What do we crave from the thirty dancers who make up the Alvin Ailey American Dance Company? That they be gorgeous, sleek, limber, powerful, virtuosic—sassy when the choreography calls for it, soulful ditto. They do not stint. They can knock dancing into the stratosphere or into our laps. Sometimes they turn the wattage up too high—forgoing subtleties for the highest, the biggest, the baddest, the … [Read more...]
Jump for Mother Ann’s Love
What fascinates people about the Shakers—members of religious communities that settled in New England in the late 18th century, proselytized, expanded, and began to wither a hundred or so years later? We marvel at the austerely beautiful furniture they made, their ingenuity, and the fact that they considered drawing, singing, and dancing gifts from God that were to be practiced freely and … [Read more...]
Goodbye to the Green
Since Laura Peterson began to show her choreography in New York around six years ago, she has become increasingly interested in transforming theater spaces through lighting, audience placement, and movement ideas. I’m thinking in particular of her 2007 I Love Dan Flavin, which I saw in the funky, cramped intimacy of the old Dixon Place, and Forever (2009), which utilized the columns and mirrored … [Read more...]
Going with the Flow
In 2000, I saw Lar Lubovitch’s Men’s Stories: A Concerto in Ruins at the Angel Orensanz Center on the Lower East Side. The former synagogue with its dark wood paneling, high blue vault of a ceiling, and stained glass windows gave the nine superb dancers who rushed in and out of it a slightly mystical aura—as if they’d channeled the ghosts of rabbinical students maddened by their studies. The … [Read more...]
November Potpourri
Seeing American Ballet Theatre during its too-brief season at City Center (nine works and eight performances in five days) could give spectators who devour the company’s spring shows at the Metropolitan Opera a new slant on the dancers. No tutus or tiaras on view, no see-me-ace-this displays of virtuosity, no hordes of elaborately costumed courtiers standing around watching some princess do what … [Read more...]
The Sculpture Dances
The star of Gideon Obarzanek’s Connected isn’t someone whose autograph you’d ask for, nor would you wish he/she/it would friend you on Facebook. The most compelling presence onstage during Chunky Move’s early November season at the Joyce was a kinetic sculpture designed by California artist Reuben Margolin. Obarzanek, the director and choreographer of the Melbourne-based company, has always … [Read more...]
Pairs Made in Heaven: Reitz & Rudner, Burrows & Fargion
In 1994, we were all younger. Yet in the photo accompanying the review I wrote that year of Necessary Weather, the luminous collaboration by Dana Reitz, Sara Rudner, and Jennifer Tipton, Reitz and Rudner look almost exactly the way they do performing the piece at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in late October, 2011. They wear the same white pants and flowing, diaphanous white shirts. Reitz’s hair is … [Read more...]
Sampling Dance, Bite by Bite
What’s not to love about Fall for Dance? For $10, you can sit in the pseudo-Moorish splendor of the refurbished City Center Theater and view one of the mixed bills running through November 6. Now’s the time to revisit companies you admire and discover ones you’ve never heard of. And don’t hurry home. Hang out for a while in the atrium running between 55th and 56th Streets that has been transformed … [Read more...]
Wandering Down Memory Lane
William Forsythe is an innovator. I doubt that fact is even up for debate among those who adore his work, those who loathe it, and those who simply scratch their heads over it. His post post-Balanchine ballets, his installations, his recent theater pieces, and his 2004 computer app, Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye, have influenced choreographers, performers, … [Read more...]
Bloodless Bacchanale
How does a choreographer tell a story in dance without telling a story? This question hangs over Luca Veggetti’s take on Euripides’ The Bacchae for Morphoses. The company co-founded by Christopher Wheeldon and Lourdes Lopez has, since Wheeldon’s departure, reconfigured itself as a pick-up ensemble whose profile changes yearly with a new resident artistic director and new dancers. Veggetti’s … [Read more...]