When I watch a dance that I’ve also seen a few years earlier, I perceive it differently. Maybe I hear it differently too. Has it changed? Maybe. Have I changed? Of course. So has the world. I’ve viewed and written about all but one of the works dating from 2011, 2017, and 2018 that members of A.I.M (Abraham in Motion) performed this past week at Jacob’s Pillow. Some new dancers have taken on the … [Read more...]
The Worlds of Mark Morris
Mark Morris can be a playful fellow, and for his latest work, Sport, he collaborated with a playful musician, who was no longer living. Erik Satie wrote his Sports et Divertissements in 1914 (an unfortunate date) and published it, updated, in 1923. His original little book consisted of an introduction and the scores of twenty piano pieces under a minute in length, illustrations of each by Charles … [Read more...]
Grace and Mercy Come Together
I think I first saw Ronald K. Brown’s Grace twenty years ago when it was brand new and performed by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Company. Last week I saw it again, when it opened the 2019 SummerScape Festival at Bard College, this time performed by the choreographer’s own group: Ronald K. Brown/Evidence: A Dance Company. The work itself hasn’t changed much, but the context has. This year’s … [Read more...]
Cunningham Abroad
Compagnie CNDC-Angers/Robert Swinston visits Jacob's Pillow Once upon a time, Merce Cunningham wrote about the dancing that mattered to him: “[y]ou do not separate the human being from the actions he does, or the actions that surround him, but you can see what it is like to break those actions up in different ways, to allow the passion, and it is passion, to appear for each person in his … [Read more...]
Dancing in the Green
It rained the day before the Jacob’s Pillow Gala. It rained the day after the Jacob’s Pillow Gala. Fortunately, the rain gods were too busy elsewhere to cause trouble in Becket, Massachusetts on Saturday the 15th of June at 5:00 P.M. Pink umbrellas hung on the chairs for the banquet in the gigantic tent, just in case, but the sunny landscape could rouse in your mind the refrain of Federico Garcia … [Read more...]
Tharp Times Three
American Ballet Theatre's Tharp Trio at Lincoln Center, May 30-June 3 Does anyone dare to call Giselle dated? I doubt it. It’s a centuries-old classic that’s had numerous facelifts. I don’t often wish myself back at its premiere in 1832. However, feeling a twinge of nostalgia for something in your own not-so-distant past can be enriching when contemplating it anew. I wrote my review of … [Read more...]
Artforum review of Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event
Dear readers, I was invited by Art Forum to be one of three dance writers providing their responses to this extraordinary celebratory Event, which occurred exactly one hundred years after Merce Cunningham's birth in three cities: New York, San Francisco, and London. Seventy-five dancers participated and a host of former Cunningham company members taught material from his dancer. Here is the … [Read more...]
Tracing Bloodlines
The Stephen Petronio Company at Skirball American choreographers in the modern dance world have tended to disavow their heritages as they made new discoveries. In the 1930s, Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey labored to find their own styles and disavowed any influence that might have trickled down from Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis, in whose companies they had danced. Did Merce Cunningham and … [Read more...]
Martha Graham and Beyond
The Martha Graham Dance Company has titled its season at the Joyce Theater “The Eve Project.” What did artistic director Janet Eilber mean by this? Forget about Eve being conned by the biblical serpent; she tempted Adam to bite into that apple and, according to the bevy of gospel writers, more or less invented sex and paid the price. Instead, every one of the eleven works being performed between … [Read more...]
Struggling to Understand
Watching nine members of Israel’s Jerusalem-based Vertigo Dance Company perform One. One & One at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, you don’t think of green pastures and rippling brooks, you imagine rocky or sandy terrain being dug into and turned over and wrestled into fertility. Soil itself figures in this dance by Noa Wertheim, with Rina Wertheim-Koren as a co-creator. To sounds of rumbling, of … [Read more...]