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New York may have the Rockettes, but Washington has ...a big tree in front of the White House?  It’s nice to look at, but hardly makes for an evening’s worth of entertainment. But this year the city unveiled a new holiday tradition of its own. Septime Webre, the artistic director of the Washington Ballet, offered a decidedly local twist on Tchaikovsky’s "The Nutcracker". 

This timeless Christmas ballet has been reimagined many times, but Webre's version strikes a particularly patriotic chord. His Nutcracker Prince was none other than George Washington, ballet tights and all (what would Martha think?), while the dastardly Rat King was a red-coated and rather sinister looking King George III (British expats were left to squirm). Centuries of political tensions aside, the sight of America's powder-wigged first president prancing about the stage was a fantastic one. Indeed, it’s astonishing the parallel hasn’t been made before: both had a knack for saving the day, both saw enormous fashion potential in tight pants and both had wooden teeth.   read more »

One's experience of classical ballet is often distilled into comforting holiday classics, such as "The Nutcracker" and "Swan Lake". They are soothing, reliable, and about as uninspired as your grandmother's menu for Christmas dinner. That is unless these standbys have been reworked by Matthew Bourne, a British choreographer. Bourne's "Nutcracker" takes place in an orphanage, and his production of "Swan Lake" features an all-male cast. Exploring the edges of Tchaikovsky's score, he adds humour, emotional resonance and homo-eroticism to the classic story, and has created a classic in its own right. 

In this audio slideshow from The Economist, Bourne narrates against images that reveal the beauty and theatricality of his work. He describes his inspirations and motivations, and how he feels about his career on the eve of his 50th birthday.

~ ARIEL RAMCHANDANI

Deborah Colker leans in close, her elegant hands fluttering emphatically, as she speaks passionately in Portugese-accented English. A Brazilian former psychology student, volleyball player, pianist and dancer turned choreographer has much to be emphatic about--she is the first Brazilian to win a prestigious Olivier theatre award, and is the first woman to write, direct and choreograph a Cirque du Soleil show, "OVO" (egg), a lyrical dance performance about biodiversity now on in Canada.

She is now in New York  with her company Companhia de Dança to present her dance piece "4 Por 4", a four-part show in which each act uses a contemporary Brazilian artwork as a base. Dynamic, musically varied and visually appealing, "4 Por 4" reveals Colker's range and her interest in pushing the boundaries of dance. The four pieces, "Corners" and "Table" "Some People" and "Vases" (above), often deal with the constraints of space, to acrobatic and unusual effects.  read more »

Following on the heels of established Icelandic musicians such as Björk, Sigur Rós, Múm, GusGus and others, Ólafur Arnalds is the latest talent to emerge from this somewhat unlikely North Atlantic sonic hub.

Arnalds’s ambitious and confident debut album, Eulogy For Evolution, was released in 2007 when he was just 21. A mix of classical instrumentation and indie rock, the album garnered widespread acclaim for its savvy blending of influences and Arnalds’s obvious precocity.

After an equally compelling follow-up EP, Variations of Static (2008), Arnalds embarked on a more experimental project, which involved creating a new song every day for a week, and then immediately making it available online at foundsongs.erasedtapes.com. The project, called Found Songs, earned attention by making use of social-networking tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr (on which Arnalds ran a forum/competition for corresponding artwork). Erased Tapes Records , an independent London-based label, recently released a CD, download and 10" Vinyl edition (which features seven photographs chosen from the Flickr group).

While Found Songs lacks some of the depth and coherence of Arnalds’s previous albums, the composer’s trademark influences–-Romantics such as Debussy and Bach; minimal modernists like Max Richter–-combine with contemporary aesthetics to create a mellifluous, if slightly meandering, listen. Here Arnalds talks to us about his beginnings as a jazz drummer, his penchant for romantic piano music and the benefits of imposing limits on his creative process.  read more »

It would be hard to overestimate Merce Cunningham's contribution to the world of dance. As a choreographer he spent a lifetime revolutionising the form and frustrating expectations, designing remarkable, challenging movement up until the very end. He died late on July 26th, aged 90, having choreographed an evening-length piece to celebrate his own 90th birthday earlier this year.

At an event in June to announce the company's Legacy Campaign, a smart and precedent-setting plan for preserving Cunningham's work and supporting his company, I ended up talking to a few of his dancers. We were milling about the Bethune Street studio in New York's West Village and I was quietly marvelling at how mortal they all seemed in their civvies. Having seen them perform--most recently at the final and wonderful Dia "Beacon Event" in May--I knew their trousers and summertime shifts concealed instruments capable of spectacular feats of balance, strength and concentration. Rashaun Mitchell, an especially dazzling member of the troupe who has been with Cunningham since 2004, described what makes dancing for him so unique. "You can just keep trying his moves for years," he explained, addressing Cunningham's aggressive demands on the body. "You may break yourself, but there is always something more difficult to try."  read more »

Alvin Ailey's story is remarkable. Born to a single 17-year-old mother in segregated Texas during the Depression, he went on to found one of the most successful modern dance troupes of all time. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has been very busy celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the company, which Ailey founded in New York in 1958. Following a 26-city American tour, the company returns to Brooklyn this week (June 9th-14th) to perform the works that have made them famous--"Revelations", especially.

