Jennifer Homans

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Jennifer Homans

Recently, at the Joyce Theatre, I attended a war. The war was a dance, “Gigenis: The Generation of the Earth,” directed by the British dancer and choreographer Akram Khan, loosely inspired by the story of Queen Gandhari, from the ancient Hindu epic the Mahabharata, who miraculously produced a hundred sons only for them all to be killed in battle. “Gigenis” was danced by seven exponents of Indian classical traditions (including Khan), accompanied by seven musicians.

Dec 23, 2024 | newyorker.com | Jennifer Homans

In the program notes, Abraham, who is forty-seven, writes about aging, the fragility of memory, and his father’s early-onset dementia. He began work on the dance in 2021, and he laments the “chaos of pandemic debris”; he also references the environmental crisis, Octavia Butler’s “apocalyptic narrative of Black American Futures,” and his own “fading hope and prayer” for change. These are thoughts. Yet the work he has made has no narrative and no familiar gestures.

Dec 19, 2024 | newyorker.com | Jennifer Homans

And what she saw most was the art of George Balanchine. She wrote about Jerome Robbins, Antony Tudor, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, post-modern dance, and Fred Astaire, but Balanchine and his dancers became her obsession, her art, her world. And because she believed in dance—“if it moves, I’m interested; if it moves to music, I’m in love”—and in his artistry, she was unsparing in her assessments, which could be as harsh as they were exalted.

Oct 28, 2024 | newyorker.com | Jennifer Homans

The National Bunraku Theatre, in New York recently for the first time in more than thirty years, presented an evening of suicides. The performance, at the Japan Society, consisted of excerpts from two of the company’s most celebrated productions. In the Fire Watchtower scene from “The Greengrocer’s Daughter,” by Suga Sensuke and Matsuda Wakichi, from 1773, the titular character sacrifices herself to save a temple page boy she loves.

Aug 14, 2024 | newyorker.com | Jennifer Homans

Alonso was Cuban ballet, and she was Giselle. I well remember seeing her perform the role with American Ballet Theatre (where her career first took off) at the Metropolitan Opera in 1977. I was with my mother and had to cross a picket line of anti-Castro protesters, and wait as police cleared the house after a bomb threat. For much of her career, Alonso was partially blind and she had learned to navigate a stage, and a partner, without relying on sight.