The Martha Graham Company, aged 87, is a determined survivor. It has soldiered on past the death of its sole choreographer in 1991, the sale of its 63rd Street building, and a lawsuit over its rights to Graham’s dances. Then, not long after the company took over the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s studios in Westbeth, hurricane Sandy caused flooding in the basement storage space and damaged sets, … [Read more...]
Archives for 2013
The Animals Within
Over the years, thoughtful choreographers have turned to nature as a way of thinking about choreography. Isadora Duncan was drawn to wind and wave motion, Martha Graham to the ways in which emotion structures the body, Merce Cunningham to ideas about chance and indeterminacy in nature’s processes. It’s an interesting coincidence that, just recently, two groups—Jennifer Monson/iLAND at the … [Read more...]
Fair Winds from the West
Lincoln Kirstein has written that while the New York State Theater (now the Koch) was under construction, George Balanchine wandered in and saw that the pit would hold no more than 35 musicians. He immediately threatened to withdraw the New York City Ballet as the principal designated tenant. The pit was redesigned to accommodate 70 players. Had Balanchine, to whom music was so important, … [Read more...]
Men at Work
Neal Beasley and Bradley Teal Ellis staged their joint appearance on one of Dance New Amsterdam’s SPLICE series more intimately than other choreographers sharing a SPLICE program have done. They took the word “splice” seriously—dividing Ellis’s (american) guilt and Beasley’s every adam belonging to me into three parts, and splicing them into each other in alternating segments. They evidently saw, … [Read more...]
Erotic Geometry
When I look closely at a broccoli floret, I don’t ponder fractal geometry; I may marvel at images derived from Fibonacci sequences, but I don’t pretend to understand Walsh functions. Choreographer Karole Armitage might consider me an intellectual wimp. Her Three Theories premiered in 2010 at the World Science Festival. Although Armitage’s new Mechanics of the Dance Machine at New York Live Arts … [Read more...]
When An Artist’s Newest Works Are Her Last. . .
On Thursday, January 31, the second day of the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it was announced that Brown, because of health problems, had retired as artistic director of the company she founded over forty years ago, and would choreograph no more dances. Consider these words bordered in black—mourning for the works she might have continued to give … [Read more...]
Dances Galore
It’s hardly fair to David Parsons to see one of his company’s performances at the Joyce the night after the New York City Ballet’s first all-Tchaikovsky program of the season. Wednesday, Balanchine’s Mozartiana, Thursday, Parsons’s Wolfgang. The company that Parsons founded in 1987 is wildly popular with audiences. He gives them a lot: lively, accomplished dancers; eye-catching lighting (by Howell … [Read more...]
See the Music
George Balanchine once said that during his grueling years as a pupil in the Imperial St. Petersburg Theatrical School, he didn’t fall in love with ballet until he was twelve. The change occurred the first time he appeared onstage in Marius Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty, set to Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky’s ravishing score, and young Georgi Melitonovitch was cast as a Cupid. His arrows, so to speak, … [Read more...]
Oh Those Feet!
Silence doesn’t play a large role in Michelle Dorrance’s SOUNDspace. In the Danspace performances of Dorrance Dance/New York, the choreographer treats St. Mark’s Church as an acoustic instrument, and the building is happy to comply. Back in 1795, when its cornerstone was laid, ministers had no microphones, and the voices of parishioners hymning their lungs out could make it seem as if the high … [Read more...]
Slow Down; Now Breathe
You’re informed by program material that the compellingly idiosyncratic French choreographer Myriam Gourfink works with scores, sometimes with computers, in devising her dances, and that the breathing techniques of yoga are fundamental to her process. You learn that she is concerned with the “micro-movements” affiliated with breath and how these infinitesimal inner adjustments conspire to move her … [Read more...]