American Ballet Theatre at the Met
Amor Vincit Omnia
by Mary Cargill
Several critics have referred to Sir Frederick Ashton’s “Sylvia” as the “surprise hit” of ABT’s last season. Hit, yes, but surprise? Given the piercing and triumphant sweetness of the score, the brilliantly realized, classically inspired designs of the London production, and the choreography by one of the greatest and most musical of dance makers, it would have taken some truly awful dancing to have destroyed this beautiful work, and ABT does not have truly awful dancers. The real surprise is that it was only given a niggardly four performances over a holiday weekend this year. READ MORE
Ashton-esque
by Leigh Witchel
Even with a weak plot, Ashton's "Sylvia" is an irreplaceable work, not just for the title role created for Fonteyn, but for its mastery of classical set pieces for the corps and Delibes' magnificent score. We're blessed to have it on our shores as well as at the Royal Ballet, but ABT's performance on Wednesday night didn't make much of a case for the ballet. READ MORE
Veronika Part and Marcelo Gomes in "Swan Lake"
by Gay Morris
Veronika Part and Marcelo Gomes starred in the Wednesday matinee of “Swan Lake,” their single appearance together in a week of American Ballet Theatre performances of the Petipa/Ivanov classic. Part and Gomes are often seen in leading roles at ABT but they haven’t quite reached the stellar heights of some of their colleagues. Part, who came to the company in 2002 from the Kirov, is still a soloist, despite rarely dancing anything but ballerina roles. Gomes has not received the same adoring tributes accorded to dancers like Angel Corella and Jose Manuel Carreño or the recently retired Julio Bocca. Perhaps, it’s just a matter of time — Corella and Carreño have been principals since the mid-1990s and Bocca entered the company as a principal in 1986, while Gomes, although arriving at ABT in 1997, has only been a principal since 2002. Still, he is a superb technician and charismatic actor who deserves more attention. READ MORE
The goat-footed baloonman whistles far and wee
Scott Wells at Counterpulse
by Paul Parish
"Over you," the clever title of Scott Wells's new concert of contact-improv-based dance, had its opening night at Counterpulse in San Francisco. Wells has become over the last fifteen years the Paul Taylor of Contact Improv — that is, the first to make dances in this idiom that are deeply musical, somehow "normal," imaginative, witty, often hilarious, sometimes fierce, but always respectful enough of the concerns of the general public so that the audience in Peoria would feel they had something at heart in common. In Wells's case, perhaps as in Taylor's, it's rooted in a profound need to reconcile deep oppositions, softened and lightened by a Zen attitude towards the impossibility of it. For Wells, it looks like to me (and I follow Wells as some movie-goers followed Kieslowski) these oppositions are between art and athleticism, the masculine and the feminine, the almost disembodied breath of music and the deeply muscular nature of movement, and the aggressive and the passive modes of being. His concert came hot on the heels of the West Coast Contact Improv Festival, in which he taught a class, "Wrestling with Affection," and probably half the audience had been his students. READ MORE
Aszure Barton at the Pillow
by Susan Reiter
The ominous and the dangerous were lurking close to the surface, if not in front of our eyes, throughout the strikingly inventive program of Aszure Barton’s works — a return engagement at Jacob’s Pillow for her troupe after a well-received week there last year. Even the rambunctious, raunchy, ready-for-anything bunch of vigorous movers, dressed in sportily chic jeans, shorts and tops, scattered across the floor of the generous Duke space when the smoky lighting first went up on “Over/Come" soon revealed themselves as something darker than eager, energetic youngsters. By the time we’d been taken through “Short-Lived,” a broodingly knotty quartet, and moved onto the somber, ritualistic sensuality of the imposing “Lascilo Perdere,” Barton’s blend of sensual, grotesque and vigorously athletic movement added up to a powerful, meaty experience. READ MORE
San Francisco Letter No. 12
by Rita Felciano
“Migrations” is the second stage of ODC Theater’s graduated workshop program for post-college choreographers. Three at a time, they are given that most precious commodity for all dance makers: space, time and a supportive environment. The choreographers in “Migrations” are no longer rank beginners; in the current group, two have distinct choreographic personlities while the third one is still floundering, putting too much material into too little structure. READ MORE
Clouds and Riddles
by Christopher Correa
It was a dark and stormy night…
So begins Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s indelible first line in the novel Paul Clifford, widely known as the worst opener in the English language. It has also become known as the generic entrée into various adventure stories, horror serials, and an emporia of pulp fiction; Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys come to mind. READ MORE