Jonah Bokaer and Daniel Arsham bring their latest work to BAM Howard Gilman Opera House. Hooded figures swathed in pale clothing stand, isolated in pools of light, on the stage of the BAM Gilman Opera House, as part of BAM's Next Wave Festival. Their faces are hidden, and they’re frozen in diverse positions. In place when we enter the theater, they could be statues awaiting renovation. This … [Read more...]
Enter The Men
10 Hairy Legs presents work by four choreographers at New York Live Arts. There’s a problem. Well, not much of one. Randy James gave the name 10 Hairy Legs to the all-male company he founded in 2012 . I counted twelve legs (and won’t debate the hairiness quotient). Obviously, I don’t recommend a name change, but I bring it up because I wish that the program I saw at New York Live Arts … [Read more...]
Embodying The Erased Father
Nora Chipaumire premieres a new work at Montclair State University's Peak Performances. You go out to Montclair State University to attend the world premiere of Nora Chipaumire’s portrait of myself as my father on Peak Peformances’ 2015-2016 season, and note that Spring is greening the lawns. The immense construction machines that are ripping up turf and erecting buildings sit brooding and … [Read more...]
Flesh and the Gaze
Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner's Eskasizer, at The Boiler February 26 through April 3. Over the centuries, women’s bodies have been compared to many things. The amorous speaker in the Bible’s “Song of Songs” hymns his beloved’s breasts as being “like two young roes that are twins which feed among the lilies.” (He also likens her teeth to a flock of evenly shorn sheep). But how closely … [Read more...]
Tangling, Tiptoeing Through Mysteries
Donna Uchizono premieres a new work at Gibney Dance's Agnes Varis Performance Center. “Donna Uchizono: Woman of Mystery.” Does that sound about right? No, it’s too much of a cliché to apply to a choreographer whose next step you can never anticipate and whose every new work adjusts your perceptions. Her 1995 Drinking Ivy, for instance, began with Levi Gonzalez standing alone at the rear of … [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...]
An Ancient Dance Play Meets New Music
Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto dance together again in a new approach to a Noh play. It is a marvelous robe! Well, not a robe exactly; it looks more like a shawl—light as feather, shimmering with gold, unearthly. It gives its name to a Japanese legend and to Hagoromo, the 16th-century Noh drama it inspired; the robe belongs to a celestial dancer who can depict through her movements the changes … [Read more...]
The Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up
Alexei Ratmansky brings an 1890 ballet to new life for American Ballet theatre. American Ballet Theatre is no stranger to The Sleeping Beauty. As Ballet Theatre, the new company in town in 1941, the dancers performed Princess Aurora, Anton Dolin’s mash-up of elements from the Prologue and Act III of Marius Petipa’s 1890 masterwork. ABT presented its first full-length version in 1976, its … [Read more...]
Moves at LaMaMa
Jane Comfort and Company and Jon Kinzel present new works. Jane Comfort is a master teller of tales—not straight linear narratives, but dances that bristle with content—often social and/or political, often involving spoken text. She has always ingeniously layered and juxtaposed elements and viewpoints that might strike anyone else as incompatible and made them ignite one another. Her 1988 … [Read more...]
Eyes: Open and Shut
[Katie Workum's Black Lakes at St. Mark's Church, April 9 through 11] I didn’t read the note that Katie Workum added to the program for her Black Lakes. This was not because I heeded her spoiler alert, which warned spectators who liked to approach a work with fresh eyes not to read further. I didn’t see even see the alert. I came to the Danspace Project presentation in St. Mark’s church … [Read more...]