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Dance
Social settings: Seán Curran at the Tsai Center
Seán Curran’s dance looks like a formal exposition of movement, but after a while you begin to imagine webs of social interactions, relationships, and hidden histories.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Chris and friends: Wheeldon’s Morphoses at City Center
The hype was huge, but Wheeldon seems to have a modest agenda.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Dark victory: Boston Ballet in Serenade and La Sylphide
It’s a good pairing: together, Serenade and La Sylphide write an essay on doomed love
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
Twinkle, twinkle: Boston Ballet’s ‘Night of Stars’
For some 15 years now, Boston Ballet has danced like a major international ballet company, and Mikko Nissinen wants to be sure everybody’s aware of that.
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
Teasers and tidbits: Bunraku at the Majestic; Marcus Schulkind at Green Street
The puppeteer’s face and body reflect what the puppet is going through, as if the puppet were giving life to him instead of the other way around.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Busy busy: Something for everyone
“If you pulled the cord and the chute didn’t open, how would you dance on the way down?”
By: DEBRA CASH
Rich menu: And Hubbard Street Dance deliver
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago proved a worthy finale for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival’s 75th-anniversary season.
By: JANINE PARKER
Illusion and bedrock: Invisible Wings, plus Henri Oguike and Bridgman/Packer at Jacob’s Pillow
Oguike, I think, makes movement like a mime artist.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Pillow talking: Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève and the Mark Morris Dance Group
Last summer, Los Angeles
Times dance critic Lewis Segal suggested that ballet is dying an ugly, boring death.
By: JANINE PARKER
The reign in Spain: Boston Ballet on tour
If only the company could return to the local appreciation its international achievement deserves.
By: CHRISTINE TEMIN
Dances with character: Headlong Dance Theater, Chunky Move, Paul Taylor
Dancers are working with character more frequently, after decades of choreography drenched in physical accomplishment.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Stand-up choreography: David Parker + the Bang Group
David Parker was born too late for vaudeville.
By: DEBRA CASH
Neo-hoodoo and street kabuki: Fist and Heel at Concord’s Summer Stages and Kabuki in New York
Tradition: how to preserve it in a globalized modern culture.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Knots: Misnomer at Concord Academy
Like its name, Misnomer Dance Theater seems devoted to contrariness.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Postmodern cabaret: Susan Marshall and Doug Varone at Bard
The Spiegeltent at Bard College fits into two big trucks and can be raised in a couple of days by a crew of workers.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Life is but a dream: Aurélia Thierrée and Coleman Lemieux at Jacob’s Pillow
Children from theatrical families are often said to have been born in a trunk.
By: DEBRA CASH
Not quite Nina: Ananiashvili and the State Ballet of Georgia look to find their footing
On hearing the opening notes of the Kronos Quartet composition and seeing the dancers lit in sunny yellow, I feared we were about to be subjected to one of those “up with people” ballets.
By: JANINE PARKER
Two tales retold: NYCB’s The Nightingale and the Rose, ABT’s Sleeping Beauty
The big ballet companies are shackled tighter than ever to the idea of the story ballet.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Adventurous demos: Lorraine Chapman’s The Floating World, Snappy’s String Beings
With a variety of scrims, opaque panels, and lighting tricks, the seven dancers became the source for a dreamy succession of images by new-media artist Jonathan Bachrach.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Grief work: Prometheus's 'Devil's Wedding'
From dance to dance, they shared a movement vocabulary that suggested pain, struggle, solace, and submission to unseen but unbreakable constraints.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Lightweights: Mark Morris at the ICA, Latin Jazz at the Shubert
Two of Boston’s major dance series wound up their 2006–2007 season last week with low-calorie desserts.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Tragic tropes and anti-tropes: NYCB's Romeo, Boston Ballet's Giselle
The only question to ask about a new Romeo and Juliet, besides “Why?”, is “Why New York City Ballet?”
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Love after death: Boston Ballet redeems Giselle
At 166 years old and sporting miles of white tulle, Giselle can look pretty moldy.
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
Love and death: Boston Ballet's "Classic Balanchine" has all the basics
“Classic Balanchine” as opposed to . . . “Jazz Balanchine”? “Porno Balanchine”? What was the alternative?
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
Converging streams: Ailey does Ailey and Tharp, plus Caitlin Corbett
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater offered two milestones in the development of contemporary dance during its annual Celebrity Series visit to the Wang Theatre last week.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
City limits: Boston Cyberarts’ ‘The Body’s Limit’ at Green Street, ‘Ten’s the Limit’ at the ICA
There’s nothing like the first weekend of beautiful weather to raise skepticism about digitally mediated experience.
By: DEBRA CASH
Untold tales: Bebe Miller at the ICA, Kelley Donovan at the Dance Complex
Some dances are made on specific story lines that they keep to themselves.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
From Berlioz to Bayadère: The BSO and Boston Ballet announce 2007–2008
The czy ambiance at Symphony Hall made the announcement of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2007–2008 season seem like a family chat with James Levine.
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
Why blame Chekhov?: Eifman’s Seagull, plus [bjm_danse] and Susan Marshall
The Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg have been scavenging Russian literature for 30 years now in search of suitably theatrical subjects.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Bird brain: Boris Eifman’s The Seagull
The plays of Anton Chekhov don’t take well to dance.
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
Warm with showers: Cirque Éloize at the Majestic
Cirque Éloize’s Rain culminates in an on-stage downpour, but the audience knows that in advance.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Terpsichore’s delight: The joys of spring dance
Traveling troupes and local dancemakers spring up around the Boston area this season.
By: DEBRA CASH
Building blocks: Nacho Duato, Jorma Elo, Marc Bamuthi Joseph
New ballets must be one of the world’s most expensive consumable products.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Sight and insight: Boston Ballet’s ‘New Visions’
“New Visions” is the kind of title ballet-company directors come up with for programs that are sort of new and are hoping for vision.
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
Physics at bay: Elizabeth Streb versus gravity
Elizabeth Streb has changed the name of what she does again.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Dreaming and remembrance: Boston Ballet’s Midsummer, Boston Conservatory’s Dark Elegies
Two momentous revivals in town showed us how big the category of classical ballet really is.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Eclecto-flamenco: Compañía Rafaela Carrasco at the Majestic
The house lights go down and the audience at the Cutler Majestic feels the opening space of the stage rather than seeing it.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Drama dance: Complexions at the Tsai Center
Half a century ago something known as dance drama occupied a large part of the modern-dance repertory.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Dance chant: Deborah Abel at MIT
According to Deborah Abel, breath is the key to self-awareness and a defense against the distractions of everyday life.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
L’Allegro, fuss and feathers, and the ICA blues: A year in dance
This year we were looking forward to dance performances at the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater in the new ICA.
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
Wolf love: Marjorie Morgan in Brookline
Marjorie Morgan has extended her musical adventures with a new piece for seven dancers and double bassist.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Where’s the magic?: Looking for enchantment from Boston Ballet’s Nutcracker
The hook for Boston Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker this year is “more magic.”
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
Ordered steps: Ronald K. Brown at the Majestic
“I will not move without Your consent,” swears the text at the heart of Ronald K. Brown’s 2005 work Order My Steps.
By: DEBRA CASH
Darkness with flares: GooSayTen at Zero Arrow, Deborah Butler at Casa Nia
To American eyes, butoh dance is the ultimate in weirdness.
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
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