The Seán Curran Company brings East and West together at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater. As you enter the BAM Harvey to see the Seán Curran Company’s Dream’d in a Dream, you not only glimpse an embodiment of the title, you begin to enter another kingdom. Not since Peter Brooks’ stunning production of the Sanscrit epic The Mahabharata introduced New Yorkers to the tactfully … [Read more...]
Archives for 2015
They Could Have Danced All Night
New York City Ballet presents its 2015 fall gala, "From the Runway to the Stage." For the fourth year in a row, the New York City Ballet has devoted its fall gala to fashion, a custom started by the vice-chairman of the NYCB board, Sarah Jessica Parker. Pairing celebrated couturiers with choreographers is a scheme that lures audiences with money to spend, as well as gowns to wear to the … [Read more...]
Girls Growing Up Black
Camille A. Brown & Dancers premieres Black Girl: Linguistic Play at the Joyce Theater. How fast their feet are! Skittering, stepping, bouncing up and down, kicking out those feet, six women dance as if the ground itself is both untrustworthy territory and something that needs mastering. Camille A. Brown calls her new, evening-long work Black Girl: Linguistic Play. She and her colleagues … [Read more...]
From Sweden: Taped and Set Free
K. Kvarnström Co/Kulturhuset City Theatre Stockholm performs at BAM Fisher. Eighteen years have passed since I first saw Kenneth Kvarnström’s choreography. That was at a rehearsal in his native Finland. Thirteen years ago, I viewed his beautiful Fragile at Jacob’s Pillow. So I can’t speak knowledgeably about his style, but I do see connections between Fragile and TAPE, which K. Kvarnström … [Read more...]
Growth, Death, Rebirth
Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Lin Hwai-min's "Rice." When Lin Hwai-min brought his Cloud Gate Dance Theatre from Taipei to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in 2000, one performer stood in a near corner of the stage all through Songs of the Wanderers while gold-dyed rice streamed down on his head and pooled around him. That … [Read more...]
Images within Images within Images
Wayne McGregor's "Tree of Codes" turns the Park Avenue Armory into a 21st-century phantasmagoric playground. Why when I meditate on Tree of Codes, the dance-and-design spectacle on view at the Park Avenue Armory, do I flash back almost 150 years to the spectacle-extravaganza, The Black Crook? The two productions have in common little but their desire to astonish. The Black Crook opened in … [Read more...]
Step Quickly; Don’t Fall Off the World
Canadian dancer-choreographer Louise Lecavalier brings her "So Blue" to New York Live Arts. I’m not sure when and where I first saw Louise Lecavalier dance with Édouard Lock and La La La Human Steps, a company she worked with from 1981 to 1999. Perhaps it was during the late 1980s at the biennial Festival International de Nouvelle Danse in Montréal (1985-2003). I also saw her at Dance … [Read more...]
Messages from Above
Summation Dance celebrates its fifth anniversary at BAM Fisher. Perhaps someone some day will write an essay about dance titles, how they vary —encapsulating a theme, for instance, or borrowing from literature, or throwing spectators off the track with a word or phrase that has a secret meaning for the choreographer. Summation Dance titled its latest work At the Hour. What strikes you … [Read more...]
Newcomers in Grahamland
The Martha Graham Dance Company presents new, recent, and classic works at Jacob's Pillow. The last week of Jacob’s Pillow’s 83rd anniversary season corresponded with the Martha Graham Dance Company’s upcoming 90th year, and MGDC appeared in the Ted Shawn Theater that August week. Anniversaries are meant as celebrations. I’m only sorry Ella Baff couldn’t wait until her 20th year as the … [Read more...]
From Florida with Skill and Devotion
The Sarasota Ballet brings Ashton classics and 21st-century ballets to Jacob's Pillow. With art and culture kiting around in cyberspace and responding instantly to our keyboard-trained fingers, we are constantly jumping over boundaries. Crossing them in real time with tangible objects is another matter. Who would have imagined that The Sarasota Ballet would become a treasure house of over … [Read more...]