★★★✰✰ Starstruck is subtitled "Gene Kelly's Love Letter to Ballet" - it's a ballet about jazzy dancing fizz and if that connects with us then its work is really done.
Tag - Gershwin
★★★★✰ After months apart, Morris and his dancers have finally been reunited in the company’s studios. The result is Live From Brooklyn, a 45-minute program that includes a new work, Tempus Perfectum, set to Brahms...
★★★✰✰ Program II of the Fall for Dance festival features premieres by Dormeshia and Kyle Abraham, plus excerpts of works by Balanchine and Lar Lubovitch...
★★★★✰ The Kaatsbaan Summer Festival offers the respite of communication without words, of the beauty of the body moving freely through space, and of shared experience.
★★★✰✰ Within this potpourri of Graeme Murphy’s works, the highlight was "Grand", a charming and poignant tribute he created in 2005 for his mother, a pianist, who died the previous year.
★★★★★ The ballet is a triumph, of course. It really is... Wheeldon and his collaborators have reclaimed the Gershwins’ music and songs for a five-star production...
★★✰✰✰ BODYTRAFFIC, the Los Angeles-based contemporary dance troupe, drew a robust crowd to the Joyce on Friday night.
★★★✰✰ In truth, the ballet is up and down (or, more accurately, down and up) for, overall, the second act is a huge improvement on the first.
★★★✰✰ It wouldn’t be spring without ballet galas. This week it was New York City Ballet’s turn. On the program were two new works, by Christopher Wheeldon and the relatively unknown Nicolas Blanc, the latter a veteran of the New York Choreographic Institute.
Both Royal Ballet premieres, one by Kim Brandstrup, the other by Liam Scarlett, were surely keepers, bound to be seen again.
Earlier this month Smuin Ballet danced their XXtremes bill in San Francisco with works by Amy Seiwert, Jiri Kylian and Michael Smuin. Aimée Tsao with thoughts on the bill and where the company might be heading...
But 'A Place for Us' (new Wheeldon) feels like a bauble, not quite a jewel.
On 24 May CCN Ballet de Lorraine of Nancy will premiere “La Création du Monde, 1923-2012” for the KVS Festival in Brussels. Our re-creation of the original Ballets Suédois production is the centrepiece for a new work by Congolese choreographer, Faustin Linyekula.
This was a pleasant night, pleasant for its broad content but especially pleasant because mixed bills and choreographic variety are not something normally associated with Northern Ballet. It's a time of great hardship for all the major companies as grants are pegged back and I hope the company will continue its journey in introducing more variety like this.