Monday, February 15

[dirac]

A story on Birmingham Royal Ballet's plans for the future by Deborah Weiss for DanceTabs.

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Acosta recently said in an interview that he feared for those dancers who are nearing their peak. But the brevity of the career means that every year counts – missing a season (or two) can alter the hoped for and expected route. In every company that was previously able to schedule multiple performances of a single programme, there was the prospect of many opportunities for casts/dancers at all stages of their careers, changing roles, increasing their repertoire. There were dancers regularly being offered new, perhaps solo or principal, parts that they may not have tackled before. This is how a company builds its artists and the future of the art form.

 

[dirac]

A review of San Francisco Ballet in "Colorforms" by Janice Berman for San Francisco Classical Voice.

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How can this end? This way. The fast-rising corps dancer Jasmine Jimison, drawn to the SFMOMA terrace by a paper airplane with a drawing of a tree, finds her tree there — a yellow gingko. She dances a supple Graham-ish solo, then joins the dancers on the stage, and then in the frame. Somehow, as these things sometimes happen, a forest appears behind them. Dance becomes art becomes nature, pointe shoes become sneakers, dancers keep dancing through the redwoods. The dancers go; the redwoods stay.

 

[dirac]

A review of Ballett Zürich in Christian Spuck's Winterreise  in by Graham Watts for Bachtrack.

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Spuck's choreography is enigmatic rather than literal. Throughout the songs, the loneliness of the long distant wanderer is emphasised by his isolation (it isn’t broken until the appearance of a street entertainer in the final song, Der Leiermann). The wanderer deliberately seeks the wastelands to avoid other travellers and yet Spuck fills the stage with performers from the very beginning.  Some literal references may appear in imagery, such as the blindfolded woman (Giulia Tonelli) who appears sporadically throughout the work and the lifelike models of crows that are carried by her and other dancers, ending the work as a murder of crows stationed around the stage: song 15 is about Die Krähe (The Crow), which follows the wanderer, awaiting his death.