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REVIEWS | By Gracia Haby

Ethereal Giselle

Light and dark, day and night, youth and maturity, a flirtation and redemption, naturalistic and ethereal: “Giselle” spins a conjuror’s trick all the wilier for its very familiarity, its everlasting allurement. An autumnal village presented in Act I flips to reveal the ballet blanc of Act II: two halves of a whole. We know this, we anticipate this, we lap it up. Fermented in honey before interval, raising a flagon of mead to love, and even love’s folly, and unpinned madness, we heed the warnings spun to the villagers. The flipside to a light-hearted Peasant pas de deux is heartache...

INTERVIEWS | By Penelope Ford

A Decade of DANCEworks

For a month in summer, across the country from the beating heart of dance in America, New York, the coastal town of Santa Barbara becomes the backdrop for a unique dance residency, known as DANCEworks. Over the last decade, the invitation-only residency hosted by the Lobero Theatre has been instrumental in the forging the artistic careers of some of the country's foremost contemporary choreographers, including Aszure Barton, Kate Weare, Larry Keigwin and more.

REVIEWS | By Claudia Lawson

Showtime

With cash prizes totalling $36,000, the Sydney Eisteddfod Ballet Scholarship is the biggest cash prize for rising ballet stars in the southern hemisphere. Now in its 44th year, the scholarship is open to dancers aged 16-19 all of whom are teetering on the edge of securing a place in a world class ballet school, or for the lucky few, a company contract. For an art form reliant on funds to enable careers, the scholarship presents a serious opportunity.

REVIEWS | By Rebecca Ritzel

With Open Arms

Of all the touring modern dance companies based New York, none has consistently introduced talented new choreographers (or new-to-me choreographers) like Ballet Hispánico.

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Moondance

While the full moon was never actually visible—at least from this reviewer’s seat—during the world premiere of Stephanie Zaletel’s “moon&”—there was still an incandescent quality to the dancer/choreographer’s fifth evening-length work. Especially when Zaletel took center stage at the outdoor amphitheater, a sylvan venue nestled in Hollywood’s Cahuenga Pass, where she led her six-person, all-female szalt (dance co.), a collaborative founded in 2015, in a work that veered from meditative stillness and surrender to frenzied states of prolonged rapture and the accompanying struggles—gravitational and otherwise—of what it means to live on this earth.

FEATURES | INTERVIEWS | By Rachel Stone

Taking A.I.M

As the sun set on a humid Central Park the first evening of August, Kyle Abraham, the artistic director of A.I.M (a modern, genre-bending dance company formerly known as Abraham.In.Motion), spoke with Gibney’s new curatorial director Eva Yaa Asantewaa. In the few hours before A.I.M’s performance at the Summer Stage, they talked about Abraham’s performance style and influences, his advice to those who started dancing late in life, and his apprehension surrounding a piece he is currently choreographing for New York City Ballet.

REVIEWS | By Lorna Irvine

Drag Me To Hell

At once of the earth, and completely otherworldly, Akram Khan's apocalyptic last-ever solo piece as a performer (or so he has stated) grips from the outset, and never lets go. From the minute he is spat out onto the stage, tied to a rope which renders him as vulnerable as a newborn tied to the umbilical cord, or prisoner yearning to break free, this piece of choreography is a snarling beast. It is a nightmarish vision of a state of being in limbo, inspired by Prometheus. “Xenos,” which translates as 'foreigner' or 'stranger,' stands for anyone ostracised, othered, or incarcerated...

REVIEWS | By Claudia Lawson

Split

Lucy Guerin is known for her left of field works, and “Split” is no different. The scene of the performance is the Sydney Opera House’s Studio. As far as the Sydney Opera House goes, it is not a common setting for a dance performance. Rather than a large performance space, it is an intimate theatre space; dimly lit, roughly the size of a community hall. The stage is just an open space in the middle of the seats—no curtains, no props, but cordoned off with masking tape to mark the boundaries. Our bags have been security checked and we've been...

DANCE FILM | By Rachel Stone

First Impressions

In a hot spring in the Netherlands, steam rising from the water, a man begins to dance. It’s night, and the sky and water are dark. The man, rugged and fortyish, swims towards the filmmaker recording him on a mobile phone. The man unfolds his arms in mock-grace, spinning with arms raised above him in a rounded fifth position. Swimmers shout over the warm roar of the waves. Muffled classical music plays from what sounds like a gramophone. The man spins and springs out of the water belly-first—a hairy, barrel-chested merman surfacing from the sea.

REVIEWS | By Penelope Ford

Stars in Sun Valley

Sun Valley, ski-resort and playground for the rich and famous, is nestled by the picturesque Sawtooth mountains, Idaho. The (Western) history of Sun Valley begins in 1936 when Union Pacific Railroad chairman Averell Harriman decided to build America's first destination ski-resort. Count Felix Schaffgotsch went in search of the perfect locale, and three days after his arrival in Sun Valley, he wired Harriman: “Among the many attractive spots I have visited, this combines the more delightful features of any place I have seen in the United States, Switzerland, or Austria for a winter ski resort.”

REVIEWS | By Merilyn Jackson

Summertime

BalletX’s Summer Series 2018 programmed three easygoing world premieres at the Wilma Theater last week. With comic moves here and there to classical music, and gestures at more serious themes, except for Penny Saunders' “Rock-a-Bye,” there was not much to overheat the packed audience during these sultry dog days.

REVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Spiritual Shades

Those feet! Those hands! Those insanely flat stomachs! This is American Ballet Theatre’s “La Bayadère,” Marius Petipa’s iconic 1877 ballet restaged in the West by Russian ballerina Natalia Makarova for ABT in 1980 and seen over the weekend with three different casts. (It’s also the 200-year anniversary of the birth of Petipa, a giant in the ballet world whose some 150 choreographies include his 1862 opus, “The Pharaoh’s Daughter,” his 1869 “Don Quixote” and “The Sleeping Beauty,” from 1890).

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.