Category: dance

Merce Cunningham might be gone, but his work lives through his dancers. “It’s hard to overstate the brilliance of the dancers — Dylan Crossman, Silas Riener, Jamie Scott, Melissa Toogood — who catapult Cunningham’s spirit into the present more than any tangible artifact possibly can. Their movement lives on a precipice, reads like a succession of narrow escapes: almost collapsing, almost colliding. Yet it springs from an unshakeable foundation, from knowing the rules deeply enough to transcend them.”

“One of the 21st century’s greatest choreographers is taking another drink from the fount of classical ballet: Alexei Ratmansky plans to create a new Harlequinade next year for American Ballet Theater, a reconstruction of Marius Petipa’s ballet Les Millions d’Arlequin.”

“Ballet abounds in self-contradictions. It continually shows mere mortals becoming works of ideal geometry, and helps us see music in terms of three-dimensional space. It can turn silliness into enchantment, make myth real, or — even in a work of pure dance — make us feel how the sublime coexists with the comic.”

“Before Terminus Modern Ballet Theater even puts a pointe shoe onto a Marley floor, it is already one of the most prominent dance troupes in Atlanta. First, there’s the star power of their five company dancers — perhaps the most recognizable faces in the Atlanta dance community from their tenures at Atlanta Ballet.”

“It’s an unusual choice for a playwright, especially one prone to having his characters gush torrents of words. Speaking over the phone from London last week, Mr. Walsh said he knew early in the writing of Arlington that the middle segment had to be dance.” Brian Seibert reports.

It’s even in Utah. “A breath of fresh choreographic air is coming to Salt Lake City. Ballet West artistic director Adam Sklute has invited companies from across the country to join Ballet West for the first annual National Choreographic Festival, May 19–20 and 26–27. Over the course of two weekends and two different programs, premieres and recently acquired repertory will be performed in the new, state-of-the-art Eccles Theater.”

Benjamin Millepied’s “ambitious vision is redefining what an independent dance company can do: grow into an online dance platform and a lifestyle brand, host a building and performance space, and build an international presence.”

FLEXN, created by opera and theatre director Peter Sellars and flex pioneer Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray, has grown and changed a lot in the two years since its premiere. Courtney Escoyne talks with Regg Roc about flexing as a dance form and how social justice messages were integrated into the piece.

“Shelby Shellz Suzie Q Felton is a rarity in the flex world: a woman. However, as her name implies, she’s not just one woman, but three, wrapped into a single, articulate body. There is the day-to-day Shelby, who is quiet but given to quick humor. Then there’s Shellz, who ‘is very smooth, very relaxed,’ Ms. Felton said. And Suzie Q? ‘Suzie is more cutthroat.'”

If such sleek, unexamined images of violence against women — this wasn’t the only one in “Odessa,” but to me the most prominent and inexplicable — weren’t so pervasive in contemporary ballet, I might have felt differently. But they are, and I’ve seen enough.