Dance
668 results
Page 53
Pennsylvania Ballet's "Program IV'
From the familiar to the experimental
“We Can Do Anything” should have been Pennsylvania Ballet's title for its May performance. In a well-balanced program the company performed works as wildly different and separated by time and choreographic sensibilities as can be imagined.
Articles
5 minute read
"Braving the New World' by Rebecca Davis
Orwell and Huxley meet their match
Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World shaped the course of modern thought. But Rebecca Davis's choreography has gone those cerebral works one better, enabling us to see and feel how totalitarian regimes work in practice.
Articles
4 minute read
BalletX's Spring Series (2nd review)
Xperimental and xciting, too
Feisty BalletX's Spring Series was sophisticated and polished, offering four new ballets, each from (mostly) new choreographers.
Articles
4 minute read
BalletX's Spring Series (1st review)
Ballet for people who don't particularly like ballet
Classical ballet has become a closed and rigid system. BalletX offers an antidote, opening up ballet to new movements and new forms of expressiveness.
Articles
3 minute read
Pennsylvania Ballet's Chopin Celebration
Experiments with Chopin
Choreographers Matthew Neenan and Jerome Robbins both heard something in Chopin's work that suggested movements far removed from gentle early 19th-Century dances. Combine the three of them, as Pennsylvania Ballet's Roy Kaiser did, and you have an exciting program combination.
Articles
5 minute read
Pennsylvania Ballet's "Program II'
Mathew Neenan takes (too many) liberties
Pennsylvania Ballet's version of Balanchine's Four Temperaments demonstrates that artists know more about life than philosophers. Matthew Neenan's take on Carmina Burana, on the other hand, tells us more about the artist than about life.
Articles
4 minute read
Pink Hair Affair's "Take It Off!'
This was burlesque— or was it?
Pink Hair Affair's Take It Off! purports to blend burlesque and modern dance, although its pieces rarely achieve a mix of either.
Articles
3 minute read
New Zealand's Black Grace at the Kimmel
Samoan energy heads west
In a memorable performance, the thrilling and brilliantly executed New Zealand company Black Grace integrated many aspects of modern dance with Samoan and South Pacific indigenous dance forms. The result was no cut-and-paste assemblage, but a new art form.
Articles
6 minute read
Elizabeth Streb's "Brave' at Annenberg (4th review)
The meaning in her movements
Elizabeth Streb is a charismatic, kinetic physicist who plumbs the stripped-down elements of dance movement: space, time and especially energy. Her movement “actions” are presented without the baggage of what many expect from dance, such as narrative, metaphoric representations of the body, eye-appealing forms and grace.
Articles
7 minute read
Elizabeth Streb's "Brave' at Annenberg (3rd review)
Movement without meaning
Elizabeth Streb, the eponymous “action architect and choreographer” of STREB, received a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 1997. But is Brave a work of genius, or a very ambitious workout?
Articles
3 minute read