residency by Audrey Johnson, a beguiling dancer in...

INTERVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Paul Michael Henry talks Shrimp Dance

To watch Paul Michael Henry dance is to experience something that exists in a liminal space. He creates primordial work which is nonetheless rooted in the issues of our time. So it is with “Shrimp Dance,” a unique, mesmerising piece which interrogates the depletion of the shrimp population and the wider implications for our ecosystem, using Butoh performance, live music and multimedia.

REVIEWS | By Veronica Posth

Forget Me Not

Pina Bausch’s penultimate work, “Sweet Mambo” premiered in 2008, following its counterpart “Bamboo Blues.” The two pieces were created in an attempt to explore how a single starting point—identical set design—could lead to two distinct pieces, developed by two different casts. “Sweet Mambo” was recently reconstructed by Alan Lucien Øyen, and performed in Wuppertal by the original cast, with the exception of Naomi Brito, company member since 2020/21, who danced the role originated by Regina Advento.

REVIEWS | By Karen Hildebrand

Body Language

From the moment Doug Varone’s “Somewhere” opens on the figure of Hollis Bartlett leaning into a lateral arabesque, and we hear the sound of a certain unmistakable finger snapping, it’s clear that the GPS for this particular somewhere is the misty pre-dawn of an empty NYC tenement street in Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story.” During a week that celebrated 35 years of performance, Doug Varone and Dancers presented a program of four works that map the evolution of a master story teller.

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INTERVIEWS | By Veronica Posth

Core Values

Born in Buenos Aires, Gaston Core is a choreographer, theatre-maker, curator and director. Trained as a performer in his native Argentina, Core moved to Barcelona in 2001 where he continued his work as a director and theatre-maker. In 2012, Core became the director of the experimental theatre space, the Sala Hiroshima Project. There he focused on the production and exhibition of the most innovative trends in the international contemporary performing arts scene. His choreographic work, “The Very Last Northern White Rhino,” the first in a trilogy, recently toured in Europe. Veronica Posth spoke with Gaston Core about collaboration, creating for stage, and...

REVIEWS | By Cecilia Whalen

Delicate Aberrations

When Trisha Brown's “Foray Forêt” begins, dancers look like shadows against a purple backdrop until the stage fades in to light. We see intricate, gentle, movements: slight inclines of the head, swinging arms, brief transfers of weight between the group. They are done with great precision, sometimes independently and sometimes remarkably synchronized. “Foray Forêt” was choreographed in 1990, and Brown said she was trying to tap into her subconscious to create simplified, intimate gestures. It was one collaboration of many with Brown's good friend and creative partner Robert Rauschenberg (he did the visual design and the costumes) and was recently...

REVIEWS | By Marina Harss

Fairies and Fireflies

Is there a better way to end the spring season than with George Balanchine’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream”? If so, I can’t think of it. Mendelssohn’s music, with its breathless forward drive, pulls one immediately into the story. (In this, it is reminiscent of “The Nutcracker” score.) George Balanchine’s choreography is equally transporting. From the first moment, as a flurry of tiny butterflies and fairies—beautifully-trained kids from the School of American Ballet—skitters across the stage, we are drawn into Shakespeare’s world. The spell lasts until the end of the first act, when all the characters, both human and magical, make peace...

REVIEWS | By Karen Hildebrand

Moving Meditation

At the hands of choreographer Stephen Petronio, a return to the stage after two years away becomes an occasion to both honor the past and contemplate the current moment. Opening night of the Stephen Petronio Company’s weeklong engagement at the Joyce Theater includes a new work, a restaging of vintage Trisha Brown, and an emotionally redeeming piece from company repertory, “Bloom,” accompanied live by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City.

BOOKSHELF | INTERVIEWS | By Sophie Bress

Ode to “Serenade”

To many dancers, Balanchine is a figure so imbued with history, he’s almost not real. He lives on through his 465 works, which we study in dance history classes, watch onstage, and—if we’re lucky—learn ourselves. He’s almost been stripped of humanity, raised up to such a high status that it’s easy to forget that he—in his own words—“pulled the toilet chain for the same reason you do.” Toni Bentley, and her latest book, Serenade, are here to remind us.

FEATURES | By Candice Thompson

The Biggest Dance Party of the Year

Abdel R. Salaam met Dr. Charles R. Davis in 1969. Known as Baba Chuck (“Baba” being a term of endearment for patriarchal figures in communities worldwide), he founded the DanceAfrica Festival at BAM in 1977. Baba Salaam, the current artistic director for DanceAfrica, danced in those inaugural performances with the Chuck Davis Dance Company.

Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Lorna Irvine

Teenage Angst and Institutions

Watching 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,...

INTERVIEWS | Marina Harss

The Me of Today

The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.

REVIEWS | Rachel Howard

Starry Nights

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.

REVIEWS | Faye Arthurs

America, F**K Yeah

After 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.

REVIEWS | Emily May

Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup

An “Ajiaco” is a type of soup common to Colombia, Cuba, and Peru that combines a variety of different vegetables, spices, and meats.