Lustful doings: Barcelona Flamenco Ballet @ The Alex
Suspense, intrigue, sex, scandal, love. That sounds like a pretty typical Saturday night in Glendale, California. But the town’s lustful doings will notch up to a new level Saturday April 16, when the historic Alex Theatre presents Luxurîa (“Lust”), a flamenco dance-theater sensation from Spain’s internationally renowned Barcelona Flamenco Ballet. Barcelona Flamenco Ballet artistic directors, ...
Ballet Monte-Carlo’s good-looking ‘Romeo & Juliet, soon at Segerstrom
Mar
29
2022
Choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot‘s Roméo et Juliette (1996) created for Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo in 1996 may not be a new production, but boy does it look swankily danced, and designed, by some stunning dancers in these photos. So we’re going. Maillot has been artistic director of the company since 1993. The ballet is staged to ...
Death of a dancer: Kenneth Rinker 1
ed. note: artsmeme wishes to especially thank dance writer Susan Reiter for her humanity in contributing this appreciation of the marvelous modern dancer/choreographer Ken Rinker. You may experience a taste of Kenneth in motion in this film’ed excerpt from “The Bix Pieces.” On a September evening in 1972, I had a dance epiphany that has ...
REVIEW: Karole Armitage’s ‘A Pandemic Notebook’ at New York Live Arts
photo: julieta cervantes There they were, two luminaries of the 1980s NYC dance scene, facing us 40 years later, Karole Armitage and Jock Soto, in simple black and grey outfits. Armitage got everyone’s attention with Drastic Classicism (1981), a fierce, high-gloss, visually and sonically arresting work that shook up ballet conventions with outrageous costuming and ...
Dance memories stored in a jewelry bag, a gift from Yuriko
Mar
16
2022
A short time after Paul Taylor Dance Company founding member Sharon Kinney left Taylor’s company and had her first child, a son, she got a call for work. Calling was Yuriko (1920-2022), the great, fleeting exponent, and leading light, of Martha Graham Dance Company. It was the late sixties, and the Japanese-American dancer, transitioning from ...
Martha Graham’s ode to nature, ‘Canticle,’ re-imagined for 21st-C
jacob larsen, so young an, martha graham ‘moon’ ed. note: This story by dance critic Debra Levine, commissioned and published by the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for the Arts, is reprinted with permission. When Martha Graham premiered a new, full-company work with a poetic title, “Canticle for Innocent Comedians,” it was the Spring of ...
George Chakiris: Riff before Bernardo
George Chakiris as Riff in West Side Story, in 1959 It’s one of those fascinating show-biz factoids. For fourteen months, circa 1959, George Chakiris, a good friend of artsmeme, performed in the London company of West Side Story, at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London’s West End theater district. What is little known is that the ...
Paul Taylor American Modern Dance’s timely staging of Kurt Jooss classic ‘The Green Table’
4th April 1953: The ‘Gentlemen in Black’ sit around the conference table and discuss war in a scene from Kurt Jooss’s award-winning modern ballet ‘The Green Table’. Original Publication: Picture Post – 6477 – 20th Century War Dance – pub. 1953 (Photo by John Chillingworth/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) In 2014, Paul Taylor, who died in ...
What is the pointe? Let’s ask Ballet22. 2
Feb
24
2022
Carlos Hopuy, ‘etoile’ of Ballet 22Former Ballets Trockadero star Shoes matter. There are things — physical things — a dancer can do in pointe shoes that are simply not possible on “flat,” either in barefoot or in soft slippers. It’s about spin and speed. Balance and bravura. Line and elongation. Everyone in dance knows that ...
Nijinska’s heartstrings to Ukraine recalled by biographer Garafola
Feb
24
2022
Nijinska (left) rehearsing Nina Vyroubova and Serge Golovine in her version of The Sleeping Beauty produced by the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas in 1960 ed. note: We are nearly paralyzed with concern for Ukraine, which has played such a vital role in dance and the arts, and is now under Russian attack. Giving ...