Performance

The Instinctual Dance of Stair Walking

December 12, 2024 - By Janice Ross

If there is a single object that sets the body dancing, it is a set of stairs. Domestically, functionally, theatrically, stairs allow the body to partner with itself and move through space with a rhythm. It’s not clear precisely when stairs began to creep into the dance vocabulary of Anna Halprin—but for the visitor to the Halprin home an encounter with stairs is immediate and the impression lasting. Entering a home by stepping under a staircase sounds like the opening line of a fairytale. Indeed, walking through the front door into the Halprin house in Kentfield, and stepping directly under the home’s floating interior staircase, was both ordinary and exceptional. Ordinary because, after all, it was the front door, and exceptional because one was standing under a staircase that seemed to hover in the air. If this was indeed the front door, the mini foyer was...

Douglas Dunn in Italy: Dance, Dancer, and Spectator

July 25, 2024 - By Aline Nari, Translated from Italian by Joan Benham

From The Till Trilogy

July 17, 2024 - By Ifa Bayeza

The Ballad of Emmett Till explores the life and afterlife of Emmett Till, a Chicago teenager who takes a fateful trip to Mississippi in the summer of 1955.

He goes by the nickname Bo or BoBo and he stutters. Like the African bata “talking drum,” his stammer is percussive, a rapid-fire repetition, without hesitation. His is not a stammer of insecurity but a physical disability which he has chosen to ignore and even to exploit. He is in a hurry to say everything. He whistles in a variety of ways. These moments in the script are indicated with variations of the sign ((o)). He is both a youth who never ages and an old soul, longing for death.

He is accompanied by a troupe of fellow travelers, a quintet composed of two women and three men, a chorus of shape-shifters, trapped between life and after. Lost souls, who cannot find their way, they cling to life and the...

Spring Ahead, Fall Back: New York City Ballet’s Tradition of the New

June 20, 2024 - By Mark Franko

The Fall 2023 season of New York City Ballet’s seventy-fifth anniversary year was themed Foundations, the Winter 2024 season Evolutions, and the Spring 2024 season the Future. This spring futurity was represented by a plethora of new and/or recent choreographies and the increased presence on stage of the younger dancers of the company.[1] Some of the works premiered or reprised featured garish lighting, pop song music with lyrics that literally serve to translate the choreography’s meaning, and haute couture costumes by leading fashion designers showing off signatures more than effective costuming. I don’t see a choreographic future in any of this as it distracts from ambitious dance making even though it cannot be denied that ballet is inherently spectacular given its origins in...

The Dante Project at the Paris Opera Ballet: Moving across Media

March 25, 2024 - By Tatiana Senkevitch

More than a century ago, in his essay “On the Anniversary Celebration of Dante,” the legendary literary critic Erich Auerbach, observed that, “Dante is far from having achieved his maximum impact even now.”[1] The Dante Project—a recent collaboration between choreographer Wayne McGregor, composer Thomas Adès, visual artist Tacita Dean, and dramaturg Uzma Hameed—demonstrates that Auerbach is still right. Until this ballet, the world of dance referred to or evoked Dante’s poetry with its rich visual imagery only tangentially, as for example in several choreographic interpretations based on the music of Francesca da Rimini: Symphonic Fantasy after Dante by Tchaikovsky.[2] The Dante Project, commissioned by the Royal Opera House, is the first...