Foot in Mouth

[ed. note: This funny, beautiful post is the first in a series that poet and longtime dance critic Eva Yaa Asantewaa will present under the rubric "InfiniteBody." Here, she riffs off Foot in Mouth's opening question, If nearly everybody likes to move and watch others move, why are dance audiences so small?] Are you old enough to remember the days when we would fortify ourselves first and then head … [Read more...]

[ed. Note: I asked Paul Parish if he could please do the honors of starting us out on fairy tales--I have to postpone my own post --and to be polemical, please, as this is Foot in Mouth. By way of saying he didn't have anything to say, he sent this entertaining and informed response.] I was HOPING to get further than I have on thinking about fairy tales -- most of which is, Damn, it doesn't feel … [Read more...]

On the subject of renewed classics: if you live in the New York area, go see Sarah Michelson's tour de force "Dogs," at the BAM Harvey Theater through Saturday only. It's as if Michelson, with key help from visual designer and principle dancer Parker Lutz, scooped up all the women-birds and women sphinxes--the Firebirds and Cleopatras-- in history and ballet and found a way to reimagine them so … [Read more...]

[ed. note: Here's something Paul wrote in an email about Mark Morris's production of the Purcell opera "King Arthur." I'd mentioned I was disappointed that musical experimentation never counted as experimental in modern dance. Choreographers could use music as a blanket of sound or a mood adjuster or a metronome, or they could broadly riff off the place this kind of music holds in the culture, but … [Read more...]

Later this week, I'll post the promised piece on variations on the classics. My prompt is James Kudelka's "Cinderella," which American Ballet Theatre premiered this summer at Lincoln Center, and such questions as: Can an individual make a fairy tale or can only a folk? What would count as a contemporary fairy tale? Dance videographer Amy Reusch sent me these intriguing questions: Regarding making … [Read more...]

When, in the post below ("That Freaky Stuff"), I said young conceptuo-dancemakers were "barfing all over the stage" (how disgusting of me!), I didn't mean literally. I should have. Last night I saw the final program of Dance Theater Workshop's Spring Dance Dialogue, in which young European, Russian, and American choreographers workshop their pieces for a week, then present them. Levi Gonzalez's … [Read more...]

Recently I was engrossed in an arty European movie (for an article on the European Dream Festival, presently drifting across Manhattan) when I realized it didn't have a soundtrack. Ambient sounds were filling in: the buggy air of a Dutch summer resort, voices traveling in the blue light of an endless Swedish night, the tamped-down breathing of a pimply Dutch boy anxiously in love. In life, these … [Read more...]

Brian, what you say about the writer's process echoing the process of the artist under review really resonates with me. I find writing reviews a glorious, yes agonizing process. It feels most rewarding when I can respond creatively to work that has moved me. Then a sort of call and response can begin; the artist calls through performance and we respond on behalf of ourselves as critics and of the … [Read more...]

I agree about the pitfalls of retreating to the first person--the position of "This is just my opinion"--in reviews. There's a place for it, such as when you want to make a comment that you know is idiosyncratic, a pet peeve. But if it's done too much, it negates the whole enterprise. The declarative sentence already says, implicitly, This is How I See It--and expresses a point of view that … [Read more...]