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A sexy, saucy Carmen
By Ellen Dunkel, For The Inquirer The Pennsylvania Ballet opens its season with the company premiere of Roland Petit’s tale of the Gypsy girl. There’s sex, jealousy, a wild bar scene – and murder. The […]
Ellen Dunkel
Archived
At SCUBA, the backward-looking ‘Avatard’
By Ellen Dunkel for the Inquirer Avatar has been a smash, breaking new technological ground (as well as box office records). Avatard, on the other hand, is more retro, revisiting a time of clunky video […]
Archived
Promising power
By Ellen Dunkel | For The Inquirer Pennsylvania Ballet brings back Matthew Neenan’s “Carmina Burana” and shows off new dancers, new energy. Pennsylvania Ballet premiered Matthew Neenan’s Carmina Burana at the Academy of Music in […]
Archived
Black Grace brings slap dancing to the Kimmel
By Ellen Dunkel For The Inquirer A dancer’s body is his instrument. That’s especially true for the performers of New Zealand’s Black Grace, whose bodies double as percussion instruments. The seven short pieces on the […]
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Beautiful contrasts at Bryn Mawr
By Ellen Dunkel For The Inquirer Sometimes it’s not just what happens on stage that makes a performance, but the surrounding details as well. When Brooklyn’s Urban Bush Women, with Germaine Acogny and Kaolack (Pape […]
Archived
‘Water Bodies’ worth diving into, despite a few rocky spots
By Ellen Dunkel, For The Inquirer Not everything went swimmingly when the dance troupe BodyVox opened Water Bodies at the Annenberg’s Zellerbach Theatre on Thursday night. There were technical difficulties and mistakes nearly from the […]
Archived
BalletX presents pieces compelling and athletic
By Ellen Dunkel, For The Inquirer On its own, Le Baiser Inevitable, the new ballet Jodie Gates choreographed for BalletX, is visually compelling, powerful, beautiful. But there’s no getting around the fact that it was […]
Dance Education
The dance of her life is the stuff of dreams
Once upon a time, the wind blew a picture of a ballerina to an orphan’s gate in Africa . . . By Ellen Dunkel, For The Inquirer The road to becoming a dancer, particularly for […]
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New Koresh ballet explores primal love
By Ellen Dunkel, For The Inquirer Do people ever really change? Observers from psychologists to advice columnists have weighed in on that question. Now, let’s hear from a choreographer. “In 3,000 years, nothing has changed,” […]
Archived
A ‘Cat in Hat’ dance, full of lovely Things
By Ellen Dunkel, For The Inquirer The sun had just set. The wind sure did bite. We went to the theater that blustery night. All we could do was to sit, sit, sit, sit. But […]