Author: Gillian Anne Renault

Contemporary choreographer George Staib says his new piece, “Versus,” coming March 21-23 at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, emerged out of some of his older works. But it’s not a retrospective. And if the dancers in his six-year-old company, Staibdance, were hoping they would know the movement vocabulary, they were dead wrong. “They’re saying that only…

John McFall, Atlanta Ballet’s artistic director, likes to mix it up. When we met recently, he was a flurry of energy and color: black-and-white checkered shoes with pink laces, mustard-yellow jeans and a black shirt beneath white hair and ice-blue eyes. He mixes it up, too, in the company’s “New Choreographic Voices,” coming March 22-24 at the…

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s opening night Thursday at the Fox Theatre was more than a performance. It was an event. Before the dancers set foot on stage, cheers and applause greeted Artistic Director Robert Battle as he talked about Atlanta’s longtime love affair with the New York-based company. The troupe’s five-performance engagement continues through February…

Brian Wallenberg and Jonathan Harker are very much alike: good, reasonable men with a bent for business. Both find themselves in Count Dracula’s castle one night, out of their element and in the arms of three voracious female vampires and the reptilian count himself. But when Wallenberg the ballet dancer steps on stage to play…

Gregory Catellier is funny — in a thoughtful, low-key, unexpected way. For example, his dance company’s mascot and T-shirt design is a baby ostrich (don’t ask, it’s a long story), and the Depression section of his new evening-length work “E” — premiering January 24-26 at Emory University’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts — is set…

If you think wheelchairs and dance don’t belong on the same stage, you haven’t seen Atlanta’s Full Radius Dance. Or any physically integrated dance company, for that matter. Full Radius Dance comprises four able-bodied dancers and four dancers in wheelchairs; they will perform three new works January 18 and 19 at 7 Stages in Little Five…

The second installment of the nine-month dance series Tanz Farm: A Performance Anthology opened Friday night at the Goat Farm Arts Center, providing a welcome jolt from the sweetness of “Nutcracker” season. The program was produced and curated by Lauri Stallings of the gloATL performance group and Anthony Harper of the Goat Farm and comprised three premiere…

“NO LOADED GUNS!” That was the sign that greeted families Sunday afternoon as they climbed the steps from the Cobb Civic Center parking lot to see the Georgia Ballet’s “Nutcracker” at the Jennie T. Anderson Theatre. Was the ballet expecting those little girls in velvet dresses to be carrying 9mm semi-automatics? No, it was a…

More than 20 years ago, he created illusions for the BalletMet production in Columbus, Ohio, and performed the role of Drosselmeyer, the eccentric and mysterious toymaker who invokes the magic in Act I and whose gift of a nutcracker to the young Marya sets the story in motion. That ballet was choreographed by none other than…