Jessica Lang Dance in The Wanderer at Jacob's Pillow July 29-August 9. Die schöne Mullerin, a suite of Romantic-era poems by Wilhelm Müller, set to ravishing music by his friend Franz Schubert, conjures up visions of a mystical natural world in which a swift-moving brook urges a wandering miller to follow its course—one that brings him to a mill. What does this rushing water have in mind? … [Read more...]
Tides Beyond Ebb and Flow
The Lar Lubovitch Dance Company celebrates its 45th anniversary. Permit me to be fanciful about why Lar Lubovitch chose to devote the first half of the first of two programs his company is presenting at the Joyce to three duets (not a decision I would have recommended). However, Lubovitch founded the group that bears his name 45 years ago, and ever since, he has been showing us how … [Read more...]
Erotic Geometry
When I look closely at a broccoli floret, I don’t ponder fractal geometry; I may marvel at images derived from Fibonacci sequences, but I don’t pretend to understand Walsh functions. Choreographer Karole Armitage might consider me an intellectual wimp. Her Three Theories premiered in 2010 at the World Science Festival. Although Armitage’s new Mechanics of the Dance Machine at New York Live Arts … [Read more...]
Home Is Where The Dance Is
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...]