Every couple of months for a few days, English becomes a foreign language. I slip along its periphery: coffee with foam milk in place of latte. If I have time, I can wait for the words to make their way home, but I didn't, in the middle of the night, for this Larry Keigwin review.  I might have said that what gives this comedian choreographer promise--not yet realized, but I believe it will … [Read more...]

The Lyon Ballet is here--at the Joyce, with a great program that feels as if it's made for New Yorkers (no Eurotrash, for example, or almost none). It includes Cunningham's Beach Birds, which the dancers do with loving conscientiousness, if not quite the amplitude and eccentricity of the late choreographer's own, soon to be "redundant" (as the British put it) dancers. Anyway, here's the first … [Read more...]

Mark Morris, Paul Taylor and--less heavy--Lar Lubovitch all have seasons this week and next. And I have reviews of them. I'll keep adding at the top as the week progresses, so the latest on top. Friday night (first program) of Lar Lubovitch was one of those times where I felt keenly grateful for the dancers--or, in this case, one dancer, Reid Bartelme--for improving on the material they'd been … [Read more...]

Posts here in the next six weeks are going to be pretty barebones: links to stuff Foot contributor Paul Parish and I have written elsewhere, sans photos or anything, for now. (I may gussy them up later.) But in case you just want to head direct to go, the Financial Times allows you about an article a day, which is certainly enough for the dance offerings (by me and the glorious Clement Crisp). … [Read more...]

(*Corrections to paragraph begun with *below. plus added bit of Denby poem at the end) You'd think ballet would be good at expressing the exhilaration of love, and it is, but only if it can cap it off with betrayal, tragedy, death! Consider Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, La Sylphide, Giselle, Scheherazade, La Bayadere--not to mention the moderns, Balanchine and Tudor in particular. (Ashton is more … [Read more...]

When a young choreographer has the bud of a beautiful language but only an intermittent sense of what to do with it, her promise is an open question; as a reviewer I tend to answer in the affirmative, in the hope that the language will win out in the end. Does it usually? That depends on the powers that be--not just critics, but producers, artistic directors, etc.--recognizing how much it counts … [Read more...]

**Maybe I shouldn't even mention it, I revise so chronically after the initial post. I think it's an age thing. I know how a blog is supposed to work--that it's off the cuff, that you say one thing and then forget about it so you can say another--but the big distinction for me from official print venues (where I get paid, yippee!!) is that there is no one but me to decide when it's done. So I may … [Read more...]

I suppose the esteemed New York Times chief dance critic Alastair Macaulay is right that Alexey Miroshnichenko's Lady with the Little Dog "isn't the worst dog (sorry) ever seen on [the New York City Ballet] stage," though it was the worst my friend Carlene, my regular ballet companion, had seen. As Macaulay mentions, another older and more popular Soviet-ballet booster, Boris Eifman, takes the … [Read more...]

Writing on the Pacific Northwest Ballet's debut under the widely admired former New York City Ballet principal Peter Boal proved a challenge, in that I know that Boal is a very thoughtful curator of dances--that as artistic director he wants collections of dances, not a haphazard jumble. But coming up with a program for a New York show that doesn't bring coal to Newcastle or wishfully exaggerate … [Read more...]

(I know, you probably don't care--nor should you--but I revised, as of Sunday Jan 4 3ish pm the paragraphs on the downtown scene and on Performa--the first b/c I wanted to try to get right at least what I think I'm seeing, the second because there were some factual inaccuracies. I put ** before those paragraphs.]   Finally, we have escaped the Bush-ridden naughties. To ring in the new year … [Read more...]