★★★✰✰ It reminds you powerfully that the Chinese Cultural Revolution has a living legacy...
Reviews
Reviews of Dance and Ballet Performances
★★★★✰ Forsythe is surprising himself and his audience with new discoveries of what bodies and ballets can do.
★★★✰✰ There was a lot here to enjoy. This may have been a celebration of three decades in dance, but there was no nostalgia here...
The Merchants of Bollywood are back, this time with "Taj Express". Graham Watts on thin plots and a glittery parade of happiness. ★★★✰✰
★★★★✰ At moments, I was ecstatically aware of the beauty of the body in motion.
★★★✰✰ This is a sincere and deeply felt attempt to show us how history gets rewritten to demonise some and exalt others.
★★★✰✰ Both pieces are demanding and elicit some impressively stylish moments, though there’s a fair amount of unevenness...
★★★★✰ Tony Adigun’s smart street-dance reimagining of Dickens’s Oliver Twist switches the focus of the tale...
★★★✰✰ Big Dance Theater company, based in New York, set about turning Samuel Pepys priapic confessions into a dance theatre piece, mashing up past and present....
★★✰✰✰ Cal Performances patrons were clearly entertained on Friday evening. I, too, wanted to like the piece, but it didn’t really resonate with me.
★★★✰✰ It’s easy to warm to Shane Shambhu and to laugh along with him, but though the journey was entertaining it doesn’t seem to reach an entirely clear conclusion.
★★★✰✰ No evening of new works is perfect; the excitement lies in the hope that at some point some magic will happen. And in that solo for Taylor Stanley by Kyle Abraham, we got a glimpse of that magic.
★★★★✰ A winning first program, one with the range and breadth that Smuin is famous for.
★★★★✰ The company seemed to be dancing with a special ferocity, as if to prove its worth and convince the world that this enterprise is, indeed, worth preserving and saving.
★★★★✰ A good night of new work for Leeds coupling a rising star from outside with local and much-loved company talent.
★★★★★ "I cannot recall being so moved at a dance performance for a very long time, if ever."
★★★★✰ The curtain calls for Robert Carter's "Dying Swan" are nearly as long as the ballet itself and just as funny.
★★★✰✰ Blanc shares her struggles with dieting, exercise regimes and the pressure to look perfect to the point where she has an epiphany which she calls her feminist boner.
★★★✰✰ The dance comments, illustrates and riffs on ideas and sounds in the music. Like Marsalis’s compositions, it’s neither banally literal, nor thoroughly abstract, but lies somewhere in the middle, deriving its inspiration and energy from currents in the music.
★★★★★ The Trocks' version of Swan Lake (or Lac, as it used to be known) restores some Soviet era removals. Benno, the hero's best friend and supporter, is back, as are mime sequences, mostly mystifying the participants...