Has there ever been a more sensitive, sympathetic chronicler of that inner flutter brought on by the onset of love than Frederick Ashton? It seems unlikely, on the evidence of ABT's premiere of A Month in the Country...
Author - Marina Harss
Symphony in C, a luminous outpouring of legs and arms, crisp geometries, bobbing rhythms, and articulate patter-like conversations for the feet, is a vivid reminder of why one goes to the ballet at all. Luminosity and classical logic, laced with wit and intelligence.
But 'A Place for Us' (new Wheeldon) feels like a bauble, not quite a jewel.
But stuck in the middle of all this brightness was Ivesiana, like a ghost at a birthday party. It is a most unsettling ballet.
He dances with his whole body, his head, his feet, his back, his chest, even the tips of his fingers. His movements are full of detail and texture and sensuality, peppered with sudden changes of tempo and force..
A Bend in the River is innovative on many levels, but, like all successful advancements, feels both true to its sources and utterly unique.
Johnson has a challenge on her hands. So much potential and so much talent; but what is the mission?
When he begins to move, you are not just impressed by what he’s doing – which is impressive enough – but also touched by the quiet joy and purity of expression that emanates from his body and eyes.
It takes a certain amount of nerve to build a dance season around some of the great masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire. It’s not simply a matter of status in the musical canon; these pieces are strong, they produce emotions, they command attention for themselves. But Bill T Jones is not a timid artist...
Some experiments sound better on paper - especially when one admires the artist behind them - than they turn out to be in reality.
Beloved Renegade - I’d venture to say that this is one of Taylor’s great works, heartfelt, profound, complex and deeply musical.
Opening night was a gala performance; one might have expected Esplanade, or Arden Court, but that’s just not Taylor’s style. For a choreographer who has been criticized for being too popular in his tastes, Taylor can be very odd indeed.
Even more than with other choreographers, the costumes and sets are essential elements of Graham’s dance imagination. Think of Martha’s stretchy sack-dress in Lamentation, or the prickly metal tree-dress by Noguchi in Cave of the Heart. They are extensions of the dancers’ bodies, and of Graham’s Jungian world-view.
To preserve or to progress? And if the latter, how? These questions seem to come up increasingly often as companies grapple with the death of their founding choreographers, artists who created importantant schools of dance in their own image.
Teresa Reichlen - known as Tess by friends and colleagues - is an immediately striking dancer: tall, pale, preternaturally serene. She could be a Madonna in a painting by Botticelli.
Without Körbes’s natural, radiant dancing, Jean-Christophe Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette, which dominated the company’s four-day run, would have been hard to bear.
In New York one can begin to feel proprietary about Balanchine, to form the illusion that his choreography is a local specialty, the province of a select group of dancers, all of them employees of New York City Ballet. But this is mere local pride.
Sara Mearns has been New York City Ballet’s reigning Swan Queen since her breakout performance in 2006, when she was only nineteen years old and a member the corps de ballet. It was a performance of surprising intensity, edged with danger.
Now thirty-one Carla Korbes has grown up to become one of America’s most remarkable ballerinas. Her recent performance of Terpsichore’s duet with Apollo at the Guggenheim was one of the most touchingly natural and innately musical interpretations I’ve seen.
N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz is certainly not Robbins’ finest or most original work but perhaps because of its relative straightforwardness, it reveals much about what is so remarkable about this choreographer.