The Guggenheim Museum's Works & Process series presents two works by Jodi Melnick on January 14th and 15th. I didn’t try to count the gestures in One of Sixty-Five Thousand Gestures, a 2012 collaboration between Trisha Brown and Jodi Melnick. Nor did I think about the “one” of the title while Melnick was dancing alone on the small stage of the Guggenheim Museum’s Peter B. Sharp Theater … [Read more...]
Dancing on Water, Making Waves Onstage
The Trisha Brown Dance Company performs at the Clark Art Institute and at Jacob's Pillow. I’ve never watched a work of Trisha Brown’s without saying to myself, “How did she ever think of that?” I still marvel that an artist so rigorous could be so playful. I’ve envied her rambunctious way with words too. Yesterday, feeling foggy-headed, I went to the refrigerator and screwed the cap off a … [Read more...]
Tracing Bloodlines
The Stephen Petronio Company premieres a new work and revives one by Trisha Brown. Stephen Petronio’s five-year project, Bloodlines, pays homage to his heritage in the most loving and laborious of ways. He introduced it last year by having his dancers learn and perform Merce Cunningham’s great 1968 RainForest. This year, for the company’s season at the Joyce Theater, they tackled a work by … [Read more...]
Goodbye to All That (Almost)
The Trisha Brown Dance Company presents three of Brown's proscenium works in New York for the last time. Goodbyes are never easy when you love someone. Or something. The Trisha Brown Dance Company’s season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music during the last few days of January represents the last time we New Yorkers will see some of Brown’s major works performed by her dancers. Just realizing … [Read more...]
Flying On
The Trisha Brown Dance Company moves through its final three years. It has only been a few months since I wrote about the Trisha Brown Dance Company, and here I am writing again. Ever since it was announced last year that health issues had caused Brown to retire as company head and sole choreographer and that the dancers were embarking on a three-year farewell tour, I tend to think, “It … [Read more...]
Family Ties
The Trisha Brown Dance Company and the Stephen Petronio Company give their New York seasons the same week. Sitting in the Joyce Theater during the Stephen Petronio Company’s 30th Anniversary Season, the word “highflyer” suddenly pushes it way into my mind. This is not just because Petronio is ambitious and successful, but because he takes risks and succeeds when you might expect him to … [Read more...]
When An Artist’s Newest Works Are Her Last. . .
On Thursday, January 31, the second day of the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it was announced that Brown, because of health problems, had retired as artistic director of the company she founded over forty years ago, and would choreograph no more dances. Consider these words bordered in black—mourning for the works she might have continued to give … [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...]
Forty Years of Magical Thinking
Labels like “ordinary” and “everyday” have often been pasted onto Trisha Brown’s movement, especially when someone is alluding to her early work as a member of the iconoclastic Judson Dance Theater. But when has anything she’s ever made been ordinary? Walking may be ordinary, but getting a dancer (to whom she was married at the time) to walk down the side of a very tall building is not your usual … [Read more...]