There’s no way around it: it’s been a miserable year for the performing arts here in the US... But still, there were highlights, moments in which for whatever reason, some spark illuminated the soul...
Tag - New York
Stella Abrera, the much loved and recently retired American Ballet Theatre principal talks to Oksana Khadarina about her new life as Artistic Director of the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park and its much admired Festival. That and putting on a ballet for Alexei Ratmansky in St. Petersburg...
★★★✰✰ Program II of the Fall for Dance festival features premieres by Dormeshia and Kyle Abraham, plus excerpts of works by Balanchine and Lar Lubovitch...
★★★★✰ The Fall for Dance festival is an all digital affair this year and Program 1 included striking and heartfelt premieres by Jamar Roberts and Christopher Wheeldon...
There was a rush of emotion at seeing these extraordinary dancers doing the thing they do best. Their energy, precision, and drive, the way they change the space around them, is inspiring...
★★★★✰ Ice Cycle is an unusually beautiful vision suggesting, at times, the effects of global warming, encompassing Sperling’s environmental concerns as well as her choreographic and design mastery.
As lockdown eases ballet is getting out of streaming from living rooms and into the big wide world - Jann Parry looks at six happenings/films involving dancers from Dance Theatre of Harlem, New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Alonzo King LINES Ballet & The Royal Ballet
★★★★✰ 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.
★★★★✰ One silver lining to the pandemic has been getting to see companies online that I have been largely unfamiliar with and Ballet Hispanico is a real find...
New York City Center is streaming some ballet master classes, curated and hosted by Alastair Macaulay, and involving Misty Copeland, Sara Mearns and Tiler Peck. The coaches/guests include Nina Ananiashvili, Merrill Ashley, Alessandra Ferri, Stephanie Saland and Pam Tanowitz.
★★★★✰ Rooms2020 retains Sokolow’s intensely expressive choreography, which makes it a striking documentation of the aloneness and alienation that can pervade this time of pandemic.
★★★★★ Dormeshia’s And Still You Must Swing is the first online dance that made me want to write about it. I knew it would be good...
★★★✰✰ “Space is the Place,” was the Sun Ra anthem. And those were the words for the last song in a tribute to the late pianist and Arkestra leader, conceived by Nona Hendryx and presented by Met Live Arts and Harlem Stage, at the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum...
★★★✰✰ Lasting 75 minutes the Che Malambo show is quite spectacular, if unevenly so...
★★★✰✰ In the last week of its winter season, New York City Ballet unveiled a new work by its resident choreographer, Justin Peck, to a score by the popular neo-Minimalist composer Nico Muhly. It was a homecoming of sorts for Peck...
★★★★✰ It’s comforting to know that at even my advanced age I can still be confounded even by hoary old Swan Lake.
★★★✰✰ The dance is spare and pedestrian, as is De Keersmaeker’s way, and lasts two hours, without intermission. And yet it’s not really a challenge to experience it all in one sitting.
★★★★✰ The four ballets make for a slightly over-long evening (both Episodes and Rodeo are substantial works). But it’s a small price to pay for seeing these rarities back onstage.
★★✰✰✰ At times the striking images and lithe, hyper-flexible dancers are enough to seduce the eye. But Cāo Sem Plumas is a frustrating piece, in which the live dancing is overshadowed by film...
★★★★✰ There was always something new around the corner, a surprising shape, a witty step, an unlikely transition. It’s clear that Ratmansky felt liberated by the unusual structure and soundscape...