Juliette Mapp and Beth Gill present brave new works in New York. Once in a while you go to a dance performance and think you’re in a mysterious world, whose inhabitants are familiar to you. . .and yet. . .not. You think about them, ask yourself questions. Then you try to stop asking questions and just watch what they’re doing. That’s how I felt during two recent, deeply absorbing works: … [Read more...]
Printed on the Space
Beth Gill and New York Live Arts and Lance Gries at Danspace St. Marks make a virtue of economy. In the deserts of the American Southwest, everything counts: the immense sky, that butte over there, those spiky plants, the track in the red earth (lizard? Maybe). Beth Gill’s beautiful New Work for the Desert has that kind of clarity. Watching it, you sense open space and the trails that … [Read more...]
The Animals Within
Over the years, thoughtful choreographers have turned to nature as a way of thinking about choreography. Isadora Duncan was drawn to wind and wave motion, Martha Graham to the ways in which emotion structures the body, Merce Cunningham to ideas about chance and indeterminacy in nature’s processes. It’s an interesting coincidence that, just recently, two groups—Jennifer Monson/iLAND at the … [Read more...]