DANCE

Opera Ballet Vlaanderen’s 23/24 season commenced with a double bill combining a première of Richard Siegal’s brave but inaccessible New Ballet mécanique with the critically acclaimed showstopper Half Life by Sharon Eyal. 

The long-term strategy of Czech Dance News is not only to develop reflection on the art of dance, but also to care for those who are engaged in this reflection. To provide new information, impulses and examples of good practice from abroad. 

In an ever more secular and indulgent world, we often forget about the moral values that our society was built on. Stuttgart’s second biggest dance company asks us to remind ourselves of these values, as well as to examine their relevance in our modern lives.

What does it mean to be radical today? At the vanguard of the Belgian contemporary dance scene, STUK might be as good a place as any to check the temperature. 

One of the largest and oldest dance festivals in Europe takes place every July in Vienna. Dozens of different dance workshops, up to eight full-length performances and other accompanying programmes, including films or open-air classes, are offered every day in several cultural institutions and outdoor spaces.

The 35th edition of Tanz im August (TiA) marks Ricardo Carmona’s first as artistic director. Carmona is a former dance and performance curator for Hebbel Am Ufer, presenting a programme that reconsiders the conceptual and physical versatility of contemporary choreographic gesture through the search for new narratives, facing the current climate, and political urgency.

 

Jonathan Gray was the last editor-in-chief of the world-renowned magazine Dancing Times. Unfortunately, after the coronavirus pandemic, the magazine announced its closure with the issuing of one last edition in September 2022

Appointed as the new director of the Tanz im August festival after nine editions curated by Virve Sutinen, Berlin-based Ricardo Carmona talks about his curatorial perspective for the 2023 edition, interweaving curatorial issues, biographical elements, and global challenges.

I met Anette Therese Pettersen this spring at the international seminar Dance Criticism in a European Context, which Taneční aktuality organised with the Czech Dance Platform.

Choreographer Alexei Ratmansky is in many ways a fascinating man. A world traveller who at the age of thirty-six became artistic director of one of the world's most prominent ballet companies, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.

After experiencing the first couple of days, I returned to catch some glimpses from the third and final week of the festival, including the powerful TAO Dance Theatre, recently awarded the 2023 Silver Lion, Biennale College Choreographers’ well put together pieces, and the choreography for objects by Andrea Salustri.

One of the leading representatives of European Expressionism, Egon Schiele (1890-1918), who, together with Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, established a new era of painting in Vienna, died more than a century ago at the age of 28.