The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company presents a new work. In October, almost a year ago, I wrote about one of two pieces that the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company premiered at the Joyce Theater. Lance: Pretty AKA The Escape Artist told through movement, speech, music, movable set pieces, and props the story of Lance T. Briggs, a nephew of Bill T. Jones, who began as a promising ballet … [Read more...]
Celebrating Thirty Years, Moving On
Doug Varone and Dancers shows old and new works at the BAM Harvey Theater. Doug Varone and Dancers is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, and during the past three decades, Varone has also choreographed dances for other companies, as well as directing and choreographing operas. Knowing that about him, you might expect that his style is not a static one, and you would be correct. In … [Read more...]
Dreaming a Never-Stopping Dance
The Seán Curran Company brings East and West together at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater. As you enter the BAM Harvey to see the Seán Curran Company’s Dream’d in a Dream, you not only glimpse an embodiment of the title, you begin to enter another kingdom. Not since Peter Brooks’ stunning production of the Sanscrit epic The Mahabharata introduced New Yorkers to the tactfully … [Read more...]
Beauty All Around
Heidi Latsky Dance shows a new film and two dances at Montclair State University Alexander Kasser Theater, April 16 through 19. Ideal beauty has always been a slippery topic, certainly since Plato strolled the streets of Athens. We’re pretty clear about structural archetypes, despite nature’s occasional deviations and breeders’ genetic modifications: sheep are quadrupeds with woolly coats; … [Read more...]
Ice Floes Meet and Part
The Liz Gerring Dance Company brings her Glacier to the Joyce Theater. Liz Gerring graciously titles her Glacier after the piece of music by Michael J. Schumacher to which it’s set. His score for guitar, piano, harp, cello, clarinet also contains recordings he made near Glacier Lake in Colorado, and it is these sounds that are prominent during the beginning of the dance: a rattle of little … [Read more...]
Boxed In and Kicking Out
Andrea Miller’s Gallim Dance Company premieres a new work at Montclair State University’s Peak Performances, September 26 through 29, 2013. In titling her wild new work Fold Here, Andrea Miller of Gallim Dance Company must have been thinking of all the implications of the instructions. Folding along prescribed creases makes a flat sheet of corrugated cardboard into a three-dimensional … [Read more...]
Bill T. Jones Takes a Stroll with John Cage
Artists inevitably reveal themselves in their work, but some do it more overtly than others. Over the course of his career, Bill T. Jones has told us a lot about himself—not only in his choices of subject matter and his wonderfully poetic memoir Last Night on Earth, but while onstage dancing. Watching his solos, we learned about the large family he grew up in—about his mother Estella, his … [Read more...]