The Mark Morris Dance Group performs in its own Brooklyn space. Music often takes Mark Morris in directions I couldn’t have anticipated, as the programs for his company’s season at the Mark Morris Dance Center make clear. Only occasionally does a score’s history enter the picture, and, if it does, it enters with an enigmatic twist. His 2005 Cargo is set to Darius Milhaud’s La Création du … [Read more...]
Is This How It Ends?
Tiffany Mills premieres After the Feast at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club. Tiffany Mills titled her latest work After the Feast, and the program note for its premiere during the annual La MaMa Moves! Festival asks the spectators to imagine: “an urban dystopia caused by vanishing resources.” In my mind, that includes considering the reckoning that may come as a result of our depredations … [Read more...]
Marching Forward, Sometimes on Tiptoe
The Martha Graham Dance Company performs at City Center Erick Hawkins once claimed that he never knew that Martha Graham, his partner, lover, and onetime wife was fifteen years older than he. She knew it, however (and habitually chopped several years off her age when documentation was needed). In 1946, a period when he and she were temporarily on the outs, she choreographed Cave of the … [Read more...]
Bracing Winds from Miami
Miami City Ballet bursts into Lincoln Center. Ten years ago this summer, Miami City Ballet performed at Jacob’s Pillow. This is what I wrote in the Village Voice: “Miami City Ballet’s dancers tear into Balanchine’s works with such appetite for speed and scale that you wonder how they stay in control. Their legacy is clear. They came to Balanchine through Miami’s artistic director Edward … [Read more...]
The Old and the New Dancing Together
Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance continues its Lincoln Center run through April 3. In a program essay by Susan Yung for the Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance season (through April 3), guest choreographer Doug Elkins mentions that Taylor’s Esplanade was the first dance he ever saw on PBS’s “Dance in America” and acknowledges its influence on him. Not that you’d guess it at the opening … [Read more...]
Paul Taylor’s Dancers on an Adventure
Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance presents it New York season, March 15-April 3. Last year inaugurated the transformation of the Paul Taylor Dance Company into Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance. During that season, Shen Wei’s Rite was performed by his own company, and the José Limón company danced Doris Humphrey’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. During the company’s current two-week … [Read more...]
Tracing Bloodlines
The Stephen Petronio Company premieres a new work and revives one by Trisha Brown. Stephen Petronio’s five-year project, Bloodlines, pays homage to his heritage in the most loving and laborious of ways. He introduced it last year by having his dancers learn and perform Merce Cunningham’s great 1968 RainForest. This year, for the company’s season at the Joyce Theater, they tackled a work by … [Read more...]
Fire and Ice Mate. . .Can That End Well?
The Kathryn Posin Dance Company performs at 92Y. Think about Swan Lake and numerous 19th-century fairytale ballets—both tragedies and those with happy endings. Did/does anyone question why an “oriental” houri wears pointe shoes or why the vengeful ghost of a jilted bride dances in a moonlit forest with a cohort of similarly affected others? Mostly we accept the story and how it is told. … [Read more...]
From Palestine via Belgium
Badke, a Belgian-Palestinian dance production, comes to New York Live Arts. There is no light in New York Live Arts’ theater, where Badke is beginning. In the darkness, we hear a shout, a strangled cry, a high ululation. Somewhere in front of us, feet are stamping. A rhythmic treading develops and builds into more complicated heard patterns. Then the lights come on, and we see them: ten … [Read more...]
Goodbye to All That (Almost)
The Trisha Brown Dance Company presents three of Brown's proscenium works in New York for the last time. Goodbyes are never easy when you love someone. Or something. The Trisha Brown Dance Company’s season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music during the last few days of January represents the last time we New Yorkers will see some of Brown’s major works performed by her dancers. Just realizing … [Read more...]