Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham bring their Morphia Series to the Coil Festival. Sometimes what surrounds a performance affects your experience of it. My experience of Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham's Morphia Series included the journey to and from it—in terms of both mind and body. And then a fruitless online trip to access an essay about it: Loadingloadingloadingloading. . . … [Read more...]
Dancing with Bach
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Boris Charmatz perform her Partita 2 in Lincoln Center's White Light Festival. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Brussels-based company, Rosas, last performed in New York in 2013, when the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented her En Attendant and Cesena. Several years before, the two stunning pieces, featuring singers and instrumentalists as well as dancers, had … [Read more...]
From Sweden: Taped and Set Free
K. Kvarnström Co/Kulturhuset City Theatre Stockholm performs at BAM Fisher. Eighteen years have passed since I first saw Kenneth Kvarnström’s choreography. That was at a rehearsal in his native Finland. Thirteen years ago, I viewed his beautiful Fragile at Jacob’s Pillow. So I can’t speak knowledgeably about his style, but I do see connections between Fragile and TAPE, which K. Kvarnström … [Read more...]
The Dancers You Need to Love
Gauthier Dance//Dance Company Theaterhaus Stuttgart Comes to Jacob's Pillow. Only nine of the fourteen members of Gauthier Dance//Dance Company Theaterhaus Stuttgart were on hand when this Germany-based company made its United States debut at Jacob’s Pillow this July, and only once during its program (in Cayetano Soto’s (2014) Malasangre) did more than three people appear onstage at the … [Read more...]
Walk, Do Not Dance!
The Lyon Opera Ballet brings Christian Rizzo's ni fleurs, ni ford-mustang to BAM. The stage lights are dimming slowly— so slowly that we spectators can barely pin down the moment when we can no longer see the clump of seven dancers, covered head to toe in gleaming black outfits, wriggling and jouncing around. Nor can we be sure when the lights are truly out. There’s a nervous pause before … [Read more...]
À LA FRANÇAIS AND THEN SOME
DANSE: A French-American Festival of Performance and Ideas opens with a work by Alain Buffard. The French in America! I do not speak of the emigrating 17th-century Huguenots, or of Alexis de Tocqueville, who journeyed around the U.S. in the 19th-century and said wise things about it. Je ne parle pas de croissants, ni de boeuf bourgignon. Dior? Pouf! Bidets? They never caught on. No, I … [Read more...]
Help, I’m Breaking Up!
Wayne McGregor/Random Dance brings Atomos to Peak Performances at Montclair State's Alexander Kasser Theater. Wayne McGregor wants it both ways, and I don’t blame him. This virtuoso dancemaker— resident choreographer at Britain’s Royal Ballet, the director of Wayne McGregor/Random Dance, and a been-around whose works grace the repertories of numerous companies—wants us to look at his dances … [Read more...]
Three by Three by Three
Eleanor Bauer brings her work from Brussels to Manhattan. Who are these three women? We potential audience members have been milling around in the Abrons Art Center lobby, chatting and wondering when the doors to the theater will open, and when they do, we enter a zone of empyrean mystery. The women in Eleanor Bauer’s Midday and Eternity (the time piece) sit in a row at the front of the … [Read more...]
Ending in Darkness
Compagnie Philippe Saire brings Black Out to LaMama Black Out, a creation by Philippe Saire, mates choreography with visual art in ways calculated to disturb us. He is frank about his mission, describing Black Out as “A work that contemplates the randomness of mortality in a world of genocide, disease, epidemics, and senseless violence.” In it, three collaborating members of Compagnie … [Read more...]
The Beat Goes On
O Vertigo Danse of Montreal and the Société de Musique Contemporaine du Québec perform Ginette Laurin’s La Vie Qui Bat and Steve Reich’s Drumming at Jacob’s Pillow. There are two performances happening simultaneously on the stage of Jacob’s Pillow’s Ted Shawn Theatre, but I can only see one of them and a tantalizing smidgen of the other. The one I can see is Ginette Laurin’s La Vie Qui Bat … [Read more...]