Mark Morris curates "Sounds of India" for Lincoln Center's White Light Festival. Mark Morris has made many trips to India, beginning in 1981. I’ve only gone in my dreams. My fascination with the country’s dance styles came from seeing New York performances by visiting companies, dipping into epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, treating my dance history students to videos and master … [Read more...]
Archives for 2016
Remembering and Re-imagining an Era
Danspace Project's Platform 16: Lost & Found revisits and examines the decades when HIV/AIDS felled so many. I look around St. Mark’s Church. It’s really filling up; people are sitting on risers well beyond the usual cut-off place. Friday, November 4th is the second night of this three-night performance: Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and Other Works by … [Read more...]
Born in Vail
Vail Dance Festival: Re-Mix NYC performs at City Center, November 3 through 6. Damien Woetzel is celebrating his tenth year as director of Colorado’s Vail Dance Festival. And whatever you might have expected from a former principal dancer in the New York City Ballet, Vail Dance Festival” ReMix NYC is probably not it. Still, you may have had glimpses of others of Woetzel’s projects before … [Read more...]
Communicating Across Borders
Babel (words) by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet at Lincoln Center's White Light Festival. Once, according to the King James Bible, all human beings on earth spoke the same language, and when they had found a suitable construction site, they said. “Go to, let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.” But their God, who famously said, “I the Lord thy God am a … [Read more...]
The Story of a Life
The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company presents a trilogy (through November 6th). Bill T. Jones has always liked to talk on stage—while dancing or when not dancing. Sometimes he wants to get across ideas too complex to be expressed in movement alone; sometimes the movements expresses what was churning beneath the words, and sometimes the words hold the movements in check. Years ago, sitting … [Read more...]
Moving Architecture
American Ballet Theatre presents ballets by Tharp, Lang, and Millepied. Goethe once wrote this: “Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music.” For Havelock Ellis—one of the writers on the arts that Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey found inspiring early in the twentieth century—dance and architecture were the sources on which the visual arts were built. Watching one of … [Read more...]
When Is a Climax Not One?
The Yasmeen Godder Company from Israel mingles performers and spectators. When I last saw Yasmeen Godder’s choreography at the Kitchen in 2010, the dancers in her Singular Sensation often eyed the audience—challenging us, appraising us, flirting with us. However, a few feet of empty space separated even the front row of seats from their violent, messy world. Recently, Godder, based in … [Read more...]
Past, Present, and Future Meet in a Whirlpool
Imagine that you’re watching a group of workers assembling a large, complex object. So skillful are they that you can see what they are achieving, although you can’t always tell how they are bringing the object to life. You watch them fascinated—aware that rules, protocols, practices, and relationships govern their every move but not feeling deprived by your lack of knowledge. This what I … [Read more...]
Welcome to. . .Where Are We?
Danish Dance Theatre comes to the Joyce Theater, October 13-16. Help! I’ve been sucked into a nightmarish world known only to people who’ve seen too much dance. Its inhabitants seem familiar; they can thrust a leg sky-high, twist themselves into knots, and hurtle to the floor. They’re not afraid to look awkward or ugly and look wonderful—even virtuosic— doing that. They know that we’re … [Read more...]
Colliding Ideas
Tere O'Connor Dance appears at the Joyce Theater in the second week of NY Quadrille. It’s no secret that Tere O’Connor wants the dances he makes to be about themselves. He reveals this on his website, in his program notes, and in interviews. He puts it more eloquently than I can, stating that over his decades-long immersion in dance, “I’ve discovered that traits such as inference, essence, … [Read more...]