Friday, March 4

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Madrid's Teatro Real cancels performances by the Bolshoi Ballet.

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The opera house already showed its support to Ukraine on Feb. 27, when in a performance of "Twilight of the Gods," the corpse of Siegfried was wrapped in the Ukrainian flag.

 

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A review of New York City Ballet by Leigh Witchel for dancelog.nyc.

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Some of this may just be a difference in culture between Ailey, which is a dancer-centric company and NYCB, which still acts as if it’s choreographer-centric. Roberts gave the dancers something that they can sell, but not much else. Kikta and Walker’s duet was supposed to be a flirtatious relationship, but mostly it was amiable but not meaningful steps. Indiana Woodward replaced them to do balance after turn after beat after port de bras. Then out came Jovani Furlan and Emma von Enck. The bright chatter was starting to grate; without a purpose it felt like compulsive taking.

 

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An appreciation of Clement Crisp by Ismene Brown for The Arts Desk.

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But Crisp, who died in Sussex aged 95 on Tuesday evening, was profoundly devoted to the art of dance in whatever form it came, seeking out its seriousness of intention and accomplishment, viewing criticism as a calling he had felt from the first time he saw ballet as a child.

 

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Ukrainian ballet dancers take up arms.

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Principal dancer Oleksii Potiomkin, who has been telling his story on Instagram, is currently fighting in Kyiv. His story went viral after Ukrainian American writer Natalia Antonova, who has written for The Guardian, posted about the dancer on Twitter.

 

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A review of Boston Ballet by Jeffrey Gantz in The Boston Globe.

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Peck’s “Point of Departure” is set to Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw’s “Thousandth Orange,” a piano quartet (played onstage here) where the piano goes in one direction and the strings in another. Dressed in bright pastels, Peck’s three women and three men strike a classical tableau to begin; then they show us what figures on a Grecian urn might get up to when we’re not looking. It’s like reading Keats while listening to Charles Ives. The movement, like the music, can be unexpected: Derek Dunn climbs on Tigran Mkrtchyan’s back, Chyrstyn Fentroy and Patrick Yocum threaten to jitterbug. Everybody ends up back in the original tableau, but after what we’ve seen and heard, it doesn’t look the same.