★★★★★ For this viewer, Brian Brooks’ concert at Jacob’s Pillow provided a powerful reentry to live dance after eighteen months of making do with shadows on screens.
Tag - Nico Muhly
★★★★✰ The latest offering from New York City Ballet, by Kyle Abraham, is a particularly handsome, intelligent, and well-filmed example of the (made and streamed under Covid) genre.
There was a rush of emotion at seeing these extraordinary dancers doing the thing they do best. Their energy, precision, and drive, the way they change the space around them, is inspiring...
★★★✰✰ In the last week of its winter season, New York City Ballet unveiled a new work by its resident choreographer, Justin Peck, to a score by the popular neo-Minimalist composer Nico Muhly. It was a homecoming of sorts for Peck...
★★★✰✰ So, is Pure Dance a success? It depends on what you’re looking for. Osipova is as exciting, and as powerful, a dancer as ever. Among the commissions, only Valse Triste and Flutter are worthy of further exploration...
★★★✰✰ Major draws were the new Justin Peck and a revival of William Forsythe’s 1992 commission Herman Schmerman, not seen in full since the 90s...
Other years have been more exciting, I think, but this one has had its share of remarkable performances, including a few thrilling ones. Here, in no particular order, are the ones that really stood out, for one reason or another.
★★★✰✰ No evening of new works is perfect; the excitement lies in the hope that at some point some magic will happen. And in that solo for Taylor Stanley by Kyle Abraham, we got a glimpse of that magic.
★★★✰✰ No trade description problems, here. This was exactly what it said on the tin: Natalia Osipova performing pure dance, enhanced only by recorded music and lighting designs varying from the merest of subtle tints to an explosion of floodlights...
★★★★✰ A title like "If I Were a Sushi Roll" suggests that some whimsy may be in store, and indeed, Caniparoli’s new nine-part dance suite had whimsy to spare...
Fashioning a ballet out of The Tempest is no small endeavor. How does one distill Shakespeare’s rather complex play into forty-six wordless minutes....
Amid all the fuss about the costumes, the choreogaphy paled... What a joy, then, to see a section of Western Symphony, with those marvelous frou-frou tutus by Karinska and that euphoric outpouring of Balanchine’s’ crisp, witty steps.
But stuck in the middle of all this brightness was Ivesiana, like a ghost at a birthday party. It is a most unsettling ballet.
About the book, complete with 6 Dave Morgan pictures from it...
Dance is a difficult thing to experience outside of the theatre, but for the sustainability of the artform it has to find a way to make itself more widely available.
It's always been clear that Millepied is a man of intelligence and taste.
Seeing the programme twice confirmed my initial impression that Trespass is the best-wrought work. The other two ballets are interesting as concepts rather than as polished productions. But the programme’s emphasis on creativity and collaboration means that Monica Mason’s farewell contribution to the art form in which she has invested her considerable energy will carry on germinating ideas long...
I think it's safe to say that neither of the new works knocked the planet off its axis...