Michael Wade SimpsonVail,
Near the end of Jerome Robbins’ 1969 piece, “Dances at a Gathering,” the six dancers begin to merely walk, after an hour of exuberant dancing. As the final strains of wistful Chopin piano music play, they meander and look ...
Lewis WhittingtonPhiladelphia,
The Pennsylvania Ballet is the largest dance company in Philadelphia and as most of the other smaller companies have been able to rehearse short films or scaled down livestreams in the last half of 2020, ...
Toba SingerSan Francisco,
Program 03’s curator has posed several challenges as well as questions for the reviewer. Three contemporary story ballets overload one program. It takes at least two viewings to appreciate them in a filmed format. Two of the three, "Symphony ...
Lewis WhittingtonPhiladelphia,
BalletX has been confronted with an industry shutdown of theaters and venues with a slate of specific limitations to work around to train, create, rehearse and perform dance and do it safely for all concerned. But the company hasn’t ...
Toba SingerSan Francisco,
It’s rare to see a Balanchine-choreographed story ballet, let alone one featuring a plotline as serpentine as Shakespeare’s impishly comic “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In this interpretation, Shakespeare and Balanchine conspire to lampoon all manner of hierarchy, tasking the prankster ...
Toba SingerWalnut Creek,
Diablo Ballet Artistic Director Lauren Jonas commissioned Julia Adam to locate her “Nutcracker Suite” in a hotel suite—San Francisco’s Hotel Fairmont, to be exact. The company then tied the whole production up in an anti-viral cordon sanitaire. The result ...
A Netflix documentary about six working dancer/choreographers.
Michael Wade Simpson
“Move,” a new, five-part documentary on Netflix which began streaming on October 23, offers portraits of a half-dozen working dance artists. Subjects include street dance with American dancers Jon Boogz and Lil Buck; the politics of the body by ...
SInger & SonBerkeley,
James: You spoke about Joffrey having been cutting edge. Is today’s Joffrey in step with the original company? Toba: It’s an entirely different kind of company, not as self-confident, not the same unsinkable esprit de corps, ...
Maya Beiser, Wendy Whelan, Lucinda Childs, David Lang
David E. MorenoSan Francisco,
“I remember the day…” On the surface, “THE DAY” is a multilayered performance with iconoclastic cellist Maya Beiser and retired ballerina turned dance experimentalist, Wendy Whelan. This collaborative project, done in two parts, is the inspiration ...
David E. MorenoSan Francisco,
When the Paul Taylor Dance Company last appeared in San Francisco in 2017, it was just months before the dance world would lose one of its greatest choreographers—Paul Taylor. Soon, the dance maker whose innovative career set contemporary dance ...
