World-class review of ballet and dance.
In her latest book, Don’t Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet author Alice Robb calls New York City Ballet co-founder George Balanchine her “problematic fave.” Especially as the dance world continues to examine many of the darker aspects of the famed choreographer’s influence on ballet culture, this is a sentiment that many of us—myself included—seem to be echoing.
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New York City Ballet principal dancer Tiler Peck is many things beyond ballerina. Although it’s a role she excels in—she is widely acclaimed for her immaculate technique, speed, and musicality —Peck has always sought more from her career in dance. Schooled from an early age in various genres, including jazz, she made her Broadway debut at age 11, appearing as Gracie Shinn in “The Music Man.” Other musical theatre roles followed, but after seeing a performance of “The Nutcracker” in New York, Peck set her heart on pursuing her ballet training. She entered the School of American Ballet when she...
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She’s been a principal ballerina in companies that include the Joffrey Ballet, Frankfurt Ballet and Complexions Contemporary Ballet, as well as a principal guest artist with companies around the world such as the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia. From 2006-2013, she was a tenured professor of dance at UC Irvine, and in 2013 she was named the first Vice Dean and Director of the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. In addition, in 2006, she was the founder and artistic director of the Laguna Dance Festival. But Jodie Gates has never been an artistic director of a dance troupe—until...
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Phil Chan wants to get one thing straight: his work is the opposite of cancel culture. As co-founder of the organization Final Bow for Yellowface, Chan has long called for updating the obsolete stage representations of Asians and has even encouraged arts leaders to sign a pledge committing to the elimination of these damaging stereotypes. It is an advocacy he pursues in writing, teaching, consulting, directing, and choreographing.
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“It was packed and I was surprised at the kind of adoration I received. But it seemed like people were responding to the work and it felt good. It [also] scared me a little bit.”
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On January 19th, San Francisco Ballet opens its 90th season—its first under new artistic director, Tamara Rojo. Rojo is new to many San Francisco dance viewers but a near-household name to ballet fans in Europe, where she began her dancing career with the English National Ballet, ascended to stardom at the Royal Ballet, and then returned to ENB in 2012 to serve as both artistic director and principal dancer, raising the company’s profile from a regional touring troupe to an international newsmaker, particularly by prioritizing women’s choreographic voices and by commissioning Akram Khan to radically reinvent the Romantic era staple...
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The reigning goddess of Southern California site-specific dance, the indefatigable Heidi Duckler, began her terpsichorean journey in 1985 in Los Angeles. Originally dubbed Collage Dance Theatre, the troupe, now Heidi Duckler Dance (HDD), began its storied history in, well, a laundromat. That work, “Laundromatinee,” originally staged in 1988 in Santa Monica’s Thrifty Wash Laundromat, featured dancers performing amid washing machines, dryers and a bevy of onlookers, intentional or not.
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Mindy Aloff’s new book Why Dance Matters is part of a series, published by Yale University Press, on why this or that thing should matter to the reader. The series has already taken on such subjects as architecture, translation, poetry, and acting. And as of next January, it will include Aloff’s meditation on the many ways dance enters and alters our lives. At different points in her career, Aloff has been a poet, a dance critic, an essayist, a teacher, the editor of the anthology Dance in America, and the author of Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation....
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While the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale recently closed—and with it, Lita Albuquerque’s collateral event, “Liquid Light,” a multi-dimensional experience featuring the world premiere of a film of the same name and starring her daughter, dancer, and choreographer Jasmine Albuquerque—their filial collaboration is the continuation of a decades-long partnership that began, well, in the womb.
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While the intersection of film and dance has been on the rise, most recently because of the global pandemic, Los Angeles-based Bridget Murnane has been working in those two arenas for years: She was not only a professional dancer in the 1980s, having performed with, among others, Gloria Newman, but she also earned a master’s degree in dance from UCLA in 1985, where her thesis was video as a choreographic tool.
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Out Innerspace Dance Theatre is devoted to creating exciting and integral contemporary-dance works. Through their research and experimentation, the Vancouver-based company celebrates the importance of challenging preconceptions of what is to be experienced and expounded in contemporary dance-theatre. The company was officially formed in 2007 by David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen, after years of various collaborative endeavours together. During a pleasant conversation with Raymond, I had the opportunity to ask him for some more detailed information about the company, the process of creation of their last work, their methodology, and upcoming productions.
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In 1994, at the peak of the AIDS crisis, Neil Greenberg premiered what has become his best- known work, “Not-About-AIDS-Dance.” Over the heads of the five dancers, surtitles narrated—in sans serif type and the most laconic terms—what had been happening in the dancers’ lives outside rehearsal as well as what was happening right before us on the stage: the wide lunges, wheeling legs, windmilling arms, supplicant kneels, reckless penchés, and bouts of stillness more rash than anything you’d see in Cunningham, with whom Greenberg had danced for seven years, beginning in 1979.
PlusWatching Matthew Bourne's reworked version of the “star-cross'd lovers,” I was briefly reminded of Veronica, played by Winona Ryder, in the dark 1988 comedy by Daniel Waters and Michael Lehmann, Heathers, and her line, “my teen angst bullshit has a body count.” Yes, this is the darker side of Bourne's repertoire,...
PlusThe choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.
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Beneath blue California skies, manicured trees, and the occasional hum of an overhead airplane, Tamara Rojo took the Frost Amphitheater stage at Stanford University to introduce herself as the new artistic director of San Francisco Ballet.
PlusAfter a week of the well-balanced meal that is “Jewels”—the nutritive, potentially tedious, leafy greens of “Emeralds,” the gamy, carnivorous “Rubies,” and the decadent, shiny white mountains of meringue in “Diamonds”—the New York City Ballet continued its 75th Anniversary All-Balanchine Fall Season with rather more dyspeptic fare.
PlusAn “Ajiaco” is a type of soup common to Colombia, Cuba, and Peru that combines a variety of different vegetables, spices, and meats.
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