The San Francisco Ballet comes to Lincoln Center with two mixed bills of ballets by seven choreographers. The artistic director of a large ballet company must have headaches rather different from those of a Wall Street trader. His (and such directors tend to be male) “stocks” are highly volatile. Helgi Tomasson, who leads the San Francisco Ballet, can make predictions about how ballets by … [Read more...]
Entering the Forsythean Maze
William Forsythe brings his 2011 Sider to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. When you watch a recent work by William Forsythe, you may find yourself responding to it on two levels. Sitting in the Brooklyn Academy of Music to watch his 2011 Sider (part of BAM’s 2013 Next Wave Festival), you take in what the dancers are doing (say moving large rectangles of corrugated cardboard around), … [Read more...]
Three Men, Their World
Cloud Gate 2 presents On the Road for an all-male trio. Three men from Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo Company perform Endangered Pieces. Three men in a tub. Three Musketeers; The Three Stooges; Chico, Harpo, and Groucho Marx; the three sailors in Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free. What can they not get up to in the way of adventure, comradeship, and rivalry? A while back, Cheng Tsun-lung, the associate … [Read more...]
Tides Beyond Ebb and Flow
The Lar Lubovitch Dance Company celebrates its 45th anniversary. Permit me to be fanciful about why Lar Lubovitch chose to devote the first half of the first of two programs his company is presenting at the Joyce to three duets (not a decision I would have recommended). However, Lubovitch founded the group that bears his name 45 years ago, and ever since, he has been showing us how … [Read more...]
Re-visiting The Old, Exploring The New
Molissa Fenley reconstructs two key works and fashions a new one at New York Live Arts, October 2 through 5. Elizabeth Streb is in the house! Not everyone at New York Live Arts for the opening night of Molissa Fenley and Company’s season would understand the exclamation point. I don’t deny Streb’s celebrity status in the downtown dance world, but the enthusiastic punctuation is there … [Read more...]
Boxed In and Kicking Out
Andrea Miller’s Gallim Dance Company premieres a new work at Montclair State University’s Peak Performances, September 26 through 29, 2013. In titling her wild new work Fold Here, Andrea Miller of Gallim Dance Company must have been thinking of all the implications of the instructions. Folding along prescribed creases makes a flat sheet of corrugated cardboard into a three-dimensional … [Read more...]
Asserting the Uncertain, Cooking the Rough
Megan V. Sprenger / MVworks at The Chocolate Factory and John J Zullo Dance/Raw Movement at St. Mark’s Church. When you’re watching Megan Sprenger’s absorbing new Flutter at the Chocolate Factory, you don’t think about butterflies poised above a blossom or birds winging to a new perch. Darker definitions come to mind: restless or uncertain movement, shivery excitement, “disturbance of the … [Read more...]
Dancers on Fire
The New York City Ballet puts on a Gala to ignite its Fall Season. Gala performances are strange animals—the bigger the dance company, the more lavish they have to be. Money is spent so that more money may accrue. At the New York City Ballet’s Fall Gala in its Lincoln Center home, designer Bronson van Wyck has hung huge blue-and-white and red-and-white-striped hot air balloons over the … [Read more...]
Another Rite
The Martha Graham Dance Company dances The Rite of Spring and Nacho Duato's Rust at Jacob’s Pillow, August 21-25. I like to imagine that at least once a month this year, somewhere in the world, a dance company and/or an orchestra has been thundering away at Igor Stravinsky’s masterpiece Le Sacre du Printemps, Obviously, I’m no statistician, but it does seem that, in 2013, the centenary of … [Read more...]
Archived in the Blood
Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion presents Pavement at Jacob's Pillow, August 21-25 You walk down a street in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. No, you don’t walk, you saunter—loose-limbed; cocky; taking big, easy steps. You are a young black man, and this is a decades-old black neighborhood. Does your leisurely progress identify you as a power—a drug dealer, maybe? A gang leader? Or are you a … [Read more...]