From my Financial Times review of the Smuin Ballet, at the Joyce a month ago:  Trey McIntyre, whose own troupe is now the toast of Boise, has finally found a form for his whimsical, wide open, very American imagination. Taking its title and music from the Portland band The Shins, Oh, Inverted World is ballet's answer to indie rock - The Shins' kind, in which sweet, strummed melodies support … [Read more...]

Perhaps dance (of the non So You Think You Can Dance variety, anyway) is already too much on the fringe to make much use of a Fringe festival. This year, in any case, the only thing that distinguished the dance offerings I saw at the New York Fringe from what you might get at, say, the downstairs theatre at the Ailey building was that they were worse: either off-- like rotten vegetables, … [Read more...]

A peripatetic summer yielded this Financial Times essay earlier this month on outdoor shows. I noticed an ideological split among the presenting organizations:  The free outdoor shows peppering New York and and the outer boroughs each summer always have their separate agendas but this year a stark divide emerged. On one side was the community-building event, in neighbourhood parks from … [Read more...]

For the Financial Times, I took my annual train trip up to remote Jacob's Pillow last month, in which, middle-aged bones creaking in the rain, I was struck by what a spring chicken I am:Jacob's Pillow has long been an outpost of forward thinking. Before the idea of "cultural diversity" existed, founder Ted Shawn was inviting Indian classical dancer Ram Gopal and pioneering black ballerina Janet … [Read more...]

From my Financial Times review of the Tao Dance Theatre, at Lincoln Center Festival last week--one of the few modern dance companies from mainland China, and extraordinary: China came late to modern dance - and nothing is as deadly as a recent convert's earnest faith. So when the programme declared that Beijing choreographer Ye Tao, of the five-year-old Tao Dance Theater, "eschews … [Read more...]