Susan Marshall, Jason Treuting, and Suzanne Bocanegra explore our perception of color. Is this the coolest ever lecture on color theory? Yes and no. It’s also a piece of theater created and performed at the Kitchen (June 23-25) by choreographer Susan Marshall, composer Jacob Treuting, and visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra. However, after seeing their Chromatic and its references to Bauhaus … [Read more...]
Redefining Wilderness in Music and Dance
Choreographer Brian Brooks and composer Jerome Begin collaborate at The Kitchen. I don’t know why Brian Brooks titled his fascinating new work Wilderness, since the word conveys that there’s no man-made order involved, while his “wilderness” is precisely structured with a considerable amount of over-and-over repetition by eight black-clad dancers (costumes by Karen Young). On a white floor, … [Read more...]
Emerging from, Returning to Dust
Yvonne Rainer's The Concept of Dust: Continuous Project—Altered Annually. So, a woman walks into The Kitchen and stands hesitantly before the audience. Behind her, at the back of the performing area, five dancers wait; there’s a gap in their shoulder-to-shoulder line. The woman—it is choreographer Yvonne Rainer— warns us, fumbling a bit for words, that she has bad news for us. About … [Read more...]
The Sleeping Beauty Wakes in a Brave New World
Katy Pyle's Ballez performs Sleeping Beauty and the Beast in the La MaMa Moves Festival. This is, I promise, the last time I will blame acute jet lag for my sense of disembodiment and lapses in understanding. It kicks in the moment I go to the La MaMa box office, and there seem to be no tickets in my name for Katy Pyle’s Sleeping Beauty and the Beast. Once in the theater, I don’t read the … [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...]
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...]
Surviving in a Limbo of Violent Dreams
VIM VIGOR DANCE COMPANY premieres Shannon Gillen's Separati. A Plexiglas phone booth sits marooned in the performing area of the Gelsey Kirkand ArtCenter’s 400-seat black-box theater, glowing eerily in Barbara Samuels’ lighting. As Shannon Gillen’s Separati for her VIM VIGOR DANCE COMPANY unfolds, I think of Edward Hopper’s paintings of bleak, deserted city streets, or of people in … [Read more...]
Exploding the House of Atreus
Ann Liv Young's Elektra at New York Live Arts, January 20-30 The chronically grumpy comedian W.C. Fields advised fellow actors never to work with children or animals if they wanted the audience’s attention full-time. He knew what he was talking about, but Ann Liv Young is a creatively flagrant disregarder of many conventions. During her new Elektra at New York Live Arts, my gaze … [Read more...]
A Dance Morsel
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 Down to the Bone
luciana achugar premieres An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love. It’s November, 2006, and I’m sitting on one of the highest carpeted risers in St. Mark’s Church watching Luciana Achugar’s Exhausting Love. Suddenly one of the performers (Hilary Clark) works her way toward me and my companion and wedges herself between us. Other cast members are also bridging the audience-performer divide. … [Read more...]