We'll have a new issue up September 11, 2006. Dancers seem to be resting.
Jubilant Jubilee
The Bolshoi Ballet in London
by John Percival
“50th Anniversary Season” the programme book announced, and of course the impresarios, Victor and Lilian Hochhauser, made the most of all the publicity this brought, although attentive readers may remember that they had not originally intended to bring Moscow’s Bolshoi ballet to Covent Garden this summer, and only substituted it when the Maryinsky management from St Petersburg fell out with them over a dispute about repertoire. So the Maryinsky Ballet came independently to the London Coliseum with a one-week all-Shostakovich programme which I have already reviewed on this site, and the Bolshoi arrived immediately after them for three weeks with some interesting novelties among their bills. READ MORE
Mark Morris's New, Glorious "Mozart Dances"
by Susan Reiter
What an abundant, infinite world of emotional possibility Mark Morris has fashioned in his expansive new evening of three separate but inter-related works set to Mozart. One can sense him choreographing with a strict sense of discipline, marshalling all the considerable craftsmanship at his disposal, yet at the same time he opens a window on our humanity. “Mozart Dances” provides moments of poignancy — meditations on the pain of solitude or rejection, allusions to a mentor being abandoned, or possibly surpassed, by his protégé — as well as warm celebrations of the joys of companionship, the strength of communal support, the give-and-take within a layered society. READ MORE
Letter from New York
Lincoln Center Festival: A Tale of Two Beowulfs
by Nancy Dalva
The notion of festival-as-think-tank was carried from the rich first week of the Festival into the varied panoply of offerings of the second,with Benjamin Bagby’s minimalist one man “Beowulf” following upon the maximalist Beowulf-based “Grendel” of the week before. A co-commission with the Los Angeles Opera, “Grendel,” seen at the New York State Theater, offered hugely complicated visual effects. The scenery is epic. READ MORE
Tapping from New York to Chicago
“Imagine Tap,”
Tap City, and the
Chicago Human Rhythm Project
by Sali Ann Kriegsman
During the past two decades, tap has grown an idiosyncratic infrastructure of its own — an informal circuit of festivals. Tap festivals in St. Louis, Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and a half dozen other cities in North America are where some of the most exciting dancing and talent can be seen. Tap fever has spread to Europe, Australia, Japan, Israel, Brazil and even China — among some 27 countries. But here, in the US, you won’t see what has been brewing tap-wise under the radar either at mainstream presenting sites or “alternative” spaces where we typically look for the new, the next. READ MORE
Craft and Concept
The Trey McIntyre Project at Wolf Trap
by George Jackson
Expectations differ for up-and-coming ballet choreographers and for their counterparts in contemporary dance. In ballet the choreographers themselves and their clienteles put more emphasis on craft than on vision. It is the nuts-and-bolts, the tooling, the finish of a new ballet that gets comments from fans and from the press. Making a piece in the manner of this or that famous example is expected and, indeed, considered desirable. So what if the work has no singular, original, innovative vision? Skeptics even argue that there’s no such thing as real novelty because, if you look closely, ballet choreographers have been copying their teachers’ dance pieces since the dawn of the artform and only the handwriting is new. READ MORE