I plan to iron out the creases and frame the flyer for The Kitchen’s fall season. It’s an art work by Ralph Lemon that also appears in Lemon’s installation and performance there, Scaffold Room. Tiny, brightly painted figures cross the sheet of paper in rows that disguise their parallel underpinnings. There are also words, so tiny as to be difficult to read. I spot images from Scaffold Room: a man … [Read more...]
Archives for 2015
Three Veteran Adventurer-Choreographers Get Together
First time I’ve been to JACK, where Neil Greenberg, Yvonne Meier, and Jennifer Monson are sharing a program. The Brooklyn space reminds me of the original Dance Theater Workshop of the 1960s, when it sprang up in Jeff Duncan’s loft at 215 West 20th Street in Manhattan. Enough chairs for 50 or so spectators. Two small curtained dressing areas at one end. Two restrooms at the opposite end of the … [Read more...]
An Ancient Dance Play Meets New Music
Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto dance together again in a new approach to a Noh play. It is a marvelous robe! Well, not a robe exactly; it looks more like a shawl—light as feather, shimmering with gold, unearthly. It gives its name to a Japanese legend and to Hagoromo, the 16th-century Noh drama it inspired; the robe belongs to a celestial dancer who can depict through her movements the changes … [Read more...]
Dancing with Bach
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Boris Charmatz perform her Partita 2 in Lincoln Center's White Light Festival. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Brussels-based company, Rosas, last performed in New York in 2013, when the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented her En Attendant and Cesena. Several years before, the two stunning pieces, featuring singers and instrumentalists as well as dancers, had … [Read more...]
From Vaudeville to the Streets
Spectrum Dance Theater brings Donald Byrd's The Minstrel Show Revisited to NYU Skirball Center. Eleven dancers take the stage at NYU Skirball Center in Donald Byrd’s The Minstrel Show Revisited. They’re strutting, prancing, raising white-gloved hands. How come I don’t recognize any faces? I can hardly tell which are women and which are men. Byrd has already made a point about racial … [Read more...]
Pat Graney and Colleen Thomas Explore Difference (Differently)
Two choreographers, Pat Graney and Colleen Thomas, tackle issues, such as gender roles, in very different ways. The 1960s weren’t all about Beatles, sit-ins, marches, pot, and communes. For many women, the post-war 1940s and the 1950s lingered on in spirit. Some of these women may have worn go-go boots and very short dresses, but they belonged to the unspoken club of wives who greeted their … [Read more...]
Perspectives on Classicism
American Ballet Theatre opens it Lincoln Center season with ballets by Morris, Ashton, and Tharp Ask a choreographer bred in modern dance to create a ballet for an esteemed classical company, and what ensues? If the choreographer in question is Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp, the resultant work often both honors tradition and knocks it around a little. This seemed true at American Ballet … [Read more...]
What Do We See and How Do We See It?
Danspace St. Mark's presents Moriah Evans's "Social Dance 9-12: Encounter." Leaving St. Mark’s Church after seeing Danspace Project’s presentation of Moriah Evans’s Social Dance 9-12: Encounter, I had a surprising thought about the experience: “This is so non-interesting that it’s interesting.” Then I spent the bus trip home wondering what I meant by that. Note that I didn’t think the … [Read more...]
70 Years of History Brought to Life
The José Limón International Dance Festival at the Joyce, October 13-25. José Limón was choreographing right up to the end of his life. His last dances, Orfeo and Carlota, premiered in 1972, the year of his death at 64. Those two works are included in the Limón Dance Company’s 70th anniversary celebration, now entering its second week at the Joyce Theatre. So is one of his earliest … [Read more...]
Dancing as the Leaves Fall
Fall for Dance returns to New York City Center for the eleventh time. Every autumn, as the leaves change color and begin to consider falling, Fall for Dance defines the verb differently: New Yorkers and savvy visitors buy bargain-price tickets and fall in love with dance—or at least with some of the twenty companies, small ensembles, pairs, and soloists who fill five mixed-bill programs at … [Read more...]