Natalie Axton is a dance critic who contributed reviews and commentary on ballet and dance performances to The Weekly Standard in 2009 and 2010. Her writing covered a range of dance topics, including chamber ballet, contemporary dance, and notable choreographic works, with a particular focus on the New York dance scene.
The last section of Sasha Waltz and Guests’ triptych, Gezeiten, is an absurdist tour de force. For a half-hour, 16 dancers and the world they inhabit slowly, then quickly, fall apart. A man hammers his shoes onto a wall. A woman in a ball gown shimmies across the stage, drawing a smiley face in…
If you read the press release for Neil Greenberg’s like a vase at the Dance Theatre Workshop here in New York, you will learn that the 60-minute dance “explores the tensions created by the seemingly inescapable human desire to make meaning.”
Sending an audience through a ritual of repetition requires a director confident in his vision and possessed of a keen eye for detail. Happily, Christian Rizzo is this kind of director. His 2007 dance piece, b.c., janvier 1545, fontainebleu, was presented last month at the Kitchen in New York City.
The New Chamber Ballet is a collaborative ensemble dedicated to creating new work at low cost. It is the brainchild of Artistic Director Miro Magloire, a German composer turned ballet dancer, who founded the group in 2004. Currently comprised of two choreographers, five ballerinas, a pianist, and a…
After 16 years of New York City apartment living, I bought a house in Westchester County. I am very happy with this decision. The house, a 1935 Cape, is charming; it will be more charming once I renovate it. Currently the house needs a new kitchen, two new baths, some ceiling, some floor, a little…
All day, every day, from the middle of March through the end of May, performance artist Marina Abramovic sat at the Museum of Modern Art in her performance piece, The Artist is Present. This appearance was Abramovic’s contribution to the eponymous MoMA retrospective running in the gallery space…
In February, the news broke that Christopher Wheeldon was stepping down as artistic director of Morphoses/the Christopher Wheeldon Company, the internationally acclaimed ballet troupe he founded just three years ago. Within the dance community, this was seismic: Many were shocked, but few were…
Two months ago I had the distinct pleasure of witnessing the devaluation of print journalism. It was a weekend performance of Christopher Wheeldon's Morphoses at Central Park's Summerstage. I was caged in the press section, right of stage and on ground level. Robert Greskovic from the Wall Street…
Merce Cunningham might be the only American artist to have remained avant-garde, even cool, for almost a century. This extraordinarily inventive choreographer, who died late last month at 90, possessed a vision that bridged expressionist modern dance and classical ballet. His career has been…
Pina Bausch, the legendary tanztheater director, died last month in Wuppertal, Germany. She was 68 and had appeared onstage with her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, just the week before. A diminutive, soft-spoken master of her craft, Bausch was, to many American dancers and choreographers, the most…