Christopher Rudd’s Lifted and Gia Kourlas’s Review: Turning a Mirror Towards the White Gaze

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Notes

1 Cori Murry, “Touché to Lifted,” [program], American Ballet Theatre, David Koch Theater, New York, NY, Oct 20–30, 2022.

2 “Audience Review: Touché Review,” Dance Enthusiast, accessed Sep 23, 2023, https://www.dance-enthusiast.com/get-involved/reviews/view/Touche-Review-November-23-2020/; Kasey Broekma, “American Ballet Theatre Review: An Evening of Courage and Resilience,” The Ballet Herald, accessed Sep 23, 2023, https://www.balletherald.com/american-ballet-theatre-review-pride-oct-2021/.

3 Gia Kourlas, “Smoke, Mirrors and Passing the Torch at American Ballet Theater; Critic’s Notebook,” The New York Times, October 28, 2022.

4 Kourlas, “Smoke, Mirrors, and Passing.”

5 Murry, “Touché to Lifted.”

6 Kourlas, “Smoke, Mirrors, and Passing.”

7 Kourlas, “Smoke, Mirrors, and Passing.”

8 At the beginning of her review, Kourlas mentions Jiri Kylian’s Sinfonietta; however, it is unclear if she saw this piece with Lifted or viewed it during a previous performance. Without context or details about the work, she only offers one comment, calling Sinfonietta “a sweeping, repetitive ballet that drives along while going nowhere.”

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Michelle LaVigne

MICHELLE LAVIGNE has taught communication classes across disciplines and programs for over fifteen years, and currently teaches at Cornell University. She has presented at national and international conferences and published reviews in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, TDR, Text and Performance Quarterly, Dance Chronicle, Dance Magazine, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Her research transverses the areas of dance, rhetoric, and performance. She is particularly interested in using frameworks that examine the consequences of cultural, social, and political repetition within dance histories, dance bodies, and their archives. Most recently, LaVigne published a chapter, “Contemporary Repetitions; Rhetorical Potential and The Nutcracker” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet (2021), which examines the reworkings and performances of The Nutcracker to argue that its persistent circulation constrains contemporary ballet’s rhetorical potential by reaffirming the values of familiarity, comfort, and normativity. She is an Associate Editor at Dance Chronicle.