"At Large" is bursting with ideas, dances, experiments in approaching the audience and the world--probably too much of everything, with some of the connecting threads too thin. But how nice for a change, this rigorous excess rather than the usual dour minimalism or clubby encodedness (like a party where every cluster is a closed circle--to you, anyway, as you wander, with plastic cup of bubbly … [Read more...]
Archives for May 2008
“Far,” “tanks under trees,” other war dances, and the new Inertia Movement
I received this email recommendation from freelance dance writer Lori Ortiz of exploredance.com and the Performance Arts Journal yesterday: Hi Apollinaire, I saw Douglas Dunn's press preview of "tanks under trees" last night. The show runs through Sunday at his SoHo loft, which he has turned into a theater with stadium seating. It's an opportunity to see amazingly evocative … [Read more...]
On the other hand, “Dybbuk”: the flipside of “Watermill”
"Dybbuk's" excellent male chorus. Photo by Paul Kolnik for NYCBSo, while Robbins' "Watermill" (1972) has something of a story but you don't know why it matters (see the last post), "Dybbuk's" meaning and pathos are perfectly clear, even if the plot you worry you're supposed to be following isn't. Of the two problems, I'll take the second every time. After all, even with "Swan Lake," I can't … [Read more...]
Milling around in “Watermill”
Sometimes when a Jerome Robbins ballet is making me cringe, I think of Deborah Jowitt's observation in her wonderful Robbins bio that if the choreographer felt a conflict between Broadway and ballet--the standard take on his career--it was only because of a more fundamental opposition he set up for himself: between theatrical effect and "the delicious ambiguity that dance permits," she says. The … [Read more...]
What’s going on?
Readers have wanted to know why I haven't said anything about all the critic layoffs these past several weeks. Here's Claire Willey from San Francisco (to represent you all!): Apollinaire- I was saddened that nobody has spoken up about the nationwide loss of fulltime dance critics. Deborah Jowitt has lost her place at the Village Voice, Lewis Segal was dismissed from the … [Read more...]