Category: Dance

Joffrey Ballet Debuts a Haunted “Bolero”

by Jacquelyn Thayer “Hell is empty and all the devils are here,” was the quote that kept intruding upon me, quietly but insistently, while watching the debut of the Joffrey Ballet’s made-for-digital Boléro, a 16-minute piece choreographed by company artist Yoshihisa Arai and starring Anais Bueno, set to Maurice Ravel’s infamously repetitive composition. Not to…

The Varieties of Virtue and Moir

Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the most demonstrably versatile team in ice dance history, have also just laid claim to the title of most decorated skating team in Olympic history — a tally of two gold medals in the individual ice dance event and team event in PyeongChang brought their total across three Olympic…

So You Think You Can Dance: Top Eight Perform

Top eight week on So You Think You Can Dance finally brought the long-awaited pairing of contestants, providing dancers with just a little better opportunity to showcase strengths. It’s refreshing, in a sea of routines sometimes overburdened by a detailed narrative, to get a dance with one simple purpose: movement. Choreographer Mandy Moore is good…

So You Think You Can Dance: Meet the Top 10

Last week’s So You Think You Can Dance recap singled out Gaby Diaz’s tap routine with finalists Lex Ishimoto and Evan DeBenedetto. And while official pick Ishimoto is appearing here as a contemporary-first dancer, his training in tap has been substantial enough for the two to offer up this Fred-and-Ginger referencing routine from the usually…

World of So You Think You Can Dance: Creative Editing

Back to the highlights as So You Think You Can Dance‘s second-to-last “Academy” round, whittling the All-Star teams down to two candidates apiece, before the top 10 reveal in weeks to come, brought back a bit more in the way of dance routines. While we’re sorry not to have seen, for example, Fik-Shun’s efforts with…

Happy Birthday, Ginger Rogers

Moving in Measure can never pass up a chance to post any clip of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and the 106th anniversary of Ms. Rogers’ birth is certainly as good an excuse as any. While uptempo numbers like Swing Time‘s “Pick Yourself Up” are great demonstrations of technical ability and connection in the purest…

Dancing With the Stars, Season 23: Week 10 in Review

We’ve reached the Semi-Finals, where votes cast now contribute to next week’s ultimate outcome. While there’s a probable frontrunner, dances from couples across the board stood out in this week’s Trio Night. 1. Laurie Hernandez, Val Chmerkovskiy and Maks Chmerkovskiy, Samba You can argue that this approach to a trio dance doesn’t quite meet the…

Dancing With the Stars, Season 23: Week 7 in Review

Eras Night is one of my preferred Dancing With the Stars theme nights when done to its best — reasonable tributes to a period or a style, less so when involving odd mash-ups or blatant inaccuracies. Last night’s offered its own mixed bag, but on the whole presented a fairly enjoyable line-up — even if…