The revived Dance Theatre of Harlem performs at Jacob’s Pillow, June 19 through 23. If a repertory company starts its program with a performance of George Balanchine’s Agon, where can it possibly go from there? Higher? Don’t make me laugh. But whatever follows, you can get a jolt of almost electric pleasure when Dance Theatre of Harlem begins its performance in Jacob’s Pillow’s Ted Shawn … [Read more...]
Three for One
Zvi Gotheiner, Cherylyn Lavagnino, and Dusan Tynek share a series at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, June 12 through 22. I should have sat down at the computer right after getting home from the opening of Musa! A Festival of Dance with Music at Baruch Performing Arts Center. The inaugural performance was so dense with dancing that keeping my memories of it intact has been a challenge. Also, … [Read more...]
Here and Now with Hip-Hop
Patricia Noworol strategizes culture and arts politics via hip-hop. Decades ago, some writers considered that ballet was on its way to becoming an international language, despite its obvious roots in western European courts, culture, and dance forms. Other people raised the issue of cultural imperialism. Hip-hop—emerging from American city streets, its roots tangling back to Africa—has … [Read more...]
Women in Distress
RIOULT Dance New York premieres "Iphigenia" at the Joyce Theater, June 5 through 9. Pascal Rioult was an important member of Martha Graham’s company during the last part of her life. Three years after her death in 1991, he founded RIOULT Dance New York and built it into a prospering entity, with performances in the U.S. and abroad, a wide-ranging outreach program to introduce children and … [Read more...]
Dmitri and Alexei, Heart to Heart
American Ballet Theatre presents a trilogy of ballets by Alexei Ratmansky to Shostkovich's music. When American Ballet Theatre premiered Alexei Ratmansky’s Symphony #9 last October, it was understood that this was to be the first in a trilogy of ballets set to music by Ratmansky’s fellow Russian, Dmitri Shostakovich. That trilogy made its debut with four performances during the company’s … [Read more...]
Tell Me a Story, and Another and Another
The Tiffany Mills Company presents two new works at BAM Fishman. Remember when dancers rarely talked onstage? No? Then you’re probably still in your twenties. Beginning in the 1980s, when narrative and emotion began to slip back into contemporary American dance and knock its movement-and-form-only stance askew, some choreographers tackled stories that couldn’t be told through dancing … [Read more...]
Playing Hard, Game Unknown
Gallim Dance at BAM Fisher, May 21-26, 2013 What does “blush” convey to you? A person becomingly embarrassed? A person ashamed? The reddening sky of dawn? If it were not for the association of “flush” with toilets and wealth, I’d consider it an apter title than Blush for Andrea Miller’s revised 2009 dance. The six go-for-broke members of her Gallim Dance do indeed turn red in the face … [Read more...]
Dancing Love and Love of Dancing
American Ballet Theatre’s new production of Frederick Ashton’s “A Month in the Country” on a program with Mark Morris’s “Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes” and George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C.” Metropolitan Opera House, May 21-23. Frederick Ashton’s A Month in the Country distills the five acts of Ivan Turgenev’s eponymous play and the passage of several weeks into 40 minutes of dancing, … [Read more...]
The Attraction of Opposites
Pam Tanowitz's The Spectators at New York Live Arts, May 15 through 18; Bill Young and Colleen Thomas's A Place in France at 100 Grand Street, May 16 through 19. Pam Tanowitz’s new The Spectators at New York Live Arts is so clean you could eat off it. Pristine patterns control the six dancers she deploys, and no move they make is blurred or loose. One of Tanowitz’s talents is making cool … [Read more...]
From Tunis to Ithaca
Jonah Bokaer performs his The Ulysses Syndrome with his father, Tsvi Bokaer, May 9 and 10, during the French Institute's World Nomads Festival. Ithaca is the island in the Ionian sea that Odysseus (aka Ulysses) left when he armed himself for the Trojan War, and it’s the place he returned to after ten postwar years of wandering. Ithaca, New York, is the city where Tsvi Bokaer finally settled … [Read more...]