World-class review of ballet and dance.
Waiting in the theater, the first unhurried trickle of French composer Erik Satie’s piano variation barely registers amidst the house chatter. Sparse and minimalistic, swelling with silences, the striking keys eventually conjure up a dancer.
Continue Reading“When you visit Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre, you realise that this is a place where time does not exist,” writes choreographer Frances Rings in her notes for Terrain, and the resonance with Wayne McGregor’s theme for the 2026 Biennale Danza, Time Does Not Exist, is unmistakable.
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It starts out light and coquettish. George Balanchine’s “Sonatine,” set to the composition by Maurice Ravel of the same name, is undeniably lighthearted, as the dancers—here, Léonore Baulac and Germain Louvet—find themselves animated by the music, as they share the stage with a grand piano (and pianist Elena Bonnay at...
Continue ReadingWhen I say this work from Hofesh Shechter set my thoughts adrift, I don’t mean that the performance failed to capture my attention.
Continue ReadingGoodbyes are often tearful. As Kun-Yang Lin’s Philly-based dance company, KYL/D, gave its final performance at the Mandell Theater this spring, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably. This was it.
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The way Margaret Jenkins tells it, Dianne came to her dance company’s studios in 1973, asking to take class. Dianne was then living in a one-bedroom apartment near San Francisco’s Mission District with her scientist husband and three young kids.
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Waiting in the theater, the first unhurried trickle of French composer Erik Satie’s piano variation barely registers amidst the house chatter. Sparse and minimalistic, swelling with silences, the striking keys eventually conjure up a dancer.
Continue Reading
“When you visit Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre, you realise that this is a place where time does not exist,” writes choreographer Frances Rings in her notes for Terrain, and the resonance with Wayne McGregor’s theme for the 2026 Biennale Danza, Time Does Not Exist, is unmistakable.
Continue Reading
It starts out light and coquettish. George Balanchine’s “Sonatine,” set to the composition by Maurice Ravel of the same name, is undeniably lighthearted, as the dancers—here, Léonore Baulac and Germain Louvet—find themselves animated by the music, as they share the stage with a grand piano (and pianist Elena Bonnay at its helm).
Continue Reading
When I say this work from Hofesh Shechter set my thoughts adrift, I don’t mean that the performance failed to capture my attention.
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Goodbyes are often tearful. As Kun-Yang Lin’s Philly-based dance company, KYL/D, gave its final performance at the Mandell Theater this spring, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably. This was it.
Continue Reading
Shen Wei is a master mover between worlds—between East and West, between choreography and painting, between process and product, between the physical and the spiritual, and I could go on.
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Rudolf Nureyev’s “Don Quixote” is a long-running ballet in La Scala’s repertoire, periodically revived and performed on tour.
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Even in stillness, there is energy. When the stage lights up on Cassandra Trenary, the dancer is already quivering, muscles tensed, as if gearing up for a fight. That is precisely what ensues.
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Cell phones and motorcycle headlights illuminated the stage at the Teatro América during a recent performance of the ballet company ProDanza. When the music also failed, audience members joined dancers...
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How do we navigate a balance between the collective and the individual? How do we negotiate strength and flexibility? How do we value tradition while embracing innovation?
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“Vibrations” closes the Opéra Garnier’s 2025/26 season with what might be read as a triptych on dance’s future, past, and present.
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Particles or string? Dark matter or light? The National Ballet of Japan offers up a contemporary double-bill of dance, loosely connected by visual metaphors to modern physics.
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When Yvonne Rainer choreographed “Trio A” on herself in 1965, it took six months to work out the four-and-half-minute solo. But for many early audience members, its effect was immediate and electric.
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Nina Ananiashvili was still thrilling audiences as an exceptional ballerina when, in 2004, she got a call from Georgia’s newly elected president, Mikheil Saakashvili.
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City living is not for all of us. For many there is nothing more appealing than that stillness of nature, that sense of suspended time.
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“Flower and Decoy” is stark, darkly poetic dance theater. Combining traditional Japanese aesthetics, supernatural horror and street dance, Tatsuya Hasegawa leads his all-male dance troupe, Dazzle, through an intricate, abstract contemplation of myth and mortality.
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“Don Quixote” is a funny ballet—and I mean funny both as in odd and as in hilarious. This season, the American Ballet Theatre presented its fourth staging of this comedic classic, by artistic director Susan Jaffe and regisseur Susan Jones.
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Entering the theater at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, one hears birds chirping and the blowing of the wind. Haze swirls from the open stage revealing only the faint outline of a set built to resemble the windswept, sandstone rock formations of Wadi AlFann (Valley of the Arts) in the ancient oasis of AlUla in the Saudi Arabian desert.
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A celebrated performer, educator and arts leader, Christopher Charles McDaniel, who was born in 1992 in East Harlem, New York, fell in love with ballet at age seven and has...
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