Search results for: helen pickett

Meet 2010’s showstoppers     William Wingfield and Whitney Jensen, two of our 2010 “25 to Watch.” Photo by Matthew Karas.     Robert Fairchild If there was ever a crush-worthy ballet boy, it’s 22-year-old Robert Fairchild. A new principal with New York City Ballet, Fairchild beckons the viewer with innocent, pool-like dark eyes and […]

Why cry about the economy? It won’t help, and a succession of dirges makes for wretched choreography, anyway. America’s dance companies and presenters aren’t mourning. They’re making the best of it. They’ll trim and adjust a bit this season. But they know that, for every cutback or compromise, the dance world can still put warm […]

Aspen Santa Fe Ballet The Joyce Theater, NYC February 17–22, 2009 Reviewed by Wendy Perron   Photo by Rosalie O’Connor, courtesy ASFB. Samantha Klanac, Katie Dehler, and Lauren Alzamor, “shape-shifting from scared children to cutie pies to rebels” in Itzik Galili’s Chameleon. This chamber-sized company is definitely not staying in its chamber but going out […]

I saw two pieces that embraced chaos at the Lincoln Center Festival this week: William Forsythe’s Impressing the Czar (1988), and the Gate Theatre’s I’ll Go On, a one-man play based on Beckett’s writings. Both began in a no man’s land of chaos, and ended in a hurricane of focused energy. I will remember the […]

Boston Ballet’s “Next Generation” Wang Theatre, Boston, MA March 6–9, 2008 Reviewed by Karen Campbell Though it wasn’t conceived that way, Boston Ballet’s “Next Generation” program of premieres had a nifty context. The four featured choreographers—Jorma Elo, Helen Pickett, Heather Myers, and Sabrina Matthews—were all given their first major commissions by artistic director Mikko  Nissinen, […]

The judges of the New York International Ballet Competition did something unprecedented in 2003. They awarded a prize to a dancer they had already eliminated.   Kathleen Breen Combes, a 21-year-old dancer with Washington Ballet, and her partner Jonathan Jordan were the first to perform the Bournonville duet that was taught to all participants. During […]

Boston Ballet is going places. One place, last weekend, was the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process program. They showed two ultra contemporary pieces and the White Swan pas de deux. The best was, subjectively speaking of course, Jorma Elo’s Brake the Eyes. It has nicely bizarre, distended movement, surprises in the ensemble choreography, and a […]

Young, alone, and at the end of a one-year scholarship at San Francisco Ballet School, Misa Kuranaga auditioned for a spot in a ballet company—any ballet company. She was 19, and her search took her to studios both glamorous and modest around North America. But it soon became apparent that nobody intended to offer her […]