Bolshoi Ballet / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / July 18-30, 2005 Of the four program-length productions the Bolshoi Ballet brought to New York, only Don Quixote, discussed in my Tilting At Windmills, sports choreography that you might term traditional—stretches in which you can recognize Marius Petipa’s diamond-brilliant designs. I suppose you might call […]
Tom Pearson; Joyce SoHo Presents
The movement of “Reel”–now angular and thrusting against the air, now sinuously splayed against the ground–looked as if it might belong to an ancient tribal culture with ties to various postmodern nations (Tom Pearson); With no obvious structure and only the smallest hints of message, Breezy Berryman’s “Widow’s Walk” satisfied simply through the precision, vitality, […]
TILTING AT WINDMILLS
Bolshoi Ballet / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / July 18-30, 2005 Sometimes I wish we could TiVo live performances. I’m thinking just now of the Bolshoi Ballet’s Don Quixote. It had some marvelous moments, one of which I’d be happy to revisit in perpetuity—when I saw it the second time I was amazed […]
Pilobolus
I didn’t so much mind the gratuitous brutal hostility–one must, after all, move with the times–but the adolescent acting out of childish fantasies rooted in the grotesquely disgusting . . . Village Voice 7/19/05
Mark Foehringer Dance Project/San Francisco
In a ruminative homoerotic duet rife with emotional subtlety, even acrobatic moves look like the characters’ natural means of expression. Village Voice 7/19/05
ARCADIAN DELIGHT
American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 23 – July 16, 2005 Ever on the lookout for lavishly decorated program-length story ballets—the sort of entertainment the general dance-going public apparently prefers to sterner affairs—American Ballet Theatre joined the U.K.’s Royal Ballet to revive Frederick Ashton’s 1952 Sylvia. The ballet is […]
“The Lure of Perfection”
Simply through scrupulous descriptions of what people wore, the writer brings social and theatrical milieus alive. Village Voice 7/5/05
INHERITANCE TACTICS
American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 23 – July 16, 2005 American Ballet Theatre seems to ricochet between desperate attempts at “making it new” and revisiting its past repertory and honoring it with revivals. A quartet of this season’s golden oldies formed a program of their own—the “Fokine Celebration”, […]
“TOTAL IMMERSION” INDEX
From June 3 – 11, 2005, at Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre, the Royal Danish Ballet celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of August Bournonville, the dancer, choreographer, and ballet master who made the company unique and gave it its international cachet. In a SEEING THINGS series called “Total Immersion,” I wrote 15 essays about the […]
TOTAL IMMERSION: THE BOURNONVILLE FESTIVAL, NO. 15
Royal Danish Ballet: Bournonville Festival / Royal Theatre, Copenhagen / June 3-11, 2005 / Operan, the Royal Theatre’s new house for opera and ballet With the Bournonville Festival, the Royal Danish Ballet looked back to the past and offered telling examples of how it intends to preserve its singular choreographic and stylistic legacy. Appropriately, the […]