LeeSaar The Company brings its latest work to Jacob's Pillow, August 20 through 24 I have to believe that titles matter to Lee Scher and Saar Harari, the artistic directors of LeeSaar The Company. Their latest extraordinary piece of choreography is called Grass and Jackals. So I open my mind to tall grass that bends in the wind, lies flat under a hard rain, and can be a good hiding place. … [Read more...]
Archives for August 2014
Comedy and Tragedy Dance a Duet
doug elkins choreography, etc. performs a new work and an old one at Jacob's Pillow. So what if you’re a nerd, and the woman you crave is a lot taller than you? Watch her and her bunch of friends; maybe you can pick up a few things that will make them accept you. Perhaps playing the clown will work? Mark Gindick really is a clown (as well as an actor and a dancer), and the clique that he … [Read more...]
A Playwright and a Composer Meet in a Forest
Christopher Caines directs and choreographs Purcell's Fairy Queen for the Dell'Arte Opera Ensemble. If I had looked carefully at the program for The Fairy Queen before the Dell’Arte Opera Ensemble’s ambitious conflation of Henry Purcell’s opera and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream had begun, I might have been tempted to make a run for it. Here, for example, are the roles that actor … [Read more...]
A Fountain of Music and Love
Mark Morris directs and choreographs Handel's Acis and Galatea for Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival. It is beguiling to imagine George Frideric Handel’s pastoral opera Acis and Galatea receiving its first performance at the Duke of Chandos’s mansion on the terrace overlooking the gardens and their newly installed fountain. If the part about the terrace were true, guests at this 1718 … [Read more...]
Enter, Pursued by History
John Heginbotham premieres his full-evening Chalk and Soot at Jacob's Pillow. No artist can entirely escape history. Unacknowledged, it trails behind him/her. Occasionally it blows around the artist’s ankles, occasioning thoughts. What was that? Where did I get it? Is it something barely remembered or something better chopped off? John Heginbotham doesn’t deny the influences of his years … [Read more...]