Molissa Fenley reconstructs two key works and fashions a new one at New York Live Arts, October 2 through 5. Elizabeth Streb is in the house! Not everyone at New York Live Arts for the opening night of Molissa Fenley and Company’s season would understand the exclamation point. I don’t deny Streb’s celebrity status in the downtown dance world, but the enthusiastic punctuation is there … [Read more...]
Archives for 2013
Boxed In and Kicking Out
Andrea Miller’s Gallim Dance Company premieres a new work at Montclair State University’s Peak Performances, September 26 through 29, 2013. In titling her wild new work Fold Here, Andrea Miller of Gallim Dance Company must have been thinking of all the implications of the instructions. Folding along prescribed creases makes a flat sheet of corrugated cardboard into a three-dimensional … [Read more...]
Asserting the Uncertain, Cooking the Rough
Megan V. Sprenger / MVworks at The Chocolate Factory and John J Zullo Dance/Raw Movement at St. Mark’s Church. When you’re watching Megan Sprenger’s absorbing new Flutter at the Chocolate Factory, you don’t think about butterflies poised above a blossom or birds winging to a new perch. Darker definitions come to mind: restless or uncertain movement, shivery excitement, “disturbance of the … [Read more...]
Dancers on Fire
The New York City Ballet puts on a Gala to ignite its Fall Season. Gala performances are strange animals—the bigger the dance company, the more lavish they have to be. Money is spent so that more money may accrue. At the New York City Ballet’s Fall Gala in its Lincoln Center home, designer Bronson van Wyck has hung huge blue-and-white and red-and-white-striped hot air balloons over the … [Read more...]
Another Rite
The Martha Graham Dance Company dances The Rite of Spring and Nacho Duato's Rust at Jacob’s Pillow, August 21-25. I like to imagine that at least once a month this year, somewhere in the world, a dance company and/or an orchestra has been thundering away at Igor Stravinsky’s masterpiece Le Sacre du Printemps, Obviously, I’m no statistician, but it does seem that, in 2013, the centenary of … [Read more...]
Archived in the Blood
Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion presents Pavement at Jacob's Pillow, August 21-25 You walk down a street in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. No, you don’t walk, you saunter—loose-limbed; cocky; taking big, easy steps. You are a young black man, and this is a decades-old black neighborhood. Does your leisurely progress identify you as a power—a drug dealer, maybe? A gang leader? Or are you a … [Read more...]
The Beat Goes On
O Vertigo Danse of Montreal and the Société de Musique Contemporaine du Québec perform Ginette Laurin’s La Vie Qui Bat and Steve Reich’s Drumming at Jacob’s Pillow. There are two performances happening simultaneously on the stage of Jacob’s Pillow’s Ted Shawn Theatre, but I can only see one of them and a tantalizing smidgen of the other. The one I can see is Ginette Laurin’s La Vie Qui Bat … [Read more...]
Restless Creature
Wendy Whelan’s “Restless Creature,” duets choreographed by Kyle Abraham, Joshua Beamish, Brian Brooks, and Alejandro Cerrudo. At Jacob’s Pillow, August 14-17. Ballet dancers tend to have short careers onstage. If they retire at around 36 (as they often do), they’ve spent as many years training to dance as they have performing. Some stay in the field as teachers, choreographers, and company … [Read more...]
Two Brits and Mark
The Mark Morris Dance Group and Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Festival performs operas by Benjamin Britten and Henry Purcell. Mark Morris has journeyed into music in other ways beside making dances to compositions he loves. He has conducted orchestras, directed and choreographed operas. Two works presented in Tanglewood’s airy, wooden Seiji Ozawa Hall reveal his sensitivity to music in … [Read more...]
Pacific Rim Get-together
The Asia Pacific Dance Festival in Hawaii and the Prince Lot Hula Festival Flowers everywhere. On trees and the ground beneath them. On shirts. Around necks. And, I like to think, blossoming in the minds of those attending the Asia Pacific Dance Festival at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Co-produced by the University’s Outreach College and the East-West Center Arts Program, the biennial … [Read more...]