Category: Dance Photos

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MORE PHOTOS OF CALATRAVA’S AWESOME MIRAGE SET

 

Above are a couple more photos of Peter Martins’ new Mirage ballet, which I wrote about here, that better showcase Santiago Calatrava’s stunning architectural set. I’d described how it closed at one point, and you can see that in the bottom photo, and I’d forgotten to mention that in the end it radiated a rainbow of color (top photo). Photos are by Paul Kolnik and are taken from Marina Harss’s excellent write-up in The Faster Times.

Funny, I recently discovered The Faster Times (I know Marina but I know her as a New Yorker writer) and was really amused to see that my very first ballroom teacher (the one who’s ultimately responsible for the title of this blog) is their ballroom critic!

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AVI SCHER & DANCERS' FIRST FULL SEASON A SMASHING SUCCESS

Here are some photos of Avi Scher’s first full season at Alvin Ailey theater, sent to me by the amazing ABT dancer-turned-photographer Matt Murphy. Visit Matt’s blog, and his photographer website.

Savannah Lowery (from NYCB) who, for the first time, completely blew me away, flying over Ralph Ippolito (also from NYCB) and Eric Tamm (from ABT), in Touch.

Ashley Bouder (NYCB principal), who replaced Sara Mearns, who had a minor foot injury. Marcelo Gomes (ABT principal, of course!) in the background. This was my second favorite piece of the evening, Utopia. It was interesting because as much as I love Sara Mearns and was disappointed I wouldn’t be seeing her, I couldn’t imagine this role being formed on anyone other than Ashley. There was so much quick-footed, high-spirited allegro dancing and Ashley is the queen of allegro. She and Marcelo were perfect together. She replaced Sara last minute and I can’t believe how quickly she learned that dance because the choreography was, like all of Avi’s choreography, rather complex and original.

Marcelo in Mystery in the Wind, my favorite ballet of the evening. It was a neoclassical piece (Avi’s style ranges between neoclassical — like Balanchine — and contemporary), that reminded me a bit of Apollo, a bit of La Bayadere, with a main love story between Marcelo and Veronika Part, and three female dancers doing solo parts, and kind of acting as muses. In addition to Marcelo and Veronika I really loved watching Abi Stafford in this (I linked to her NYCB profile since I don’t have a picture of her for Saturday night). She had several solos, some of which were kind of sweetly folksy / flirtatiously tango-y, combined with these crazy fast balletic chaine spins across and around the perimeter of the stage. She did really well and she looked really beautiful. I brought my friend Alyssa with me, who doesn’t know much about ballet, and she said she could tell right away who all the big principals were (and she was correct in her guesses)– and Abi immediately caught her eye.

Marcelo again.

Veronika Part in that same piece. She was beautiful, it goes without saying. Every single part of her body makes such a perfect shape, my friend said, and she was so wholly into the character and the music (which is completely typical of Veronika!).

Marcelo and Veronika in Mystery again. I loved the central pas de deux – so sexy and passionate!

Another of my favorites: the “Our Love’s Defense” duet from Little Stories, with NYCB’s Christian Tworzyanski and, again, the kick-ass Savannah Lowery. Savannah has a very athletic body, she’s very muscular and toned, and she looked so good in these athletic costumes and in some of Avi’s more heavy-hitter choreography. (In this piece she and Christian have this fun, sexy wrestling match/ lovers’ quarrel.) I think more of the modern choreographers when they do work for NYCB should use her – Benjamin Millepied and Jorma Elo, etc. I think modern ballet suits her body and dance strengths more than Balanchine — I really felt like she came alive to me as an artist in Avi’s work like never before. And she’s a very good actor as well!

Veronika in Touch.

And with ABT’s Arron Scott in the same.

NYCB’s Ralph Ippolito in No Matter What. Ippolito is a corps member of NYCB and I’d never noticed him before, but he really stood out to me here. He’s very intent in everything he does, and he’s very good at using his body, his limbs, to express, to make meaningful, evocative shapes.