"Revelations" remains remarkable nearly 40 years after Ailey created it. This work stands above all others in his repertory, which is known for being uneven. The "truth is that he created one great piece, the 1960 'Revelations' (and it is very great, on a par with the best of Balanchine and Graham), and never again made anything half as interesting," wrote Joan Acocella in 2001. But to see it is to understand Ailey's legacy, his contribution to dance and his gift to African-American self-possession in the arts.

Teresa Wiltz writes movingly about this:  read more »

I suppose I was startled by the patrons I spotted walking into the Park Avenue Armory. They wore bright colours. They had squeaky voices. I was expecting art, but they were kids and they were demanding fun. What we all got was something sublime. In "anthropodino", the Armory's first commissioned art installation, Ernesto Neto, a Brazilian artist, has converted the massive drill hall into a complex of caves and tented passageways suspended by diaphanous fabric. Stretched lycra walls extend upwards into a magnificent nave at the centre. (See a film of its creation here.)

I’m repelled by Neto’s aesthetic, which is equal parts Gaudi, sci-fi and majestic homage to gonads and egg sacs. But his work is a feast for the senses. Interaction is irresistible. The kids went into playground mode, running for the plastic ball-pit and the chamber of bean-bag cushions stuffed with lavender. Adults sniffed quizzically at the dangling and dripping sacs to determine what spice (cumin? turmeric?) was stuffed inside.

And then I got lucky.  read more »

In Austin McCormick’s glittering production of "Le Serpent Rouge: A Titillating Tragedy", the Garden of Eden looks like a stripped down circus ring, presided over by a whip-cracking mistress of ceremonies. In a Brooklyn warehouse space, the redoubtable Gioia Marchese, our ring mistress, ushers us into “a sort of paradise, if you will”, and then proceeds to dissect our notions of Original Sin. Adam and Eve swing languidly and a little dopily from twin trapezes until Lilith and the Serpent galvanise them into knowledge. As he did in his sumptuous "The Judgment of Paris", McCormick and Company XIV, his troupe, plunder a variety sources in this mix of theatre and dance—the Book of Genesis, Jean Cocteau, Charles Bukowski, John Erskine and Thomas Mann—to investigate myth and our cultural responses to it.    

The snake in the garden appears as a gorgeous drag queen: Davon Rainey, in corset and Marie Antoinette wig, prances and shimmies to the fruity orchestrations of Paul Anka’s “Adam and Eve”. Like the bikinied girls at wrestling matches, Rainey coyly wields ad cards to introduce each of the Seven Deadly Sins. McCormick's unhappy ménage-a-trois of Adam, Eve and Lilith paces along the carousel rail, acquiring and divesting clothes (seemingly in a nod to Pina Bausch) as they discover their capacity for longing and loss. Scenes drawing on the history of dance, and range from Baroque gluttony to a pistols-at-dawn duel.  read more »

Amid all the drama surrounding Merce Cunningham's 90th birthday--a time of grand celebrations, awkward decisions and some nail-biting about his company when he's no longer there to guide it--it's been good to be reminded of just what makes this man so brilliant.

"There are certain limits as to what the body can do, but within the limits the variety is endless," he explains in this great little film on his official website. This fascination with movement for its own sake--without tethering it to the story of romantic swans or a tune's crescendo--is why Cunningham has done more than anyone to reinvent what it means to dance. For him, movement is meaningful because it's movement--the body in space, challenged and then glorious. Alice B. Toklas once said she liked his dancing "because it's so pagan."

"I think dance only comes alive when it gets awkward again", he once said, as recorded in this extensive 1968 profile by Calvin Tomkins in the New Yorker. For Cunningham, movement is only interesting when pushed to the extremes, where flaws can creep in.  read more »

To his fellow pupils at the Royal Ballet School the Ukrainian dancer Sergei Polunin was “a legend”—“insane!”, and this winter, after only a year and a half in the company, he enters the annals of ballet history by tackling two full-length classics at the age of 19.

Raised in Kherson, the only child of a builder and an adoring stage mother, Polunin trained as a gymnast before studying dance at the vocational academy in Kiev. “My father went to Portugal to earn money to support me, and my grandmother went to Greece to help.” A career in London was his mother’s idea, and leaving her in Kiev, where she began work as a costume-maker, Polunin won a Rudolf Nureyev Foundation scholarship to the Royal Ballet School in 2002. His technical ability was so advanced that he leapfrogged two years, but he soon picked up enough English to fit in. “I wasn’t homesick at all—I liked being in a group.” After winning every prestigious dance award, including the Prix de Lausanne, he joined the corps of the Royal Ballet at 17, dancing soloist roles in his first season. His gangly teenage physique had honed itself almost overnight into the classical perfection of a danseur noble.  read more »