and its discontents: Check it out. … [Read more...]
Archives for 2011
Participatory Art and its Discontents
What's participatory art good for? I consider the question in the Village Voice. Check it. … [Read more...]
Wed. April 20
A plethora of modern--as well as old or dead--masters … [Read more...]
Old masters looking back as we wonder about looking forward (revised already)
(Note: Somehow a couple of paragraphs got disappeared last night--not erased but buried in computer code and thus invisible. I've put asterisks by them, newly restored...] Late February and March were chock-a-block with venerated masters of modern dance, from graying to old to dead. The plethora of offerings forced us to think again about what we will be left with in their … [Read more...]
Monday, March 21
how not to mistake a dancer for a fine wine … [Read more...]
The dancer and the dance (on the occasion of Balanchine and kin)
Over Christmas, I deflowered a middle-aged friend of his Nutcracker innocence. A typical European, he'd seen Pina Bausch but no Petipa. Though I suspect he found the whole thing childish, he responded gamely (this was to ABT's new Ratmansky version) except to the pas de deux. These moments of slippery idealized romance made him itch. In fact, he decided BAM was infested with bed … [Read more...]
Step sisters (NEW! comments, and comments on the comments)
[Ed. note: while I am slow to get a new post up, check out the comments to this one. I have some questions for you, dear reader.] For reasons good and bad, choreographers Andrea Miller and Sidra Bell are not typical fare at New York's longtime incubator for new performance, Dance Theater Workshop. On the one hand, their work doesn't question performance's frame: not much … [Read more...]
Wednesday, January 26:
the battle between steps and ideas in "downtown dance" … [Read more...]
Thursday January 20:
Tuning in to tone … [Read more...]
Tuning in to tone with five dances and one movie
By the time I was nine, home was my mother, my sister, and I. We bickered in twos, with the third as chorus and tie breaker. Sometimes my sister would cut me off or my mother her with a complaint about "tone"--how she didn't "like it." It's a dread phrase, "I don't like your tone," because it implies that there isn't anything behind the tone to have excited it--or that there shouldn't … [Read more...]