College basketball has nothing on the March Madness that seems to overtake the New York dance season just as spring is trying to inch in. I find myself momentarily mixing up dancers and works in my mind and trying to read notes scribbled on top of one another in a dense, black blob. Then there’s the pen that ran out of ink. . . . Three performances have been running around in my mind on … [Read more...]
Living in a Green World
When Ohad Naharin left New York for Israel, his homeland, in 1990 and took over Batsheva Dance Company, he developed a distinctive movement style. In all his dances, the performers are muscular in unconventional ways. Watching them, I imagine elements of the inner apparatus that moves the human body trying to find new conduits into motion. Sometimes a dancer’s hip or a shoulder is impelled to … [Read more...]
Contending with Loss
Stephen Petronio’s melancholy, disturbingly beautiful new Architecture of Loss is, I’m pretty sure, fraught with more stillness and more silence than any of the works he’s made over the last couple of decades. The word “architecture” in the title tells us that he’s not trying to show us mourning as a response to loss; he’s showing us loss as absence and the evanescence of supporting … [Read more...]
So, Ludwig. . .
Ludwig van Beethoven must have had more stamina than he’s usually credited with. If you research his Fantasy in C Minor for Piano, Orchestra, and Chorus, Op. 80, you find that its first public performance in 1808 ended a program that lasted four hours and included among its nine items the premieres of Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies (conducted by the 38-year-old composer), his Fourth Piano … [Read more...]
Walking Backward in Devotion
The first time I saw dancing at the Whitney Museum of American Art, it was 1971 and Trisha Brown’s dancers were walking on two walls of one of the huge galleries, via ropes, pulleys, and tracks mounted on the ceilings. The last time I saw dancing at the Whitney, it was 2012 (March 1 to be exact), and Sarah Michelson’s Devotion Study #1—The American Dancer had taken over most of the museum’s fourth … [Read more...]
One Good Thing About Arizona. . .
Ib Andersen didn’t move to Phoenix in 2000 to become artistic director of the Arizona Ballet. According to a recent interview, when he took on the job he was already in Arizona—loving the clear light, open sky, and sere landscape, and painting in his spare time. He may not have much spare time these days. During his tenure, the company debt has been erased, the board has labored to raise money, … [Read more...]
To Dance in the Sky
At the very end of Pat Catterson’s gentle, beautifully crafted new dance, To Lie in the Sky, a voice recites the plangent opening lines of May Swenson’s “The Question”— “Body my house/ my horse my hound/ what will I do when you are fallen.” Catterson took her title from that poem’s penultimate query: “How will it be/ to lie in the sky/ without roof or door/ and wind for an eye.” These are not … [Read more...]
Take Them Disappearing
What are we seeing? We’re seeing a woman kneel beside a large potted tree, and root around in its soil; she is nicely dressed in black pants, a ruched white top held up by tiny black straps, and high-heeled, little brown boots. That was an easy question. But, wait. How are we seeing it and through how many possible layers of meaning? (Is she cultivating the soil a bit, hunting for something—maybe … [Read more...]
Traveling The Upward Path
The sound of distant dripping fills the darkness. Lights gradually, dimly, reveal a barely discernible standing figure. Suddenly the person plunges forward against what turns out to be a translucent curtain that stretches from one side of the stage to the other. Whenever his hands or his scribbling finger or his head presses against the flexible membrane separating him from us, that part comes … [Read more...]
It’s All Wheeldon
Trying to trace Christopher Wheeldon’s career, you might decide he has a vagabond streak that tugs against a now-and-then yen for stability. As a young dancer and choreographer-in-waiting, he left Britain’s Royal Ballet for the New York City Ballet, became NYCB’s resident choreographer from 2000 to 2008, started Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company while still affiliated with NYCB, pulled out of that in … [Read more...]