Here’s a fairy tale for 2011. Once upon a time, a very important knight—one of the great musicians of the late 20thcentury—joined forces with an adept ruler-choreographer (also a knight) who had inherited a powerful kingdom of dance. They set out together on a quest to find the true grail—a beautiful ballet that would further ennoble them both and maybe even bring in money. As far as we know, they … [Read more...]
Archives for 2011
Past Present
It is 1979; it is 2011. It’s 1981; no it’s 2011. Bill T. Jones wears glasses now, and I can’t read without mine. Arnie Zane died in 1988; his spirit and his name live on in the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. In the 1960s, I was a founding member of Dance Theater Workshop. In the 1970s, Bill made his ferocious New York debut as a soloist on that organization’s Fresh Tracks series. In 2011, … [Read more...]
Merce Redivivus
Stand in a summer field at dusk, and you’re surrounded by a silence that only seems silent. Intermittently a bird calls, a wild apple falls from a tree, a sudden wind ruffles leaves. In the distance, a figure bends down to pick something. On a busy city street, it’s almost impossible not to be in motion and enveloped by motion and noise. The soundscape is dense with the whoosh of traffic, human … [Read more...]
What the Funk!
David Dorfman’s Prophets of Funk might well be subtitled The Way We Were. He first heard Sly and the Family Stone as a college freshman, back in 1973, and no doubt mourned the band’s demise in 1983. When the Jacob’s Pillow audience gets its first look at Dorfman during the work’s August run there, he’s surely channeling his younger self. Advancing along a diagonal—a bulky man, limber in his loose … [Read more...]
Morris, the Night, and the Music
When it comes to selecting music to spark choreography, Mark Morris is an omnivore. He gives loving, uncondescending attention to popular songs like George Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” Jerome Kern’s “Two Little Bluebirds, or (once) Yoko Ono’s “Dogtown,” as well as digging into scores by Bach, Stravinsky, Schumann and other musical giants. To Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, … [Read more...]
Forty Years of Magical Thinking
Labels like “ordinary” and “everyday” have often been pasted onto Trisha Brown’s movement, especially when someone is alluding to her early work as a member of the iconoclastic Judson Dance Theater. But when has anything she’s ever made been ordinary? Walking may be ordinary, but getting a dancer (to whom she was married at the time) to walk down the side of a very tall building is not your usual … [Read more...]
Being Together
When is a shadow not a shadow? That’s one of the mysteries of Jodi Melnick’s solo Fanfare(2009). Wearing a little black dress, her red hair fiery in Joe Levasseur’s lighting, Melnick inhabits a world within the Doris Duke Studio Theater at Jacob’s Pillow that’s otherwise all black and white, darkness and gleaming silver. Burt Barr’s set design consists of two double fans set on … [Read more...]
What Shape Are You In?
Is Jonah Bokaer 30 yet? During the silent beginning of his solo Recess, a woman in the audience of Jacob’s Pillow’s Doris Duke Studio Theater whispered to her companion “he’s so young!” He may look like a tall, self-possessed boy, but he has accomplished as much or more than many 40-year-old performer-choreographers. He spent eight years dancing in Merce Cunningham’s company; picked up a degree in … [Read more...]
To Hell and Back
To be and not to be. That is a different question. It hovers above Big Dance Theater’s The Supernatural Wife, Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar’s absorbing re-envisioning of the myth behind Euripedes’ Alkestis. Already seen in Europe and appearing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’ Next Wave Festival in November, the work’s U.S. premiere took place in Jacob’s Pillow’s Doris Duke Studio Theater from … [Read more...]
Korean Dancing: Ancient and Very New
Fifteen years ago, I decided that the Korean salpuri was one of the world’s great dances. For some time, smitten by a performance in an early black and white film, I had corralled graduate students from Korea to perform a salpurifor the dance history class I taught. They managed it with varying degrees of skill and spirituality. Then, in 1996, in Seoul, I saw a version of this solo (which derives … [Read more...]