Archives for 2010

Yes, ridiculous: now that all the nuts are cracked, I get around to posting these. It was an especially bountiful Nutcracker season here in New York. Besides the glorious perennial, New York City Ballet's Balanchine production, Ratmansky mounted his very own version for ABT and Mark Morris's Hard Nut made a rare (too rare, I say) East Coast appearance. The Ratmansky excited me so much, I hardly … [Read more...]

Because Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has tended to extrapolate badly from its founder's aesthetic and ethos, I forget every year what a strong craftsman Ailey was. Even when he was tired, the work had merit. Revelations is always my first reminder of his craft--and, no, he wasn't tired for that--followed this year by Cry, Night Creatures, and the final section of Three Black Kings. In fact, … [Read more...]

Hmmmm.... It must be something in the air--or in me--that the experimental works this month seemed too much between one thing and another, without ever wresting their own potent identity. They felt insufficiently steeped, like a stew that hasn't sat and simmered long enough for the flavors to blend. With Neil Greenberg's (like a vase), the steps were precise yet coded, private, partial: Neil … [Read more...]

This season we've had contemporary European dance not only at BAM, the usual suspect, but also at the Joyce, with Belgium's Ballets C de la B earlier this month and more recently Cedar Lake, its reputation as purveyor of B-list--or at least green--European choreographers (with a few A-list Israelis in the mix) now solid. I sound typically New Yorker, don't I? Jaded to the point of provinciality. … [Read more...]

With dances that use an academic or codified language, the route to the matter at hand is relatively direct. Not so when not steps, not structure, but method--more intangible, less empirically provable--is the reigning force. In that case, it doesn't do for the critic to isolate effects; they are mere flotsam--analogues. Of course, writers do isolate all the time, with the result that the dance … [Read more...]