Reviews for Ventana Ballet Performances
Review: Kaleidoscope (2024) by Ventana Ballet and Austin Camerata
by David Glen Robinson
Published on May 26, 2024
In the second edition of KALEIDOSCOPE these talented companies and gifted performers emphasized the intersections that exist between music, dance, and with other artistic media. Let's hope they establish KALEIDOSCOPE as an enduring annual event.
Kaleidoscope is a collaboration between Ventana Ballet and Austin Camerata music, but duality has little to do with it. In Kaleidoscope, each click-twist of the tube tumbled every movement and note into new intersections and visions of dance and modern music, never to be repeated exactly in the world of art. This quality placed a high premium on the eye-witness experience, well worth the ticket. The Draylen Mason Music Studio in the KMFA studios …
Review: The Watchmaker's Song by Ventana Ballet
by David Glen Robinson
Published on December 11, 2023
The collaborative THE WATCHMAKER'S SONG, now annual, offers even more magic and diversity than its core story of The Nutcracker, in a setting that evokes dark times in Texas and a shift toward the light.
In The Watchmaker’s Song by Ventana Ballet and Red Nightfall Dance Theatre, the sugar plums are sprinkled with extra magic and the flavor is tasted in our imaginations. In hoary ancient times, a curse was leveled against a hero (Aidan DeWitt), who became the robotic and mysterious nutcracker. The Watchmaker, an equally mysterious supernatural being played by Navaji David Nava, makes a magic watch to counteract the evil. As we might expect, the Watchmaker’s superpower …
Review: KOMOREBI by Navaji David Nava and Ventana Ballet
by David Glen Robinson
Published on September 27, 2023
Influenced by many world traditions, Navaji David Nava's KOMOREBI dances were intensely beautiful, stamping us with the expansiveness of the brilliant choreographer's spiritual journey.
Ventana Ballet is one of those new advanced ballet companies in our dance-rich town. Along with PerformaDance and Ballet Austin, it pushes the envelope of dance and the meaning of ballet for the fine arts. They try new forms and ideas, unrestrained by the ballet canon. Rarely do they wear toe shoes onstage. At the same time, they insist that what they create is ballet, nothing less, nothing more. Their own acceptance of that seeming contradiction …
Review: Night Birds by Ventana Ballet
by David Glen Robinson
Published on September 04, 2023
Ventana Ballet's consistently themed NIGHT BIRDS, virtually perfect, was an emotionally high-toned confection for a sultry summer evening in Austin.
Ventana Ballet presented another in their Night Birds series of ballets at The Cathedral ATX, the former Landmark Missionary Baptist Church on 16th Street, repurposed as an event center and art gallery. If exquisitely choreographed and well-performed dances weren’t enough to entice a general audience, then Ventana’s strategy of presenting the dances accompanied by cello music certainly completed the evening to great satisfaction. The cello artistry was provided by Daniel Kopp and his friends Cory …
Review: Kaleidoscope by Ventana Ballet and Austin Camerata
by David Glen Robinson
Published on May 16, 2023
KALEIDOSCOPE: Five not so easy pieces. HAIKU: In a studio / music becomes the dancers / the night tastes it all
Dance in Austin is said to exist in a state of underfunded flux. Some say it is dying out, an artifact of twentieth century fine arts having no claim on the twenty-first. Ventana Ballet says no to all that, producing dance in ballet and contemporary technique and blends of the two. Ballet purists take note; widen your horizons a smidge by giving some creative attention to Ventana Ballet. Ventana’s show Kaleidoscope gives us a powerful, …