Clipped Wings

“La Sylphide” is a cautionary tale. Young men should not abandon their fiancées on their wedding day; they should not be unkind to beggar-women who turn up on their doorstep; and certainly they should not attempt to capture and possess that which can never belong to them. These lessons are hard-won. By the time the ballet has ended, a sylph—a spirit of the forest—has lost her wings, gone blind and died. The transgressor has lost everything: his family, his future, and, quite possibly his life.

View from the Still Point

You can fit a lot into three hours. You can span, if you have the reach and vision of choreographer Lucy Guerin, 21-years in a performance installation at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). A Lucy Guerin Inc production, presented in partnership with ACCA, as part of Frame: a biennial of dance, “Newretro” is 21 works, for 21 dancers, 21 years in the making. It is a recreation, rather than a retrospective, remixed from what was into what is, because this is as much about what the next 21 years might hold as it is about the wealth and...

The Evolution of Noh

The genre of Noh theater and dance exists in our time thanks to important contributions by two nineteenth-century Americans. The first you’ll know. The story goes that when President and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant toured the world after Grant had left office, they visited Japan, where, as the former American head of state and a famous military man, Grant was treated to a performance of a Noh play. Some treasured plays in that genre feature tragic laments for a lord felled in battle by warriors whose essential message is, as the Wanderers and Seafarers of Old English poetry—so similar to...

A Jubilant Don Quixote

Just as the iconic 1973 film transferred stage designs to film, and the choreography “from a stage setting to a film setting [to] let the camera tell the story,”[1] The Australian Ballet have transferred the energy and humour of the film to the stage once more. As befits a company’s 60th anniversary, transplanting Rudolf Nureyev and Robert Helpmann’s “Don Quixote” from screen to stage 50 years later, called, of course, for a repolish of colour, as all tributes to legacy should. And so, to do justice to both anniversaries, as artistic director David Hallberg introduced, this rendition connects Nureyev’s “original stage...

Elevation

For the first time in six years an international choreographer has created a work on Sydney Dance Company. Spanish superstar Marina Mascarell’s “The Shell, A Ghost, The Host and The Lyrebird” is one of three works being performed at the Sydney Opera House as part of the company's triple bill, “Ascent.” The night brings together three wildly different works, three sublimely different choreographers, and two world premieres.

Rainbow After

In a world in the midst of war, emerging from its post-pandemic slumber, themes and acts of unity, contact and harmony are more than welcome. The differences that make us human are also, dichotomously, the magic that brings us closer together. The subtle nuances of language, the freckles on your skin, the color and glorious hues of your eyes, the food you eat and the mannerisms and peculiarities that identify you as you, are the uncompromising glue that holds us together.  

15 Minutes of FRAME

This time yesterday I was sat on the floor. This time yesterday, at 3pm, in the van Praagh studio, named after Peggy van Praagh, the Australian Ballet’s founding artistic director, at the Primrose Potter Australian Ballet Centre, I was unsure what I’d see, in the truest and best sense of being uncertain. Having taken the lift to level five, the path ahead was unfixed, something of which many tales of curiosity require. I was there to experience “An Afternoon of Work-in Progress Studio Showings” presented by the Australian Ballet as part of the inaugural 2023 FRAME festival program.

Kylin’s Garden

Some years ago, I wrote, “Dance has the power to stir the viewer's innermost longings and outermost visceral reactions. Few choreographers reach into those sensibilities as effectively as Kun-Yang Lin. With quiet power, he arrives at the essence of an emotion—humor, spirituality, anguish, ecstasy—extracts it raw, and then, with quicksilver speed, subtly refines it.”*

When Beauty Awoke

Avenging Angels

“I’m really into vengeance, sadly,” Maurya Kerr told the 92nd Street Y’s Harkness Dance Center director Taryn Kaschock Russell following Kerr’s “black calls to dark calls to deep underneath.” “I try to get it out in my work instead of in person,” Kerr added.

Khansa, Warsha and the Queering of Lebanese Dance

Mo Khansa, who works simply as Khansa, is a radical young Lebanese dance artist, choreographer and singer who interrogates ideas about identity, place, gender, sexuality and autonomy in his incredible work. Influenced by his mother, herself a more traditional type of dancer, and iconic artists like Arca, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bjork and FKA Twigs, his is a singular path. Watching him move feels like being let in on a secret, one which could blow things apart—such is his power.

Friends in High Places

This mixed bill takes its name from the daily barre classes Tiler Peck started hosting on Instagram Live during the 2020 lockdown, an impromptu venture that soon had 15,000 people tuning in to #turnitoutwithtiler. The New York City ballet superstar is a much-loved luminary, known for her sunny energy on and off stage. That vim comes through in this fizzing programme of new and recent work, Peck’s London debut, giving it a warmth that’s often missing from the contemporary ballet sphere, including in NYCB’s slick neoclassical house style.