Ja’Malik and Victoria North in No Matter What.

The theater was completely packed on Saturday night, opening night, and I’m told it was the same at yesterday’s matinee, despite it being Easter. There’s one last performance of this short season tonight, at 8p.m. that I heard is pretty sold out as well. How excellent for this young choreographer!

Here are some of the many other reviews: Oberon’s Grove, the NY Times, Dance View Times.

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PAUL TAYLOR

 

Before Corella Ballet moved into City Center, Paul Taylor Dance Company had their month-long season there, in celebration this year of Paul Taylor’s 80th birthday. I didn’t go to as many performances as last year, but went to see the two new dances premiering this season: Also Playing (pictured above) – a sweetly funny tribute to Vaudeville, and Brief Encounters, by turns sensual, mysterious, unsettling, and funny, and danced all in black underwear with golden lighting by James Ingalls. I also saw Piazzolla Caldera, not a new piece but from 1997, but new to me. I loved it — very sexy Argentine tango but in places also humorous. This is typical Paul Taylor: humor mixed with sensual / sexy / musicality, athleticism, etc. I don’t have time to write a full review but here are some photos, all by Tom Caravaglia.

These next two are from Also Playing:

 

 

These are from Brief Encounters:

 

 

 

 

(above photo by Gloria Wright, taken from here)

And this one, again by Tom Caravaglia, of Piazzolla Caldera:

 

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SONYA TAYEH REHEARSAL WITH BILLY BELL, ET AL, AT DEMA DANCE

 

 

Today I was invited to attend a rehearsal for a new company, DeMa Dance Company, at their studio in Brooklyn. For their first set of performances, which will be in May at the Alvin Ailey Theater, Sonya Tayeh, from So You Think You Can Dance is choreographing a piece, called When the Love Enters, the Light Shines, set to Bjork’s Unison. They let me sit in and watch her work, which was really thrilling!

Thrilling also because none other than Billy Bell (who, all regular readers of this blog will remember, I was going on and on and on about at the start of this SYTYCD season) just became a principal dancer with this company. So I got to watch him rehearse too 😀

And then, I got to do little mini-interviews with both Tayeh and Bell. (A first for this blog!) Billy is one of the sweetest, most enthusiastic people I think I’ve ever met and I’m just so intrigued by Sonya’s unique work; she’s really endlessly fascinating, as was just watching her work — and this is the first time I’ve ever been invited to a rehearsal when the dance is at its beginning stages; you learn so much more about how a dance is actually created by watching at this stage than when you only see the finished, or almost-finished product. So I’m really thankful to DeMa for inviting me today.

It may be a couple of days though before I’m able to get the interview and rehearsal notes up because I have Alvin Ailey tonight and then tomorrow I’m leaving for Art Basel in Miami for the weekend. But I wanted to at least get some of the photos up now (all taken by DeMa’s photog Kim Max).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Above are Tayeh and Bell with the founders and artistic directors of DeMa, Despina and Matina Simegiatos (Matina is on the far left, Despina on the far right). Below is the whole company. All of the dancers (at least those I saw today) are very good, with strong technique and loads of energy (you need it to work with Tayeh). More on the rehearsal and the interviews to come, but in the meantime, check out their website — I think they’ll be a promising company. And check out the videos — I particularly like the top one — Zaloggos — about the Greek women.

 

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SOME PHOTOS OF ABT’S FALL ’09 OPENING NIGHT GALA

 

Above photo by Rosalie O’Connor of Everything Doesn’t Happen at Once by Benjamin Millepied; photos below by Andrea Mohin from the NY Times, of Millepied’s Everything (dancers: Marcelo Gomes and Isabella Boylston), and Alexei Ratmansky’s Seven Sonatas (dancers l-r: Stella Abrera, Xiomara Reyes, and Julie Kent).

 

 

Here is Gia Kourlas’s review in the Times.

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THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE IS NOT THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (BUT COULD USE MORE DANCERS!)

