VVoice

The troupe was at its ravishing best in two small masterworks of lyrical dancing—Antony Tudor’s serene Continuo,with its miraculous floating lifts, and George Balanchine’s Valse-Fantaisie, a windswept bagatelle that restores your faith in romance. Village Voice 2/13/04

Many of the solos, duets, and small-group vignettes that constitute [Landmarks of Dreams] have a colorful, playful air typical of a circus with theatrical aspirations, their vocabulary cheerfully mixing acrobatics, ethnic dance, and the ingenious cantilevering of contact improv. Village Voice 2/13/04

Classical dance fans in the West are perennially thrilled to hear that the Russians are coming. Via the burgeoning DVD industry, they’re traveling across space and out of the past—on small, shiny disks designed to last forever. Village Voice 1/21/04

This season marks the 100th anniversary of George Balanchine’s birth, and the dance world is rushing around commemorating it with productions of the ballets, exhibitions in multiple media, symposiums, lecture-demonstrations, and so on. Some of the activity will be wonderful. Some of it, inevitably, will be mediocre or, worse, merely bandwagon behavior. Village Voice 1/7/04

The sedate elders [surrounding the children] serve as models of gracious decorum, as if civilization were achieved along with the attainment of full height. Village Voice 12/10/03

Ambitious beyond its power to deliver, [Tynek’s Pilot’s Dream] is filled with vision, charm, and wit. Village Voice 12/10/03

[Jessi] Scopp . . . alternates lithe, quicksilver, frequently violent movement with ominous slow-motion and suspended or frozen postures – to terrific effect. Village Voice 12/03/03

Cultivating their unique beauty and dignity, Fagan makes each member of his company look like a god in the pantheon of his imagination. Village Voice 11/26/03

The second company of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, may be chamber-size, but its young dancers possess enough exuberance to fill a stadium. (Hubbard Street 2); No reference here to the legendary Elssler’s sensuous allure. No nod even to the lush waltzing that’s the national dance of Straussville. (The Ballerina Fanny Elssler) Village Voice 11/19/03

[Soledad Barrio] can access the deepest, most primal feelings and project them directly to her audience. Impelled by will and imagination, she turns herself into an engine of arousal and destruction. (Noche Flamenca) [An] infectiously joyous show, which proves that distinctive ingredients need not be diminished or obscured when they meet and mix. (Black Burlesque [Revisited]) Village Voice 11/12/03