An in-depth interview with the lady who helps bring Balanchine back...
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
It’s a good thing indeed when a visit to the ballet turns out to be a night full of surprises, all of them good.
Is there a ballet more deceptive than Balanchine’s Divertimento from ‘Le Baiser de la Fée’? If so, I’m not aware of it.
What one does not see much of, at least at first glance, is nostalgia for the motherland. “I never had nostalgia about anything,” Baryshnikov says.
Which brings me to Ángel Muñoz who, with Peña, is the real star of the show. The two couldn’t be more different: Peña is all interiority and nuance, while Muñoz is all bluster and instinct.
I’m not yet fully convinced of the wisdom of New York City Ballet’s thematic seasons, organized around the music of a single composer....
Eiko and Koma are now in their sixties. What stays with you is the image of those bodies, tormented, trembling, vulnerable, but ultimately indestructible.
Dance is a difficult thing to experience outside of the theatre, but for the sustainability of the artform it has to find a way to make itself more widely available.
...it’s remarkable how satisfying the old-fashioned virtues of structure and form can be.
More than sculpture, the choreography reminded me of exhibitions of body-building.
On the eve of the Clive Barnes Foundation announcing its annual awards we interview Valerie Taylor-Barnes, the great critics widow, about her life in dance (including the Royal Ballet) and the work of the Foundation...
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.
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.