 

Over the weekend I went to see The September Issue, the documentary about Anna Wintour and Vogue, focusing on the mag’s — well, the fashion industry’s — most important issue of the year. I found it thoroughly entertaining, but not in the way I expected. I expected it to be a real-life Devil Wears Prada, but it wasn’t that at all. I remember from the book, Lauren  Weisberger’s main character constantly feeling like a horrid slob amongst all the fashionistas — or fashionista wannabes — who worked at the magazine, and I remember her even being ridiculed by everyone for wearing Ann Taylor, supposedly a cheap designer.

Of course Devil Wears Prada, the film, played up on all of that, having Meryl Streep lecture Anne Hathaway on her decidedly frumpy wardrobe and call her (a size 6) “fat.” But here, everyone who works at Vogue — particularly Wintour and other higher-ups like creative director Grace Coddington (who is really the emotional centerpiece of the film) are pretty mundanely dressed. They seem more like incredibly hard-working women who are far too busy to care much about how they look everyday at the office. No one wears much makeup, hair looks completely unstyled, Coddington munches on a rather bland-looking corner deli-bought salad while enthusing about the photo-shoots she’s designed and her romantic vision for the issue, talking about her past as a model and how she turned to the editorial side of things early on after a car accident ended her modeling career, and bemoaning the wasted money spent on photo spreads Wintour ended up not liking and axing entirely.

But my biggest surprise was how unattractive I found the models to be. And they weren’t — they were all really beautiful. But I think I’ve seen so much dance now that, as much as I used to admire models, I’m now almost horrified at their bad posture, their boney bodies, their completely uncoordinated frames, their sloppy-looking lines. During a shoot, this one model was playing around and she decided to do a kick — a battement — for the photographer and it was just about the worst kick I’ve ever seen. Her knee was bent awkwardly, her foot was doing nothing at all and gave her leg no line, and she almost fell over. The photographer seemed to think it was great though.

Made me think how much better dancers might be at making the clothes look good. I don’t know, maybe most dancers are too short or the fabric doesn’t drape as well over built musculature as it does over basically skin-covered bone.

 

This wasn’t the same model from the film — I can’t find a photo of her — but it’s taken from Italian Vogue. I mean the clothes look good — she’s pretty — but look at her lines underneath…

This in contrast to the New York City Ballet dancers, as photographed with this gorgeous flowing diaphanous fabric for NYCB’s Winter season calendar, which I just received in the mail today.

 

 

 

 

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KYLE FROMAN = VISIONARY

 

 

Just looking at a couple of the photos New York City Ballet dancer turned photographer Kyle Froman has shot for Morphoses to publicize that company’s upcoming City Center season (tix go on sale for that today, by the way) and am realizing what an excellent photographer he is. I mean, he doesn’t just take pictures of dancers in action (which is an art in itself) but he has a real vision for dance with the way he poses his subjects against a setting and the overall images he creates and the feelings they evoke. He’s like Balanchine as a photographer. I don’t see a lot of dance photography like this.

 

 

 

 

I enjoyed watching him dance with NYCB — particularly his hilarious turn as the pompous Russian danseur in Balanchine’s Slaughter on Tenth — but sometimes I think a dancer finds his or her true calling when he “retires.”

Here is his website. He also has a book out, In the Wings, consisting of photos he took behind the scenes at NYCB when he was still dancing there.

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FALL FOR DANCE 2009

 

It’s September — happy September everyone — and for New Yorkers that means Fall For Dance is just around the corner. Tickets go on sale 11 a.m. September 13th, so time to get thinking about what all you want to see. For people unfamiliar with this festival (which this year takes place from September 22 – October 3), three to four companies perform each night and tickets are only $10 a piece per night. A great opportunity for first-time dance-goers. Tix sell out out at the speed of light, though, so have your computer turned on and your browser pointing here by above said time on above said date.

In celebration of the centennial of Ballets Russes, many of the participating companies are performing BR classics like Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun and Fokine’s Dying Swan and Spectre de la Rose. There are also several lectures in the City Center studio centered around BR and its influence today. Go here for the schedule and more info.