The Lyon Ballet is here--at the Joyce, with a great program that feels as if it's made for New Yorkers (no Eurotrash, for example, or almost none). It includes Cunningham's Beach Birds, which the dancers do with loving conscientiousness, if not quite the amplitude and eccentricity of the late choreographer's own, soon to be "redundant" (as the British put it) dancers. Anyway, here's the first … [Read more...]

Mark Morris, Paul Taylor and--less heavy--Lar Lubovitch all have seasons this week and next. And I have reviews of them. I'll keep adding at the top as the week progresses, so the latest on top. Friday night (first program) of Lar Lubovitch was one of those times where I felt keenly grateful for the dancers--or, in this case, one dancer, Reid Bartelme--for improving on the material they'd been … [Read more...]

Posts here in the next six weeks are going to be pretty barebones: links to stuff Foot contributor Paul Parish and I have written elsewhere, sans photos or anything, for now. (I may gussy them up later.) But in case you just want to head direct to go, the Financial Times allows you about an article a day, which is certainly enough for the dance offerings (by me and the glorious Clement Crisp). … [Read more...]

(*Corrections to paragraph begun with *below. plus added bit of Denby poem at the end) You'd think ballet would be good at expressing the exhilaration of love, and it is, but only if it can cap it off with betrayal, tragedy, death! Consider Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, La Sylphide, Giselle, Scheherazade, La Bayadere--not to mention the moderns, Balanchine and Tudor in particular. (Ashton is more … [Read more...]

When a young choreographer has the bud of a beautiful language but only an intermittent sense of what to do with it, her promise is an open question; as a reviewer I tend to answer in the affirmative, in the hope that the language will win out in the end. Does it usually? That depends on the powers that be--not just critics, but producers, artistic directors, etc.--recognizing how much it counts … [Read more...]