The longer you live, the older you get. Hmm. This not-exactly-apocalyptic statement refers (obliquely) to recollection. When I attended Jacob’s Pillow’s 90th Anniversary Gala last week, memories crowded in. Sixty-eight years ago, I made my debut on the Pillow stage in Taken With Tongues: A Study in Fanaticism by Harriette Ann Gray. Crammed into two cars (or was it three?), we dancers and … [Read more...]
Dancing Through The Century
by Deborah Jowitt I’m sitting at a table miles from New York City staring at a small, yellow, lined piece of paper and hoping I can decipher my scribbles racing across it. The task? Martialling my memories of a woman I knew, respected, loved, and was amazed by: Ann Hutchinson Guest. She passed away in her sleep on Saturday, April 9, 2022 at the age of 103—almost making it to the anniversary of … [Read more...]
Casting a Net for Dance
What is Indra’s Net? To begin with, it’s the name of Meredith Monk’s newest work. Yes, but what is it? In Buddhism, it alludes to the interconnectedness of everything in the universe and beyond. The world is a web with a pearl tied in its every knot, and each pearl reflects everything that exists. I pursue the inspiring concept as carefully as I can. I did not see Indra’s Net … [Read more...]
High Fliers
Time moves crankily during this pandemic. September is nearly over, and I’ve just watched on my laptop a video of a performance by Elizabeth Streb’s “live action heroes” that took place at Jacob’s Pillow more than a week ago. I’ve had to compare my notes with another slightly conflicting program list. I thought writing about this retrospective, “Streb: From Ringside to Extreme Action,” would … [Read more...]
Dancing on the Green
“Ooh that feels so good!” The speaker was not involved in a semi-pornographic film. She was a teenager watching a filmed pas de deux at a summer dance festival years ago. Others shushed her; this was art! Indoctrinated, did they even notice that the male dancer, hoisting his partner overhead, had placed one hand on her crotch? Please be forbearing when I tell you that this memory edged into my … [Read more...]
Horses and Humans Together
When I was about eleven years old, my family moved into a house on a Southern California palisade overlooking a country club that included a golf course, stables, a polo field, and a stadium. Sometimes I awoke to the sound of hoof beats—a horse pulling a sulky and its passenger around one of the rings below. I don’t remember why my parents signed me up for riding lessons (although I can’t … [Read more...]
Dancing the Flu Away
Here I go, repeating myself again: Dancers can’t not dance. Their bodies—their instruments—need to be kept in shape. Strategies emerge. Must they practice battements by lifting their legs between their refrigerator and their tv set? Even though the pandemic wanes, if they’re close to colleagues, do they need to be masked? Sometimes, a simple iPhone on a stand documents their … [Read more...]
Red on Green
Let’s hear it for dancers! They can’t not dance. And they all have i-phones or the equivalent—and maybe obliging friends to operate these. However, I confess that after a while of sitting at my laptop watching, say, six performers dancing in their bedrooms, I can get too interested in the sites themselves. A lot of books! What pictures hang on their walls? Dig that cookstove. But what if … [Read more...]
Four by Morris
I’ve seen Mark Morris’s work for many years, starting in 1980. I remember him dancing half naked with a mane of black curls in his 1984 O Rangsayee. I interviewed him in Brussels, when he and his company had taken over the Théâtre de la Monnaie (1988 to 1991).A few years ago, I watched him rehearse his dancers in one of the nine studios in the Mark Morris Dance Group, built on a corner in … [Read more...]
Alone Together
I have never been in Philip Johnson’s immense second-floor lobby in the New York State Theater when it was empty of audience members. I’m not familiar with the grids marked on its floor. Before the pandemic, it was a place where friends and colleagues chatted, compared notes, and maybe bought drinks during intermissions of the New York City Ballet’s performances. (I usually remembered not to leave … [Read more...]