Given the fact that ballet audiences are notoriously conservative, Karen Kain has taken a huge chance on Kevin O’Day’s Hamlet. In particular, composer John King’s original score is of the snap, crackle and pop variety, much like Thom Willems’ music for William Forsythe. The choreography is relentlessly contemporary ballet, filled with flexed feet and angular […]
More often than not, in dance works that are very personal in nature, choreographers need a good editor. This is true of Yvonne Ng’s Frequency. I’m mentioning this point first because the length itself and repetitions within Frequency, mar a honey of a dance piece. Ng is not known for her ensemble work. Apparently her […]
Montreal’s Martin Bélanger is a philosopher of dance – by that I mean, his multidimensional works deal with cosmic topics. He likes the big picture. Grande Théorie Unifée, a work he created last year for Festival TransAmériques, is a case in point. By the time that the rambling 90 minute piece is over, Bélanger and […]
(Happily, DanceWorks brought Fragments to Toronto on Mar. 3, 2012, so I could enjoy Emard’s brilliant work once again. In the intervening two years since the premiere in Ottawa, he has added titles to each fragment, and I’ve added them into the original review.) Montreal’s Sylvain Emard has managed to stay true to himself while […]
Christopher House is a smart man. He knows that a choreographer/artistic director needs to stimulate his company with other dancesmiths, so he created Four at the Winch. The series features the TDT dancers performing original works by choreographers that House admires. This year’s Four at the Winch is a little different because it showcases four […]
