Count Hermann Carl von Keyserlink, so the story goes, had trouble sleeping at night in 18th-century Leipzig. So the amiable Johann Sebastian Bach composed thirty variations for harpsichord that his precocious and gifted pupil, 14-year-old Johann Gottheim Goldberg, might play at night to relax the insomniac. It is hard to imagine Bach’s Goldberg Variations helping anyone to get some shut-eye; … [Read more...]
Once Upon a Time There Was Romance
Do you ever wonder how choreographers choose their titles? After seeing James Whiteside’s New American Romance on the last day of American Ballet Theatre’s fall season at the former New York State Theater, I spent some time pondering that. The five women in its cast of eight wear dark blue, swirling, ankle-length tutus (provided by Primadonna). The music to which Whiteside set his ballet, … [Read more...]
Martha Over the Years
When Janet Eilber, artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, stepped through Jacob’s Pillow’s front curtain to introduce the group’s performance, she mentioned that this was the 94th year of the MGDC, which made it the oldest dance company in the United States. Actually Graham’s history travels twistily backward even further, when she and the Pillow’s founder, Ted Shawn, danced … [Read more...]
Borne on the Winds
The tall, robust, gray-haired man standing outside Jacob’s Pillow’s Ted Shawn Theater during intermission is explaining his reaction to Andrea Miller’s Boat to two attentive listeners. The members of her company, Gallim, he says, never stand still! He can’t get over that. It’s not entirely true, of course. The eight marvelous dancers who make up Gallim do pause in their dancing or stand and … [Read more...]
Anthologizing Abraham
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...]
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...]
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...]