Bill Young/Colleen Thomas & Co. February 22 & 23 I’m sitting in Bill Young and Colleen Thomas’s loft waiting for the rest of the audience to straggle in, greet friends, maybe pick up something to drink, and settle down for the program of dance in LIT No. 19 (Loft into Theater). Memories assail me, specifically those filed away under “good old days in NYC,” when … [Read more...]
Archives for February 2019
Finding a World
Who are these people, these inhabitants of Andrea Miller’s To Create a World? They are, of course, members of her company Gallim and collaborators in the work’s choreography, but that doesn’t answer the question. They seem to be part of an evolving world of fire and ice, themselves perhaps evolving. In Will Epstein’s score for piano, electronics, voice, percussion, synthesizers, saxophone, plus … [Read more...]
Dancing Community
It wasn’t the usual impersonal voice reminding those of us sitting in the Joyce Theater to please turn off our cellphones, Instead, we who were waiting to see Camille A. Brown and Dancers perform her ink heard a muted, but excited babble and a voice that I took to be Brown’s delivering the requisite warning. It also might have been an invitation to see the performers as a tribe and, as much … [Read more...]
New York City Ballet Presents a New Work
If Sir Isaac Newton had time-traveled from the late 17th–century England to 21st-century New York and found himself watching the New York City Ballet perform Justin Peck’s new Principia, would he have understood the ballet’s connection to his three-volume Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica? You never know. But he might have understood bodies onstage being subject to gravitational pull and … [Read more...]
Transfigured Night
I am always amazed by the dances that Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker creates for her Belgium-based company, Rosas. To begin with, I’m never sure what I’ll see or where I’ll have to go in order to see one of them. Preparing to take in her Verklärte Nacht last week, I might well have wondered whether she would perform a solo, like her 1980 Violin Phase (incorporated into the four-part Fase two years … [Read more...]