DANCE THEATER REVIEWS

Opening night on August 1st 2016 of a shared week at the Joyce presented by the venerable American Dance Festival got the six-day run off to an auspicious start. Provincial Dances Theatre, a company from Russia, treated dancegoers to two mesmerizing contemporary works by Tatiana Baganova that will a...

Three men engage in acrobatic entanglements that transform from free-moving sculptural configurations to crumpled masses of bodies that roll all over the floor of a darkly lit fog filled stage. Resembling an improv-ed floor-work exercise full of incongruously musical acrobatic manipulations, this in...

Though it was hot and muggy on the evening of July 24th, 2016, the jam-packed audience at Manhattan Movement & Arts Center was grinning agog like newly minted parents infatuated with their brood. The cause: a troupe of adorable bambine from Staten Island Ballet performing Ellen Tharp's 'Tarantella'....

Doug Varone and Company impress at Bates Dance Fest with new and classic work....

In iLuminate you're transported on a thrill seeking yet mind-boggling ride. The energetic nine-member troupe is full of expert dancers who dance full-throttle the entire show. Their unified razor-sharp work is worthy of the precision of the Radio City Rockettes....

BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! offered New Yorkers a free evening of empowering music and dance at the Prospect Park Bandshell on July 21st 2016.  The program began with Brandee Younger's glistening jazzy harp music following the traditions of Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane.  Younger's mellow jazzy mu...

The Australian Ballet return to the London Coliseum this summer with the UK debut of Alexei Ratmansky's Cinderella, created on the company in 2013. Sleek, surreal and contemporary, there is no trace of a pumpkin or any talking mice in this new adaptation of the classic fairy tale....

If we've been here before, why aren't the returns diminishing? The sequence repeats itself all night long in continuous loops and yet the eye never wanders. To the contrary one is drawn in deeper with each new repetition. Is it the weather-beaten beauty of the performers and the total investment wit...

Bradley has written a clear, comprehensive guide to dance education in all its current ramifications including jazz and hip hop. She discusses classes for students of all ages including adults. Her tone is friendly and accessible. She lays out the facts about everything from cost to male dance educa...

The indoor-outdoor Alma Theatre was seasonally comfortable with almost all of the seats full on opening night of Groundworks Dance Theater's 14 th annual performance at the Cleveland Heights hilly, tree-covered Cain Park. What the participants didn't know was that the almost always proficient Ground...

According to Artistic Director/Producer Tony Waag, Tap Treasures Showcase "reinvestigates and revisits eight historic locations in Manhattan that contributed to the evolution of tap dance." The hour-long show was performed at The Duke on 42nd Street on Thursday, July 14, 2016....

Seasoned choreographer Twyla Tharp presents two classic pieces and one New York City premier for her 2016 summer season at the Joyce Theatre.  Tharp's choreography ranges from intense to silly and playful blending classical ballet and modern lines with pedestrian movement.  While at times her chor...

The maxim 'Go big or go home' holds. That's one thing that can be said for Korea National University of Art's 'K Arts; Rising Stars of Korea Gala': they dance big; Bolshoi big. The leg extensions were never below 9 o'clock and more often than not floated past 12 o'clock; the pirouettes were never fe...

Robert Creighton, embodying the spirit of James Cagney in this energetic, fast-paced, biographical musical, Cagney, playing at the Westside Theater/Upstairs, Off-Broadway, brings the Hollywood icon to life. He has the physical plant of Cagney, as well as a dynamic talent for tap dancing, singing, ...

Sitting through BalletX's 10th anniversary season performance at Philadelphia's Wilma Theater on July 6, 2016, I was struck with some deep pangs of disappointment. It wasn't that the new works presented that evening were bad, quite the contrary. But how does one say that something more was expected,...

On June 29, 2016, The Black Iris Project, under the direction of the award-winning choreographer Jeremy McQueen, performed their new ballet entitled Black Iris at Central Park as part of SummerStage- the largest free performing arts festival in New York City. It was such a beautiful evening- a perfe...

Lines of light illuminate the pathway of a woman in flight. Her focus is razor sharp as she surveys men soaring around her in configurations that fluctuate between the flight patterns of birds and planes. Eventually these men hoist and entangle her in a never-ending series of lifts that keep her sus...

Alexei Ratmansky's 2015 version of 'Sleeping Beauty,' based on the Stepanov notation of the original 1890 version, as well as Diaghilev's production in 1921, has always posed a problem for me. I saw it last year with a friend, and our reaction was the same: why do we need this new 'Sleeping Beauty?'...

Sir Kenneth MacMillan silenced the Bard to the wordless storytelling of corporeal movement. His three-act Romeo & Juliet remounted at MetOpera this June 20-25, ennobled by three decades in American Ballet Theatre repertory....

Jack Ferver never let up on his drag delivery. Switching arbitrarily from bad French to English or from danse to dance passed for plot in this cabaret act. The scantily clad men in the audience - I attended the June 30th, 2016 performance - lapped it up before they even had a chance to hear the next...

Performing for the first time in more than a decade, the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival welcomed The Philadelphia Dance Company (PHILADANCO) to the Prospect Park Bandshell on Saturday, June 25th 2016. This evening's program tailored specifically for the festival featured cutting edge choreography...

'We're the lucky ones,' said Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet (CPYB) CEO Nicholas Ade as he introduced the company's 60th Anniversary Celebration at the Sunoco Theater in the Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts in Harrisburg on June 25th, 2016. Ade acknowledged the tremendous accomplishment in...

You've been here before. Someone is giving a report on something that might have once held interest but through virtue of repetition, perfunctory execution, and obsession with minutiae that thing has become prosaic at best. Prosaic is the optimal description for this extended talkfest that Susan Mar...

BWW Reviews 'Swan Lake' by ABT starring Maria Kochetkova....

The Radio City Rockettes star in the new summer show at the Radio City Music Hall, 'New York Spectacular,' but don't expect the traditional razor precision ensemble work that you may be accustomed to seeing. This new show has the personalized stamp of popular So You Think You Can Dance choreographer...