★★★✰✰ As part of the 92nd Street Y’s annual Harkness Dance Festival, John Heginbotham’s company performed a brief, manageable program of solos and duets on Friday, including several New York premieres.
Author - Lauren Gallagher
Lauren Gallagher is a dance writer based in New York City. Formerly a dance critic for the San Francisco Examiner, she spent her childhood as a Rudolf Nureyev groupie and considers London her second home. She Tweets about ballet, books, cars, and life at: @snickersnacked.
★★✰✰✰ With its theme of masculinity, Panta Rei Dance Theatre’s Lullaby seems a timely choice for the Norwegian company’s Stateside debut...
★★★★✰ Nutcracker Rouge is a lush, flesh-fueled frenzy of sensuality and spectacle. McCormick’s gift for erotic elegance is mesmerizing. Any raunch manages to be a good dose of the subversive while also being good plain fun.
Jessica Lang Dance White Light Festival: Stabat mater ★★★★✰ New York, Rose Theater 2 November 2017 www.jessicalangdance.com www.lincolncenter.org/venue/rose-theater Despite the fact that Christians make up about a third of today’s global population, compared to the days of martyrs and mystics, Western society today feels largely secular. In this climate, it is a brave and interesting thing to see...
★★★✰✰ The program opened and closed with the most recent works: Jessica Lang’s Her Notes and Alexei Ratmansky’s Serenade after Plato’s Symposium. Both premiered at ABT in 2016, and both are works whose inspiration largely comes from their scores.
★★✰✰✰ The best moments in The Toad Knew are comic, but there aren’t enough of them. Old-fashioned clowning is sprinkled throughout the production...
New York City Ballet 20th Century Violin Concertos: The Red Violin, In Memory Of…, Stravinsky Violin Concerto ★★★✰✰ New York, David H. Koch Theater 7 October 2017 www.nycballet.com davidhkochtheater.com It goes without saying that Stravinsky Violin Concerto is considered one of Balanchine’s greatest works, but never have I seen it shine so brightly than Saturday night at the Koch, with...
★★★✰✰ It wouldn’t be a complete exaggeration to say that the Bolshoi’s U.S. premiere of Jean-Christophe Maillot’s The Taming of the Shrew set the Koch Theater on fire Wednesday night...
★★★✰✰ With only four works, no intermissions and a run time of less than two hours, New York City Ballet’s Spring Gala was short and to the point.
★★★★✰ The overall triumph of Cuisine & Confessions is that it achieves what it sets out to do: to offer an inventive thought piece on our humanity via food...
★★✰✰✰ Some vein connected Bells and Fool’s Paradise on Thursday night and it wasn’t encouraging. Both pieces overuse the female body as a vulnerable entity...
★✰✰✰✰ Dancers roam around the stage connecting, disconnecting, clinging and separating in a drifting non-specific haze of memories. Who are the exes, who are the friends? Who are the never-weres? Who knows.
Paul Taylor American Modern Dance & Lyon Opera Ballet – Icons: Graham, Cunningham, Taylor – New York
★★★★✰ Sunday night, the New York dance scene flocked to see three of America’s dance pioneers side by side in “Icons: Graham, Cunningham, Taylor.
★★★★✰ What is it about Esplanade that makes us so elated, so satisfied, so moved?
★★★✰✰ Over two years after her retirement from New York City Ballet, Wendy Whelan remains a sight to behold.
★★✰✰✰ Last Work is not unlike other Batsheva pieces which use an assemblage of vignettes, however it doesn’t hang together as cohesively as say, Sadeh21.
★★✰✰✰ Slated as a “rock opera style production” created in the late David Bowie’s honour, Star Dust is a lengthy, razzle dazzle suite of dances set to Bowie’s most popular tunes.
★★✰✰✰ BODYTRAFFIC, the Los Angeles-based contemporary dance troupe, drew a robust crowd to the Joyce on Friday night.
★★★✰✰ Hosted by the Japan Society on the east side of midtown Manhattan, this year’s showcase concentrated on the theme of two: the dynamics of duos. Featuring works from Japan, Korea and Taiwan...
★★★★✰ Few alternative takes on tradition survive this long and The Hard Nut remains as subversive as it is satisfying.