Tere O’Connor can be a frustrating choreographer. Look for structure and you’ll likely be thwarted, frustrated, or worse. Because it clearly is there, but you can’t understand it.
Author - Marina Harss
Over the course of an hour and a half the story is told, more or less, twice: first in swift pantomime (aided by projections) and then in a series of more intensely danced interludes.
Well, performing for me is really about that experience of giving to the audience. In the studio you work and perfect things, you collaborate with your partner, but for me it’s about what happens on the stage, the ability to give something, to your partner, to the audience.
When something is beautifully made it never gets old. So it is with Balanchine’s Nutcracker, first performed by New York City Ballet in 1954 and honed to near-perfection over the years.
...once she begins to dance, words become irrelevant: the clarity and detail of her dancing leaves no room for ambiguity or doubt. Like a master story-teller she is able to change registers and points of view in the course of a single solo...
The Unkindness of Ravens - collaborative efforts are not easy, especially when they are cooked up over a short period. The two companies are just similar enough - contemporary, ballet-based - to make the project even more complicated.
It's always been clear that Millepied is a man of intelligence and taste.
Hubbe - handsome and captivating as ever in tight black jeans and an Errol Flynn mustache - assured the Works and Process audience that the famously elegiac Shades scene has not been tampered with...
Tonight’s premiere of Ratmansky's newest work for American Ballet Theatre, Symphony #9, was cause for celebration. In fact, it left me feeling almost lightheaded, and terribly eager to see it again, as soon as possible.
The highlight of the gala was the seventieth-anniversary performance of Agnes De Mille’s Rodeo, preceded by a short film describing its creation, with archival footage of the hilariously histrionic, diminutive choreographer.
Shivalingappa first caught my eye at the 2007 Fall For Dance festival, where she danced Varnam, a Kuchipudi solo. I was immediately struck by her musicality, the power and precision of her footwork, and the absolute clarity of her movements. And to the grace of her upper body and a jump that seems to comes out of nowhere, light and airy as a cat’s.
What was curious about A Wooden Tree is that it did not include much dancing in the traditional sense. It was as if Morris had decided to do an experiment: to make a dance with as little dancing as possible, practically a pantomime.
There should be more nights like this at New York City Ballet.
Every Fall For Dance program is a bit of a pot luck, which is part of the festival’s charm. This year it has been expanded to twelve of performances (each costing $15, up from $10 last year)...
I’ve noticed two troubling trends this season at New York City Ballet. Perhaps they are connected. The first is the creeping tendency toward stolid tempi from the pit...
The highlight of the program was the seldom-performed Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la Fée”. It is a deceptively shadowy work, a fairy tale in the guise of a conventional divertissement.
"It’s very lonely out there... I mean, it would be nice to have some sort of mentorship with regard to what it takes to be a choreographer."
This is the third mounting of the work since its première in 1976 at the Avignon Festival, where it quickly became the stuff of legend. What was this strange, endlessly-repetitive, oddly compelling work?
What is there to say about Orpheus, except that it seems to slip deeper into the recesses of time? I’ve read that at the première, the critic and poet Edwin Denby was so moved by it that he sat dumbfounded during intermission, unable to stand. It is difficult to imagine such a reaction today.
It is something of a cliché to say it, but the guiding principle of Morris’s Dido - as in the more recent Socrates - is simplicity. No single element - musc, words, dance - is privileged above the others.