Moon Water. Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan
…meditative calm and clarity as a single concept is explored—yet there’s an undertow of complexity and passion there for those who would see it. If you want novelty, fashion, sensation and display of virtuosity for its own sake, yawn yawn, you should probably look elsewhere. Moon Water performed by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan. Photo: © Liu Chen-Hsiang Cloud Gate’s movement vocabulary and aesthetic grows from the suppleness, strength and flow…
Sydney friends of the Ballets Russes. The Repin family
…d inspired so many. But what of the ‘feted and entertained’? Each city the companies visited had its complement of Australians who made it their business to find a way to entertain the dancers on weekends. Usually they also made a significant contribution to how we now understand those tours. In Sydney there was dermatologist Dr Ewan Murray-Will, for example, who entertained many of the dancers at his beach house at Bungan Beach just north of the…
Carmen Sweet. Expressions Dance Company
…rk a little further and to present it as a piece for her Expressions Dance Company. Since then Carmen Sweet has toured to the Noosa Long Weekend Festival and Singapore Dance Theatre’s Ballet Under the Stars event in 2013, and has had seasons in Brisbane and across regional Queensland. Now Weir’s dancers are embarking on a ten week tour to seventeen different venues across New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. And Canberra audiences just h…
Dance diary. May 2019
…n the counter tenor mode) Shaun Parker registered a name: Shaun Parker and Company. Next year the company that bears that name will celebrate its 10th anniversary with, I believe, a special program. The company has just recently returned from the Middle East and Austria where Parker’s most recent production, KING, was performed. In the meantime, Parker is now working on a new show for young people, IN THE ZONE, which will premiere in Sydney this c…
Hot to Trot (2020). QL2 Dance
…nging, ever-expanding patterns. To me the film often looked like origami, being made or being made to move. It was quite beautiful and a great introduction to the program. Screenshot from Natsuko Yonezawa’s Flowering. Hot to Trot, 2020 Other works on the program were created by Magnus Meagher, Alyse and Mia Canton, Courtney Tha, Lillian Cook, Pippi Keogh, Hollie Knowles, Rory Warne, and Sarah Long. Michelle Potter, 25 November 2020 Featured image:…
Adagio & Scherzo, Rite of Spring, Moving Rooms. Polish National Ballet
…ish National Ballet in Moving Rooms Photo: © Ewa Krasucka Pastor’s current company is composed of strong dancers, if those who came to New York are a guide, and, in addition, the company has been well rehearsed so that their unison work is a pleasure to watch. Choreographically, however, the works performed were rather uneven. Of the three I found Pastor’s own Moving Rooms, the final offering on the program, the most satisfying. It began with a ma…
Blue Love. Shaun Parker & Company
…his own company. It took a year or two of organisation, but Shaun Parker & Company came into being in 2010. ‘I needed someone to help me with the day to day aspects of working independently,’ he explains. ‘Now I have that, and I have a group of dancers that I call on from project to project. I make mainstage dance-theatre works with a humanistic element. And, now that I have a daughter—she’s 11, I have begun making works for families and children….
Ballo della Regina and pas de deux from After the Rain. New York City Ballet
…ith commentary by Fairchild, which should be available for longer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WirnjkgRk0 The ballet is such a wonderful example of Balanchine’s choreography. We expect to a certain extent the fast footwork (although perhaps not always as demanding as we see in Ballo della Regina) but in Ballo we also see his particular use of arms and upper body (unusual inclines of the body and again those unexpected combinations). Then, whe…
June Kerr (1932–2018)
…lle in Auckland earlier this year. The ballet world sits across national boundaries and through time, its best dancers becoming citizens of an international ‘country’). In 1952 Anne Rowse, a young New Zealand dancer training in London, also joined Festival Ballet, and she and June became instant friends. Anne spoke movingly at the funeral of the lifelong friendship that ensued. June Greenhalgh in Ruth Page’s The Merry Widow/Vilia. Festival Ballet…
Dance diary. November 2013
…lo by Frankenhaeuser who danced around the pillar—and was sometimes almost completely hidden by it—using little more that fluttering hands to convey her story. Hot to Trot: Quantum Leap Hot to Trot, a program for young, Canberra-based choreographers has been around for fifteen years, although the recent 2013 program is the first one I have managed to see. As might be expected the short pieces, which included a few short dance films, were of a mixe…