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28 FEBRUARY 2014

An Otherworldly Evening: San Francisco Ballet’s Program 3

Leigh Donlan reports from the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco:

 

 

Twenty-four dancers in white classical tutus descended the shadowed grotto into Solor’s opium-induced dream, stepping into grand arabesques ever high and in unison, an awesome vision to behold. The epochal Kingdom of the Shades from Act II …

25 FEBRUARY 2014

Three from Cedar Lake

Leigh Donlan reports from Cal Performances at Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley:

 

 

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet performed three dramatically different works at Zellerbach Hall on Saturday evening. Currently under the interim artistic direction of Alexandra Damiani, the company’s long-time ballet mistress, the New York City based company, with its daring …

24 FEBRUARY 2014

Ghosts, Shades and an Exotic Firebird

 

 

San Francisco Ballet’s latest mixed bill yielded the luscious, enigmatic Ghosts by Christopher Wheeldon, the otherworldly wraiths of La Bayadère‘s Kingdom of the Shades, and a curiously de-feathered Firebird, courtesy of SFB’s resident choreographer Yuri Possokhov. All revivals, though this was the first time they had …

23 FEBRUARY 2014

Brilliant dancing, and a derailment from Robert Moses’ Kin

 

In January, San Francisco dance lovers had a rare glimpse of Robert Moses performing his own work, in a seven-minute solo entitled The Slow Rise of a Rigid Man. In a tight spotlight on the dark stage, against lyrics by the gruff-voiced David Worm that proclaimed that he …

18 FEBRUARY 2014

Neumeier’s Dream explores the fringes of the Twilight Zone

 

John Neumeier’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is wacky, whimsical and occasionally maddening, yet his depiction of a ballet sci-fi world is so dazzling and absorbing, and his story-telling so enthralling, that it seems almost churlish to pick fault.

The daring score tacks on to Mendelssohn an ominous electronic drone …