John Jasperse presents a new work at BAM Harvey, September 21-24. John Jasperse’s new Remains has a clarity so exquisite that images from it have pasted themselves into my memory. The piece, which premiered at the BAM Harvey this past week, shows some of these images to us many times, but in different ways; imagine a painted group scene, from which someone has clipped individual figures and … [Read more...]
Stories Only Dance Can Tell
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...]
Dance Builds Its Own Worlds
Pam Tanowitz Dance and the FLUX Quartet opens Bard SummerSpace 2105. The featured composer at Bard SummerScape 2015 is Carlos Chavez (1899-1979), and in July and August, the 26th annual Bard Music Festival will devote its performances and symposia to him and his contemporaries. On June 27, Summerscape opened at Bard College in Anandale-on-Hudson with a taste of his music. Choreographer Pam … [Read more...]
Blurring Thresholds
John Jasperse brings diverse sources and his own history into a bold new work at New York Live Arts, May 28 through 31. John Jasperse is not the kind of choreographer who draws a movement style out of his own body and sensibility and sticks with it. He reacts to ideas floating around in the culture, queries his own practice, tries something he hasn’t tried before. Often the movement he … [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...]
Three Choreographers Grace a Busy Week
Vicky Shick, Doug Elkins, and Joanna Kotze show work in an event-filled January week. Every January without fail, New York offers a smorgasbord of dance. The Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) convenes in town, and the table is laid for it in every available performing space. The first two weeks of the month are also a time when dancers, choreographers, and dance enthusiasts … [Read more...]