Wheeldon’s wonderful world of Shakespeare: ‘The Winter’s Tale’ for ABT at Segerstrom
Mar
24
2025
Springtime in Southern California brings big, full-evening ballets to Segerstrom Center for the Performing Arts in Costa Mesa. We last experienced Christopher Wheeldon’s work with American Ballet Theatre’s mesmerizing full-evening Woolf Works, and prior to that, it was his Like Water for Chocolate in 2023. Now again, the British choreographer draws inspiration from yet another ...
Death of a dancer: the great Christian Holder (1949-2025)
Mar
16
2025
ed. note: With permission of the author, artsmeme is very proud to republish William Whitener‘s marvelous obituary of a F.O.A.M. (Friend of Arts Meme), Christian Holder, who passed away, too soon! too soon!, at his home in London recently. How we loved this Renaissance man of the dance. Whitener’s homage, which Dance Magazine originally published ...
ABT Studio Company will ‘love you two times’ in Pepperdine showcase
Mar
7
2025
[marvelous studio footage set to The Doors, click above] ABT Studio Company, the junior company of American Ballet Theatre, is comprised of future stars of the ballet world ages 17 through 21. They hail from all over the world. Nearly 80 percent of current dancers in American Ballet Theatre are alumni of ABT Studio Company, ...
DANCE REVIEW: Twyla Tharp talks
Feb
26
2025
Dance critics like to use the word “language” in describing the identifiable steps, movement chains, and tonality associated with choreographers of stature. At sight, you know it is Balanchine, Taylor, or Cunningham. You know it’s Fosse or Cole. But that metaphor does not often move to the next level, viz., whether (or not) in drawing ...
Free tix! Twyla Tharp, Sunday at The Soraya
Feb
18
2025
Yeppie, it’s Twyla. Twyla’s back and The Soraya‘s got her. First at the Segerstrom Center and then, this coming weekend at the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for the Arts, February 22 and 23, Tharp is hitting the stage with fourteen best-in-class dancers in a 60th anniversary of her career as a choreographer. Here’s what ...
High fliers in Brooklyn: STREB’s ‘Do Not Try This At Home’
Feb
16
2025
photo credit: stephanie berger High-octane and daring. Action-packed and gravity defying. Surely we’re describing Hollywood stunt work, right? Wrong! We’re talking about rarefied choreography of extreme physicality, innovation, and near-misses that have made Elizabeth Streb a genre leader in this limit-pushing display of human action. Others in this niche of dance that we have written ...
Ratmansky rocks the classical ballet form, in ‘Paquita’ for New York City Ballet
We’re all about high-quality dance. And while we weren’t at the performances, thanks to the vivid writing of dance critic Marina Harss, and the superlative dance photography of Erin Baiano, we can experience Alexei Ratmansky‘s restaging of Petipa’s “Paquita” (1881) vicariously. According to Harss, Ratmansky infuses this warhorse ballet to music by Minkus with his ...
Rarefied air: Justin Peck’s new work at New York City Ballet
Mystic Familiar, choreography by Justin Peck, photo: Erin Baiano The symmetry is uncanny. Almost exactly eight years ago, on January 26, 2017 – six days after an impactful inauguration — Justin Peck delivered a robustly explosive, invigorating ballet, The Times Are Racing. Set to four sections of Dan Deacon’s 2012 album “America,” it throbbed with ...
Twyla Tharp, irrepressible, meets Beethoven, Philip Glass, for Jubilee Tour
Ed. note: This story by Susan Reiter, commissioned and published by the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for the Arts, is reprinted with permission. Twyla Tharp: The name is distinctive and memorable. So, too, are the accolades the choreographer has accumulated over decades in the creative artist’s lane. Now, at 83, the Tony/MacArthur/Primetime Emmy/Kennedy Center/Guggenheim ...
Fascinating: Dances by Charles Weidman
Jan
20
2025
It was a triumvirate. The brilliant second-generation offspring of Denishawn, the pioneering American modern-dance company comprised a trio of names: Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman. A fourth post-Denishawn great was Jack Cole, but Cole came to the party after that first fabulous threesome had departed. I have listed the names of Graham, Humphrey, ...