I have yet to see a less than full-throttle performance, even when a choreographer’s style does not quite fit the company’s technique...
Author - Marina Harss
Marina Harss is a free-lance dance writer and translator in New York. Her dance writing has appeared in the New Yorker, The Nation, Playbill, The Faster Times, DanceView, The Forward, Pointe, and Ballet Review. Her translations, which include Irène Némirovsky’s “The Mirador,” Dino Buzzati’s “Poem Strip,” and Pasolini’s “Stories from the City of God” have been published by FSG, Other Press, and New York Review Books. You can check her updates on Twitter at: @MarinaHarss
So far this season I’ve seen three “traditional” Nutcrackers: Ratmansky’s version for American Ballet Theatre, Gelsey Kirkland’s, and the familiar and much-loved 1954 staging by George Balanchine for New York City Ballet. All three have their charms...
Novels are treacherous terrain for choreographers. So much of what draws us into a book and imprints itself in our imagination ...is almost impossible to convey in the language of the body.
What made this Peter so right-feeling was that all elements of the show — storytelling, music, stage action — were so well integrated.
If you think about it, Nutcracker lends itself quite naturally to an erotic treatment. Coming of age story, voyage of discovery, fantasy playground filled with tantalizing delights
Like most dances with folk roots, flamenco suffers somewhat from being cooped up in a theatre. It is, at its heart, a participatory and spontaneous art...
L’Allegro, with its painterly tableaux, classical references, and unselfconscious evocations of sex and death, feels both ancient - almost pagan - and perfectly of our time...
The gulf between commercial dance – the kind one sees in TV ads, music videos, and on shows like So You Think You Can Dance – and theatrical dance is disconcerting....
On Sunday, American Ballet Theatre’s two-week fall season draws to a close. By most measures, it’s been a success...
ABT's run of Les Sylphides this season are different - after research, the company, under their musical director Ormsby Wilkins, have rediscovered a 1941 orchestration by Benjamin Britten. Marina Harss reveals all in conversation with Wilkins...
Throughout the Bach Partita, Tharp’s movement is technical, precise, and highly articulated. As with Balanchine, the bodies are always distinct, framed in space.
It’s good to see the company perform Sylphides again after a hiatus of eight years. The style hasn’t eroded. ...The dancers believe in it.
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....
San Francisco Ballet continued their East Coast season with the New York premiere of Christopher Wheeldon's Cinderella. The staging is lavish...
Houston Ballet made a quick visit to the Joyce in NY last week. Its single program included works by Mark Morris, Ben Stevenson, Hans van Manen and Stanton Welch - Marinna Harss reviews...
Because of the ephemeral nature of choreography, it’s unusual for a ballet that has lain dormant for decades to return to life. But this fall, it will...
For all Bourne’s imagination, his version makes even less sense than the original.
...for all that, the experience of watching En Atendant and Cesena was not an arid one. Instead, the two works managed to build an ascetic aura, like witnessing (or even taking part in) a kind of monastic ritual.
San Francisco Ballet – From Foreign Lands, Beaux, Classical Symphony and Symphonic Dances – New York
In its second mixed bill here in New York, San Francisco Ballet once again impressed with its vitality and the depth of its bench, as well as with its pleasantly unified look.
San Francisco Ballet is in town for two weeks, and on the evidence of opening night, this should be an invigorating visit. The company looks to be in top form.