The Opera Tattler
Reviews of Performances and their Audiences
Category: Dance Review
-
* Notes *The Joffrey Ballet's Anna Karenina was presented by Cal Performances last night at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley for the first of three performances. The 2019 ballet with music by Ilya Demutsky was played live by Berkeley Symphony and conducted by Scott Speck. The music is eerie and busy, there is a lot going…
-
* Notes *The Bay Area premiere of Pina Bausch‘s The Rite of Spring was presented by Cal Performances last weekend at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. It was performed with common ground[s], a duet between Germaine Acogny and Malou Airaudo. The duet, choreographed and performed by Acogny and Airaudo, was performed first. Both are septuagenarians. Acogny…
-
* Notes *Alonzo King Lines Ballet opened a new season at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts last night. Though I enjoy contemporary dance and have walked past the Lines Ballet space countless times on 7th Street, I had not seen this company until now. It took an opera singer, of course, to get me…
-
* Notes * Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal returned to Brooklyn Academy of Music to present Bausch's last work "…como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si…" in a run of eight performances. I caught the last one on Saturday night. The piece is based on the company's experiences in Santiago, Chile and involves Bausch's…
-
* Notes * The Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg is touring a production of Don Quixote, or Fantasies of the Madman. The main conceit of Boris Eifman’s busy production is that the protagonist is not Don Quixote himself, but a madman imagining himself to be the knight errant. While an attempt to make to Don…
-
* Notes * Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater gave a series of performances in Berkeley last week. Program A included the West Coast premiere of Hope Boykin's Go in Grace, which features live music from Sweet Honey in the Rock. In principal, live music and live dance together seems like it would be great. In practice, having…
-
* Notes * The National Ballet of Canada, the New York City Ballet, and Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo are performing in a program at the San Francisco Ballet this week. The opening was last night, the National Ballet of Canada took the stage first in a piece titled A Delicate Battle. The dancing was good,…
-
* Notes * Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal returned to Cal Performances for the first time in 8 years, with a three day run of the piece Ten Chi. The work has quite a lot more dancing in it than Nelken, the only other work of Bausch's I know. It was a couple of strange Japanese/German dream-like…
-
* Notes * Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater comes to Berkeley nearly every year, with several performances and more than one program. This year the New York based company was here from February 28 until March 4, and I attended the first performance. They opened with Twyla Tharp’s The Golden Section from 1983, with music…
-
* Notes * Trisha Brown Dance Company was in Berkeley for two performances last weekend. In general, I found her style to be rather slow and sculptural. It was intellectually interesting but not engaging on a visceral level. The dancers were good, but there were times when they were not consistent with each other. For…
The Opera Tattler 