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Deborah Jowitt on bodies in motion

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Merce in Nancy

February 14, 2017 by Deborah Jowitt

CCN - Ballet de Lorraine presents three works from its repertory at the Joyce Theater. In 1984, France’s Ministry of Culture decentralized dance. No more choreographers holed up in Paris while the rest of the country, for the most part, did without. To date, France has nineteen Centres Chorégraphiques Nationaux, almost all of them headed by choreographers of consequence. The Ballet de … [Read more...]

Dancers on the Rampage

January 31, 2017 by Deborah Jowitt

New York City Ballet premieres new works by Justin Peck and Pontus Lidberg. When a dance really fascinates me, I wish either that I could immediately see it all over again or that I could be instantly at home, hugging it to myself and processing my memories. Justin Peck’s new The Times Are Racing for the New York City Ballet made me feel this way. It’s set to Dan Deacon’s vivid, changeable, … [Read more...]

Glittering Athletes

January 28, 2017 by Deborah Jowitt

Complexions Contemporary Ballet performs at the Joyce Theater, January 24 through February 5 Some dances aim to hit you over the head—not too hard, just enough to get your adrenaline rushing. Look at the dancers: strong, confident, beautiful, they can do anything. When they swing their legs into the air, a tree could fall. Their idea of a rest is shooting off a few very slightly less … [Read more...]

Moving Architecture

October 27, 2016 by Deborah Jowitt

American Ballet Theatre presents ballets by Tharp, Lang, and Millepied. Goethe once wrote this: “Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music.” For Havelock Ellis—one of the writers on the arts that Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey found inspiring early in the twentieth century—dance and architecture were the sources on which the visual arts were built. Watching one of … [Read more...]

They Could Have Danced All Night

September 24, 2016 by Deborah Jowitt

New York City Ballet opens its fall season  (September 20 to October 16) with four new ballets. The New York City Ballet’s gala performances are intriguing phenomena—so many gowns trailing hazardous trains during the pre-performance cocktail party on the second floor promenade, so many tiny, slightly slippery hors d’oeuvres, and at the same time such pride and good spirits among those … [Read more...]

Borne on a West Coast Breeze

August 28, 2016 by Deborah Jowitt

The Pacific Northwest Ballet performs during Jacob's Pillow's last week of the summer. It takes more than a moderate climate, ocean breezes, and lots of rain for a ballet company to flourish, and the Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet yields a well-chosen repertory and dancers from all parts of the U.S. and beyond, who make skill and precision look chosen and invested in, rather than … [Read more...]

From England Via Florida With Love

August 17, 2016 by Deborah Jowitt

The Sarasota Ballet presents an all-Ashton program at the Joyce Theater. I have long been enamored of Frederick Aston’s ballets—narrative ones, such as La Fille mal gardée, Cinderella, and The Dream; abstract ones, such as Monotones; and thoroughly unusual ones, such as A Wedding Bouquet and Enigma Variations. There’s something sweet-tempered about all of them. Who but Ashton would make one … [Read more...]

Legends and Visionaries

August 6, 2016 by Deborah Jowitt

New York Theatre Ballet performs a new work and a classic at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. Young choreographers are usually advised to start out “small.” You know, try their wings. Diana Byer, the artistic director of the fine little New York Theatre Ballet, took the opposite tack. According to an interview with Steven Melendez, a dancer in NYTB, and Zhong-Jing Fang, a member of … [Read more...]

A Wintry Tale of Love and Jealousy

August 2, 2016 by Deborah Jowitt

“What were you thinking, Will?” And “Eat your heart out, Marius Petipa.” These two silent remarks to the eminent dead periodically rattled around in my head while I was at Lincoln Center watching The National Ballet of Canada perform Christopher Wheeldon’s remarkable three-act work based on William Shakespeare’s 1611 play The Winter’s Tale (staged for the NBC by Jacquelin Barrett and Anna Délicia … [Read more...]

Once Upon a Time. . .

June 11, 2016 by Deborah Jowitt

American Ballet Theater mounts Alexei Ratmansky's The Golden Cockerel. It occasionally happens that a ballet from another era comes to us tangled in its own history, even as it tries to make sense of it. American Ballet Theatre’s production of The Golden Cockerel as re-imagined by Alexei Ratmansky is just such a work—gorgeous to look at, often comical, often perplexing. At the end of the … [Read more...]

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Deborah Jowitt

Deborah Jowitt began to dance professionally in 1953, to choreograph in 1961, and to write about dancing in 1967. Read More…

DanceBeat

This blog acknowledges my appetite for devouring dancing and spitting out responses to it. Criticism that I love to read—and have been struggling to write ever since the late 1960s—probes deeply and imaginatively into choreography and dancing, … [Read More...]

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