Big Dance Theater premieres a new work at the BAM Harvey, November 14 through 18. I’d like to browse Annie-B Parson’s book shelves. What will she read to inspire the next dance theater piece that she choreographs for Big Dance Theater and, with Paul Lazar, directs? She slides together two or more disparate texts together and makes them strike sparks off each other. Maybe it’s not just her … [Read more...]
The Red Shoes Redux
Matthew Bourne/New Adventures brings the 1948 movie, The Red Shoes, to the stage. In 1953-54, when Britain’s Sadlers Wells Ballet had not yet become the Royal Ballet, and the company was performing in New York’s old Metropolitan Opera House in the West 30s, ballet lovers formed lines for standing-room tickets early in the morning. The excitement had, in part, been kindled by Michael Powell … [Read more...]
Life in a Whirlwind
The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company presents a new work. In October, almost a year ago, I wrote about one of two pieces that the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company premiered at the Joyce Theater. Lance: Pretty AKA The Escape Artist told through movement, speech, music, movable set pieces, and props the story of Lance T. Briggs, a nephew of Bill T. Jones, who began as a promising ballet … [Read more...]
Bausch Reborn
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch returns to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (through September 24). Pina Bausch made a wise decision in 1984 when Tanztheater Wuppertal— the company she headed in that park-studded, industrial German city—made its New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music: she introduced us to her stylistic preoccupations gradually. Between graduating from the … [Read more...]
Circles of Life
Tamar Rogoff's Grand Rounds at La MaMa, April 27 through May 14. Choreographer Tamar Rogoff grew up in the 1950s reading Helen Wells’ mystery novels about a nurse named Cherry Ames, who’d risk the wrath of the doctors she served by resourcefully breaking the rules in order to save a patient’s life, if no one else was around. From Cherry Ames, Student Nurse (1943), Nurse Ames went on being … [Read more...]
‘Tis the Season
Mark Morris's The Hard Nut at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House. Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut sets the knowing audience at the Brooklyn Academy laughing in ways that most ballets set to Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker do not. But I doubt that ballet aficionados in St Petersburg in 1892 found their eyes moisting up either. This revival of Morris’s music-wise, tradition-flouting version melds human … [Read more...]
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...]
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...]
A Wintry Tale of Love and Jealousy
“What were you thinking, Will?” And “Eat your heart out, Marius Petipa.” These two silent remarks to the eminent dead periodically rattled around in my head while I was at Lincoln Center watching The National Ballet of Canada perform Christopher Wheeldon’s remarkable three-act work based on William Shakespeare’s 1611 play The Winter’s Tale (staged for the NBC by Jacquelin Barrett and Anna Délicia … [Read more...]