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Anne Teresa de Keermaeker’s Mean Girls

The Lincoln Center Festival is presenting a retrospective of the Belgian choreographer’s early works. Last night, I saw her Rosas Danst Rosas, a dance that has been canonized as one of the milestones of contemporary choreography. The film version, by Thierry de Mey, has been viewed and imitated thousands of times, including, most recently, by  Beyoncé. To me, the dance has a distinctly “mean girls” vibe—four adolescents, stuck in a kind of  study-hall purgatory.  Here’s my review of the piece, for DanceTabs.

 

Photo by Herman Sorgeloos
Photo by Herman Sorgeloos
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Just Because…

It’s too late to put in my review of Concerto Barocco at the New York City Ballet, but here is a photo from that performance, on opening night of the winter season, featuring Maria Kowroski (on the left) and Sara Mearns (on the right). Beautifully captured by Paul Kolnik.

Maria Kowroski and Sara Mearns in Concerto Barocco. Photo by Paul Kolnik.
Maria Kowroski and Sara Mearns in Concerto Barocco. Photo by Paul Kolnik.
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Go for Barocco

My first review of New York City Ballet’s winter season is out today on DanceTabs. It’s never a bad idea to start of a season with an all-Balanchine program, especially if it includes “Concerto Barocco,” a microcosm of musicality and modernity. The company seems to be in good form. Here’s a short excerpt from the review:

“We see and hear each of its moving parts, understand the transitions, and notice the way certain phrases, like a repeated hop on pointe followed by a small bow, or a courtly Baroque dance step, return from one movement to the next, leading to a logical, almost inevitable conclusion….And yet, for all its concern with structure, the ballet reads as pure, sublimated meaning and emotion.”

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Twyla’s Bach Partita Returns

Sterling Baca, Christine Shevchenko, Devon Teuscher, and Blaine Hoven in Twyla Tharp's "Bach Partita". Photo by Gene Schiavone.
Sterling Baca, Christine Shevchenko, Devon Teuscher, and Blaine Hoven in Twyla Tharp’s “Bach Partita”. Photo by Gene Schiavone.

This season, ABT brought back Bach Partita, which it hasn’t performed since 1985, two years after it was created for the company. It’s a big, brilliant piece, with thirty-six dancers, who animate the stage with in constantly changing patterns for thirty minutes. The music is Bach’s second partita for solo violin, a monster of a work, played in the pit by the young violinist Charles Yang. Here’s my review for DanceTabs. (It also includes thoughts on Mark Morris’s Gong and Alexei Ratmansky’s new Tempest, which I saw again this week.)

And a short excerpt: “Throughout the ballet, Tharp’s movement is technical, precise and highly articulated. As with Balanchine, the bodies are always distinct, framed in space….It’s not unusual to have three pas de deux going on at once, independent of each other. In these cases the eye is forced to jump from one to the other, and it’s virtually impossible to catch everything.”

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Ballets about Ballet: Les Sylphides and Theme and Variations at ABT

The opening tableau in Les Sylphides. Photo by Gene Schiavone
The opening tableau in Les Sylphides. Photo by Gene Schiavone

At the Saturday matinee, ABT presented a program consisting of Fokine’s Les Sylphides, Stanton Welch’s Clear, and Balanchine’s Theme and Variations. The most interesting aspect was seeing the contrast between Sylphides and Theme. Two sumptuous works about the nature of ballet itself. I reviewed the show here.

A short excerpt: “In many ways these two works illustrate what we think about when we think about ballet. The first is a vaporous homage to the aura of mid-nineteenth century works like La Sylphide and Giselle. The latter, a luminous affirmation of the classical style, specifically the high classicism of the Russian Silver Age and its exemplary ballet, Sleeping Beauty.”

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Seeing Balanchine with New Eyes: Pacific Northwest Ballet in NYC (DanceTabs)

When an out-of-town company brings Balanchine ballets to New York, part of the pleasure is seeing  different versions of familiar works. This week, Pacific Northwest Ballet presented a single evening of Balanchine: Agon, Concerto Barocco, and Apollo, all but Apollo staged by Francia Russell, who danced with NYCB in the fifties. Apollo was staged by Peter Boal, now the company’s artistic director. Here’s my review, for DanceTabs.

And a short excerpt:

“One of the thrilling aspects of dance (and anything that involves the body) is that it is constantly in flux. Technique changes, steps are filtered through a company – or national – style, and choreography is remembered differently by different people. Someone who learned a ballet in the fifties will have performed slightly different steps than a ballerina dancing it twenty years later (or earlier). She will then pass on those alternate steps to a particular group of dancers under her tutelage. Not to speak of personal style. Just think of some of the ballerinas who have performed in Concerto Barocco: Suzanne Farrell, Diana Adams, Gelsey Kirkland, Allegra Kent, Tanaquil LeClercq. It’s a surprise we recognize the ballet at all.”