Twenty One Pilots, Janelle Monáe, Tame Impala, Boston Ballet. One of these things is not like the others. This Memorial Day weekend, Boston’s hometown ballet company is joining a lineup of major music stars for Boston Calling, a festival dubbed by some as an “East Coast Coachella.” It’s the first time in Boston Calling’s 10-year […]

When George Balanchine’s full-length Don Quixote premiered in 1965, critics and audiences alike viewed the ballet as a failure. Elaborate scenery and costumes framed mawkish mime passages, like one in which the ballerina washed the Don’s feet and dried them with her hair. Its revival in 2005 by Suzanne Farrell, the ballerina on whom it […]

My January is always busy. Weekdays are filled with rehearsals in Seattle and weekends are spent traversing the country auditioning students for our summer intensive. I direct Pacific Northwest Ballet School and I see these auditions as essential investments in future talent for both our school and company. I do them myself to let students […]

A feast of Forsythe, a surfeit of Dorrance Dance, a challenge to how we perceive refugees. Our editors’ performance picks this month run the gamut. Boston’s Mixtape Master BOSTON Halfway into his five-year partnership with Boston Ballet, William Forsythe is gifting East Coast audiences with his first new work for an American company since 1992. […]

When audience members opened their programs at New York City Ballet’s revival of Herman Schmerman a few weeks ago, one name had everyone buzzing: Naomi Corti. Just an apprentice, she was dancing a featured role alongside principals and soloists in William Forsythe‘s challenging, go-for-broke choreography. How was this going to go down? Quite well, actually. […]

Just before retiring in 2015, Sylvie Guillem appeared on “HARDtalk with Zeinab Badawi,” the BBC’s hard-hitting interview program. Badawi told Guillem, “Clement Crisp of the Financial Times, 14 years ago, described your dancing as vulgar.” Guillem responded, “Yeah, well, he said that. But at the same time, when they asked Margot Fonteyn what she thought […]

What do Alexei Ratmansky and rising Israeli star Sharon Eyal have in common? Both have had creations partly funded by an innovative new organization: FEDORA, which was launched in 2014 as a tribute to composer Rolf Liebermann by French arts patron Jérôme-François Zieseniss to promote innovation and collaboration in ballet and opera across Europe. Since […]

The Shed might not open its doors for another year, but this month Manhattan’s new multidisciplinary arts center is showcasing the type of programming it hopes to offer. A Prelude to The Shed takes over an empty lot near the High Line for two weeks of ever-shifting programming. It will include dance battles featuring Reggie […]