★★★★✰ If you find the combination of contemporary dance and musical form entrancing, this program is for you.
Tag - Zellerbach Hall
★★★★✰ "Ballet Hispánico ...the New York-based company brought Noche de Oro, a dazzling mixed repertory program in honor of its fifty years as a center for Latinx culture and dance – it truly was a “night of gold."
★★★✰✰ The Joffrey Ballet brought a program of four diverse works. Peck’s Times was a hit as was Christopher Wheeldon’s Commedia. The other two works weren’t misses per se...
★★★★✰ the Mariinsky’s production was a welcome ravishment of vibrant costumes, shimmering jewels, romantic storytelling and sheer entertainment...
★★★★✰ Mozart Dances goes far beyond a basic choreographic rendering of the score, instead inviting an active dialogue between disciplines.
★★★★✰ Yes, the narrative has its inherent challenges, but the choreography, performances and design all riveted with drama, intensity and humour.
★★★★✰ I only wish Hubbard Street’s Berkeley run could have been longer than three performances, and based on the audience’s cheers and applause, I don’t think I was alone.
★★★★✰ In English, körper means ‘body’, and so, as one might guess, the ninety-minute tour de force, directed and choreographed by Sasha Waltz, turns its eye to the body in space.
★★✰✰✰ Cal Performances patrons were clearly entertained on Friday evening. I, too, wanted to like the piece, but it didn’t really resonate with me.
★★★★★ The house was abuzz on Friday evening for the opening performance of Mark Morris Dance Group’s The Hard Nut. It’s been five years since Cal Performances hosted the production, and clearly fans had been anxiously awaiting its reappearance.
★★★★★ Dorrance Dance is received with such universal enthusiasm and love that reviewing them feels like an exercise in redundancy, like piling on to a scrum that’s already 30 players deep.
Meticulous reconstructions of Petipa, Cunningham, Graham, Taylor works are performance staples these days. Much rarer is a reconstruction like "Le Temple de la Gloire" (The Temple of Glory) a 1745 political opera-ballet with music by Jean-Philippe Rameau and a libretto by the philosopher Voltaire....
★★★✰✰ Available Light is merciless, and in the best way...
★★★✰✰ Where Morris succeeded beautifully was in melding Eastern dance styles into his balletic modern vocabulary in deep torso bends, dervish whirls and arms extended beyond his already expansive port de bras.
★★★✰✰ Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater gave two new works their West Coast premieres on Tuesday at Zellerbach Hall, the opening night of its annual residency at Cal Performances in Berkeley.
★★★✰✰ Death was long on Pandit Chitresh Das’ mind. Over the past decade, the world-renowned kathak master prompted his San Francisco–based dance company to consider “What will you do when I am no longer here?”
It’s not your granddaughter’s Cinderella. Alexei Ratmansky’s version dispenses with tutus and glass carriages in favor of a deco-cum?post-Soviet point of view.
The company has performed here annually since 1968 and considers Berkeley its home away from home, both for the synergy it feels with the Cal Performances staff and the receptive local audience.
As always, it's a pleasure to see the Joffrey Ballet, especially since 2007 when artistic director Ashley Wheater assumed his post and began a terrific revival of the company...
This visit by the internationally acclaimed troupe met half of my high expectations – the dancers were as spectacular as ever.