The Mark Morris Dance Group
An Evening at Home
by Nancy Dalva
The James and Martha Duffy Performance space is a dance studio that converts, with risers and very comfortable padded chairs, to an intimate theater, holding, in the configuration for these performances at the Mark Morris Dance Center, 139 people. Have you ever wondered what it might have been like to live in Salzburg, or Vienna, in a grand house, and hire, for your evening’s entertainment the finest musicians, for your own musicale? This is what I imagine that was like, but the house is the house that Mark Morris and his amazing staff have built, and that now belongs, lucky us, to those who love dance. This concert experience, in this space, was the equivalent of chamber music, in dance terms. Intimate, with a luxury of detail and relationship. An inherently joyful evening, on a human scale, with the dancers not twenty feet away. The evening I was there, Mark Morris had just returned from working on his “Orfeo,” which will open at the Met in the spring. From the epic, to the intimate. It is part of his genius to find each of those qualities residing in the other. READ MORE
Royal Ballet
Bits and Pieces
by John Percival
The Royal Ballet has invented some odd programming this season. The latest example features a revival of last year's new production of the great Danish classic “La Sylphide”. I can understand why, fairly soon after the original run, they decided to give only seven performances, but why in that case split them up into two different bills? Principal dancer Johan Kobborg, who staged August Bournonville's romantic masterpiece, has now mounted some more Bournonville dances, mainly from “Napoli”, as a curtain raiser, but they get only three showings, which seems daft. At its other four performances “La Sylphide” is preceded by Frederick Ashton's “Rhapsody” — and, keeping up the absurdity, that's all the Ashton we get until the very end of the season. READ MORE
Three Evenings at the New York City Ballet
Tradition and Innovation Program
by Mary Cargill
Partners and Shadows: New Dancers in the Stravinsky Ballets
by Leigh Witchel
Jerome Robbins: An American Icon Program
by Susan Reiter
Gentle Love in post-Soviet Verona
"Romeo and Juliet"
by Alexandra Tomalonis (January 19 and 25, 2007)
and George Jackson (January 24, 2007)
Today, there are nearly as many ballets called “Romeo and Juliet” as there are “The Nutcracker,” but Leonid Lavrovsky’s grand, splendid and poetic version, choreographed for the Kirov Ballet in 1940, was the first. The Bolshoi Ballet — and its prima ballerina, the great Galina Ulanova, also borrowed from the Kirov — conquered the West with the ballet in the 1950s and a movie was made of her performance. The ballet was a casualty of the Cold War; it hasn't often been abroad since, although imitations abound. The Bolshoi brought its version — much darker and more dramatic — here several years ago, but this is the first time the Kirov has danced the ballet in D.C., and while the production looked a bit thin and down at heel on opening night, the two young dancers in the title roles were so gorgeous it almost didn’t matter. READ MORE
San Francisco Letter No. 20
by Rita Felciano
The first two weeks in January always remind me of “dead week” that odd period in college when classes were finished and the freneticism of exams had not yet begun. So it was a relatively empty calendar and mild curiosity about unfamiliar ensembles that prompted my going to see Naoko Maeshiba at NOHspace, the Hungarian Stage Folk Ensemble at the Marin Civic Center and The Crucible production of “Romeo and Juliet”. All three programs opened new doors by defying preconceptions, always a pleasant surprise. READ MORE
Yoshiko Chuma & The School of Hard Knocks
“A Page Out of Order: M”
by Susan Reiter
Fascinating dislocations, abrupt and rarely logical transitions, powerfully committed performers and a rich, exceptional musical score — these were just some of the many elements spilling across the stage (and across screens) during Yoshiko Chuma’s latest work. True to its title, the various “pages” were offered in a seemingly random order that invited the viewer to process and reassemble the multiple elements on one’s own terms. Clearly, much thought and experience — the work has been percolating through various incarnations and international collaborations — lay behind the layered activity and frequent tonal shifts of this dense 90-minute work. READ MORE
Mannequins and Masturbators
Japanese Contemporary Dance Showcase, Program A
Kim Itoh and the Glorious Future (Dead and Alive: Body on the Borderline)
Noism 07 (NINA materialize sacrifice – 1st part)
by Tom Phillips
Kim Itoh has been called the “bad boy of butoh,” and the label seems to fit. He begins “Dead and Alive: Body on the Borderline” with his back to the audience, hunched in a fetal position in a long white robe with a dark hood over his head. In the distance, dimly lit, is a cluster of three naked men, each with one hand over his genitals and the other covering his face. To a distant strain of some 19th century romantic symphony, the naked men begin to move, crossing the stage at an ant’s pace, spreading out with tiny, barely perceptible steps. Itoh struggles to his feet, then collapses again. Finally he rises to kneel, and makes his way across the stage on his knees in a horizontal ribbon of red light, while the three naked men revolve slowly in the background like statues on pedestals. This glacial crossing takes at least five minutes and has the quality of living sculpture. It evokes some prehistoric evolutionary sequence, or threshold of human consciousness. Then the fun begins. READ MORE