July 13 2024 7:30 evening Boosted by the music of Jonathan Dove, Michael Zev Gordon, Ottorino Respighi, Aldemaro Romeo, and William Grant, Amy Hall Garner’s Underneath, there is Light is a thrilling ballet. The well-designed costumes of Marc Happel—the women in airy dresses, the men in sleek pants or shorts, allow all to showcase their…
Tag: Dance
New York City Ballet at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in July
Featured image: New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Peter Walker in George Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes/Photo credit: Erin Baiano July 13, 2024 2:00 pm matinee Once a several week residency at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC), with as much Balanchine as one could possibly want in a season, New York City Ballet (NYCB) now…
Review of Edward Villella’s Prodigal Son and Peter Boal’s Illusions of Camelot
Featured image: Peter Boal as a student, courtesy Peter Boal Edward Villella The author discusses dancing as a powerful drug, in which muscles come alive. But performance also can be like running a stamina-draining marathon, tapping into stores of energy, then needing to manage an adrenaline rush that can take hours to relax from. All…
Pacific Northwest Ballet’s The Season’s Canon
Courtesy: PNB, PNB dancers Twyla Tharp’s Sweet Fields is a beautiful rendering of 18th- and 19th-century American hymns and Shaker songs to free-wheeling, almost-ethereal phrases. Dancers move in loose, open shirts and pants or mid-calf length skirts performing breathy trios. Dylan Wald has come to be identified with Jessica Lang’s The Calling, and I’ve seen…
PNB presents “Boundless”
Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Boundless” program featured choreographers Alejandro Cerrudo, Jessica Lang, and Penny Saunders. This review is of a film made opening night, March 17, 2023. In Penny Saunders’ Wonderland, Michael Wall supplies original music and adapts others. Divided into five sections, we hear strains of Jean-Philippe Goude, Hugues Le Bars, Erik Satie, Camille Saint-Saëns,…
Innovators and Icons
Review of NYCB’s stunning fall program
Robbins Bigonzetti Ratmansky
The September 25 evening program of the New York City Ballet’s fall season opened with Opus 19/The Dreamer, set to Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, the composer’s first violin concerto and often referred to as “music in technicolor.” So, too, Jerome Robbins’ colorful dance, with lead couple Tiler Peck and Gonzalo Garcia, and a…
New York City Ballet stuns with fall program
NYCB stuns in fall opening program
Olivier Wevers’ “This Is Not the Little Prince”
Olivier Wevers’ This Is Not the Little Prince is a captivating and emotional work. It is demanding on the dancers for the challenging movement and ensemble psyche Wevers asks them to create onstage. The piece is both playful and dramatic, a tour de force of surrealism. As I wrote in Dance Magazine, “[the piece]…
Bravo! Mark Morris Dance Group performs!
See here for details—40 years of lyrical joy: Mark Morris Dance Group performs. Image/credit: https://markmorrisdancegroup.org/digital-access/