★★★✰✰ Program II of the Fall for Dance festival features premieres by Dormeshia and Kyle Abraham, plus excerpts of works by Balanchine and Lar Lubovitch...
Tag - Calvin Royal III
★★★★✰ The Kaatsbaan Summer Festival offers the respite of communication without words, of the beauty of the body moving freely through space, and of shared experience.
★★★✰✰ The emphasis here was on new. This was a night to check in on the creative efforts of two emerging voices on the ballet scene - Gemma Bond and James Whiteside.
★★★★✰ In programs like this one, ABT really looks like an American company, steeped in American popular music and the relaxed attitude of popular dance. It’s a mode that suits the company well.
★★★★✰ The fewer the speeches, the better the gala – this universal truth seems to have bypassed the organizers at American Ballet Theatre...
★★★★★ As someone who cries easily, it’s a wonder that Manon remains a favorite ballet of mine... Misty Copeland and Cory Stearns were passionate and persuasive in their respective roles as Manon and Des Grieux.
★★★★✰ It’s impossible not to be impressed by the range of these works, from introspective and conversational (Symposium) to brilliantly classical (The Seasons) to dramatic (Dnieper).
★★★✰✰ The fall season is too brief, particularly because it always feels as though it takes the company a few days to warm itself up. The dancing at the gala on Oct. 17 was a little slapdash, but by Friday things had begun to settle.
★★★★✰ The audience laughs, the company looks great, the orchestra... sounds full and vibrant, and you leave the theatre with a rare feeling of joy. Lightness of spirit and complexity of execution in one delightful package.
★★★✰✰ The program opened and closed with the most recent works: Jessica Lang’s Her Notes and Alexei Ratmansky’s Serenade after Plato’s Symposium. Both premiered at ABT in 2016, and both are works whose inspiration largely comes from their scores.
★★★✰✰ In between the speeches and the short films came the dancing. The main attraction was the new Ratmansky work, Songs of Bukovina...
★★★✰✰ Ratmansky’s Souvenir d’un Lieu Cher turned out to be a mysterious little ballet, a double pas de deux that captures, ...the complex history of a quartet of characters.
★★★★✰ Don Q is pure entertainment, the kind of extroverted spectacle that the ballet is so very good at.
★★★★✰ Ballet Across America – a festival that showcases the stylistic, creative and geographical diversity of American ballet – returned to the Kennedy Center this month...
★★★✰✰ Murphy is a sensual Odette, something made all the more effective by Stearns’ tenderness.
★★★✰✰ Shostakovich Trilogy is a rich work, containing too much to take in at a single sitting. It reveals some of its secrets, but not all.
★★★★✰ It isn’t often that a gala program proves satisfying, but this one was the exception.
★★★✰✰ " Bond's strength, for now, lies in a kind of old-fashioned insistence on beauty and her ability to coax sensitive, generous performances out of her dancers."
Just before intermission Simkin included two film-and-performance works by Alexander Ekman. Simkin and the City, which went viral with the Internet-savvy dance crowd a couple of years ago, always gets a good chuckle.
A highlight of the season is the return of Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table, made in 1932. This meditation on the folly of war in eight scenes has lost none of its punch...