Category Dance
Ballet and knick-knacks
What came of the weekend? Well, one highlight was an evening at the ballet. The program featured a new dance by a guy whose name I forgot but who normally does Beyoncé music videos and is generally considered a “big deal”. The piece was made for Natalia Osipova who, as the reigning prima of the […]
Weekend in the Northeast: Newcastle, Durham, Hadrian’s Wall
On Friday night I took a train from London to Newcastle, checked into a grand-but-faded Victorian hotel next to the train station, and after a few hours’ sleep, woke up to a rather damp weather forecast: Not to be daunted by a little rain, I pulled on my long underwear and all my sweaters and […]
No dainty swans
I finally saw Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake! Can’t recall when I first learned about it . . . maybe the ending scene of Billy Elliot? If so it feels a tad late, given the piece won roughly all the awards in London and New York in the mid-1990s (but then again, in the mid-1990s I was living […]
Ballet swarms and male bodies
To make up for the disastrously uninteresting Friday night, I got tickets on Saturday to see a performance by the Scottish Ballet at Sadler’s Wells, which is apparently London’s leading venues for dance. The program was very exciting. It offered pieces by two choreographers whose pieces I’ve seen before and really enjoyed: First a piece […]
Hello, New York!
On Tuesday morning we left sunny San Juan and flew to New York. I spent most of the 3.5-hour flight zonked out beneath my eye-mask (our dissolute vacation habits of getting roughly 5 hours of sleep each night were catching up to me) and landed at the Big Apple bright eyed and ready for the […]
Kyoto (Day 3) – Gion Corner and dinner at Aunbo
For performing-arts enthusiasts such as Amanda and I are, it isn’t enough just to see temples and gardens: We always supplement that sort of sightseeing with cultural events, such as concerts, dance performances and theatre. We didn’t have time (and it wasn’t the right season) to take in these cultural events as they would ordinarily […]
Oh, the perils of being a woman in love!
Suppose you’re a beautiful young woman. You meet the man of your dreams and fall in love. He loves you, too, and life’s a fairy tale. Unfortunately, if you’re the heroine of a fairy tale and you fall in love at the beginning of the tale, then you’re in for a rough spell. Sooner or […]
Don Quixote
The nice thing about having seasons tickets to the Kennedy Center’s ballet season is that they make taking a ballet break so much easier. No need to think about buying tickets or coordinating with friends while also juggling work — or in tonight’s case — packing. Instead, the tickets have been sitting on my counter […]
Swan Lake
I’ve never been to Russia, but I imagine their winters being freezing cold and dark all the time. Kind of like how it’s been here lately. So maybe the dancers from the Mariinsky Ballet will feel right at home this week as they perform Swan Lake at the Kennedy Center. Amy and I had tickets to […]
True love conquers all (especially if you’re a vampire)
For the past few years I’ve had seasons tickets to the Kennedy Center’s modern dance season, but this year I opted for the ballet season instead. Largely inspired by my own forays into the genre, I wanted more exposure to the discipline, athleticism and rigorous aesthetics of classical dance. And, I’m not going to lie, I wanted to […]
A More Gentlemanlike Manner 