★★★★✰ Rather than succumb to a COVID-19 hiatus, RAWdance pivoted to a dance-on-camera format for the CONCEPT Series’ 28th edition, and presented seven new short films created by various artists over the past few months...
Author - Claudia Bauer
Trey McIntyre talks to Claudia Bauer about creating "The Big Hunger" for San Francisco Ballet - to some particularly devilish Prokofiev it explores the little and big hungers of life and is premiered this week, on 13 February 2020.
★★★★✰ the Mariinsky’s production was a welcome ravishment of vibrant costumes, shimmering jewels, romantic storytelling and sheer entertainment...
Arthur Pita's latest work is called "Alice in Californiland" for the Bay Area AXIS Dance Company - to be premiered later this week, on Friday 25 October, Claudia Bauer caught up with him to find out what its all about - a thought provoking collision of Lewis Carroll and homelessness...
★★★★✰ Friday the 13th was auspicious for San Francisco dance: Margaret Jenkins Dance Company premiered Trace Figures, a site-specific performance immersion that could be done by no other company or permutation of artists.
★★★★✰ SF choreographers Maurya Kerr, Dazaun Soleyn and Slender-White, and the visiting duo of Joy Davis (Boston) and Eric Mullis (Charlotte, North Carolina), presented new works of 10–20 minutes in length.
★★★✰✰ The choreography in Shostakovich Trilogy, which was co-commissioned by SFB and ABT and premiered in 2014, is as frustratingly capricious as the music.
★★★✰✰ Liam Scarlett has great taste in dancers. For the 29 March world premiere of Die Toteninsel, his fourth commission for San Francisco Ballet, the British choreographer chose the lyrical and athletic principal Joseph Walsh and soloist Lauren Strongin...
★★★✰✰ The performance was thrilling ...because it marked the Aurora debut of soloist Wona Park, whose Kitri debut in the season-opening Don Quixote got loads of buzz. At just 19, she dances with an ease beyond her years...
★★★★✰ This year’s festival, titled storm SURGE ...brought together eight local and visiting artists with connections to coastal and island communities that are on the front line of rising oceans.
★★★✰✰ Half-narrative and semi-abstract, ISADORA hop-skips through the dancer’s life; it’s described in the program notes as a “freely interpreted biography,” and it cherry-picks around unsavory elements...
"I think you’ve just got to dare to go there. It’s hard, it’s scary, but creation is always kind of scary in one way or the other. So I think you’ve just gotta have guts and go for it anyway." Alexander Ekman.
"I don’t know if we can make the world a better place, but we can definitely have the audience think about it."
★★★★★ A hundred monkeys might eventually type out Hamlet, but only a herd of unicorns on Ecstasy could come anywhere near Arthur Pita’s Björk Ballet.
★★★★✰ If Helgi Tomasson was hoping that Unbound: A Festival of New Works would generate heated debate on the state of ballet today, his wish has already been fulfilled just one night into the massive festival...
★★★★✰ There’s nothing like watching a woman crush a man’s neck with her thighs to make you go hmm, maybe that whole #MeToo thing has legs.
★★✰✰✰ The efforts of San Francisco Ballet’s artists are sadly misplaced in this largely joyless and wholly unsatisfying rendition of The Sleeping Beauty.
★★★✰✰ The MCB dancers exude Balanchine brio and delight in performing his intricate steps, but they had to give their all to keep up with the youngsters.
★★★★✰ Suspense be damned. I’m just going to give away the ending of this review: Crystal Pite’s Plot Point, which closes Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Her Story triple bill, is a terrific piece of dance-theater.
★★★★★ 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.