Archives for 2006

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on October 6, 2006.

Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) — Glimpsed on a DVD sampler from Philadanco: five gorgeous, superbly athletic, pastel-gowned women dance out their complaints about the guys giving them heart trouble.

A minute later, a crew that deserves high-risk pay invades the stage with wild leaps and lifts aiming for, and miraculously achieving, soft, safe landings.

That first clip comes from Carmen de Lavallade’s “Love Songs,” to Billie Holiday recordings. The other is of Christopher L. Huggins’s “Cottonwool,” which probes the nature of daring.

These dances will be joined on the New York program by Daniel Ezralow’s “Pulse” and the spiritually charged “For Truth,” by Ronald K. Brown, one of today’s most gifted choreographers.

Philadanco — Philadelphia Dance Company on its birth certificate — was founded in 1970 and is still run by Joan Meyers Brown, who will receive a Dance magazine award next month. Originally, Brown aimed to provide training and performance opportunities then scarce for African-American dancers. Her company remains predominantly black, as does her roster of choreographers.

As Brown says, after 50 years in the field, “There’s a dearth of opportunity still.”

Philadanco performs through Sunday at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave. at 19th Street. For information, call (1)(212) 242- 0800 or go to http://www.joyce.org .

Salute to a Composer

Just as Tchaikovsky served classical ballet, Steve Reich has nourished postmodern dance. Choreographers are drawn to Reich’s work because of its vibrant pulse, its hypnotic power, and its postmodern strategies, which include creating a rich matrix with a radically pared-down vocabulary.

“Steve Reich @ 70,” a multiconcert birthday homage to the inventive composer, kicks off with a choreographic tribute through Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Belgium’s high priestess of iconoclastic movement, and the British, more newly celebrated, Akram Khan are performing in a shared program of dances they created to Reich’s music.

De Keersmaeker’s contribution is her breakthrough piece, the 1982 “Fase, four movements to the music of Steve Reich.” She and another woman, Tale Dolven, execute terse phrases of pedestrian steps with great intensity, slipping in and out of synch. Relentlessly repeated, with only the smallest escalations, the ordinary becomes cataclysmic.

Khan’s choreography, for himself and two additional men, was commissioned to accompany Reich’s 2006 “Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings,” played live by the London Sinfonietta. The dance echoes Reich’s tactic of drawing from cultures decidedly different from traditional European forms. Powerful and fluid, the choreography looks like a blend of ritual, martial arts, and sensuous self-display.

“Steve Reich @ 70” is at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn. For information, call (1)(718) 636- 4100 or go to http://www.bam.org for information.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

I’ve been busy lately and haven’t kept up with my mail. Only this a.m. did I look at the New York City Ballet’s brochure for its upcoming season at the New York State Theater, November 24 – February 25. I do not understand what’s going on. Or maybe I understand all too well.

Let’s start at the top. The first performance, on November 21, is labeled “Opening Night Benefit.” But it’s not considered an official part of the season (see the dates given above). It’s also the only repertory program until January 3.

Time was, a full week of repertory preceded the company’s seemingly interminable run of The Nutcracker, but let that pass for the moment. The benefit program, as the brochure advertises it, will feature a “one-time-only Premiere Ballet.” Is this intended to draw an audience, which will pay premium prices for the better seats, via snobbish exclusivity? Will this mysterious item, choreographer and music unannounced in the brochure, never be seen again? Never this season, apparently. Never ever? This doesn’t sound likely. A new ballet costs a company serious money and is, presumably, an attempt at bringing into being a work of art. (Am I being hopelessly naïve?) A ballet worth doing once should be worth doing again.

After playing Nancy Drew on the Net, combing the NYCB website and myriad other sources, I found out that the item in question is a ten-minute affair called Middle Duet and that it was choreographed for the Kirov Ballet back in 1998 by Alexei Ratmansky to music by Yury Khanon. Beginning with the minor fact that the premiere is merely “American,” not “world,” the handsome, well-organized brochure is being less than forthcoming.

Anyway, barring this little piece, there will be no new ballets this season. Given the quality of six of the seven new ballets in last season’s Diamond Project (only Ratmansky’s contribution, Russian Seasons, was a hit) detractors will point out that this may be just as well. But isn’t it a truth universally acknowledged that new choreography is essential to the stimulation of both audience and dancers? What’s up?

The sole novelty will be a “major revival” of Jerome Robbins’s Dybbuk. What makes it major? The choreographer is no longer with us to rethink the piece. What would a minor revival be like?

About those weeks of Nutcracker, which have, over the years, escalated to five plus. No one would argue with the fact that The Nutcracker is essential to the NYCB, as well as to many another company. It pays the bills, drawing spectators in winter solstice celebratory mood who wouldn’t otherwise go to the ballet, some of whom make their attendance an annual tradition. So this warhorse is essential economically even when not so artistically, though the NYCB’s Nutcracker–devised by Balanchine–is a wonderful thing of its kind. Still, a dedicated ballet fan cannot live on sugarplums alone. Over five weeks of them, unalloyed by alternatives, with only shifts in the casting of the solo roles for diversion, might make one turn against sweetmeats for life.

Apart from the era in which my daughter worked her way up, height-wise, through the kiddie roles of Angel, Soldier (of ascending grades), Polichinelle, and Candy Cane, a single performance of Nuts annually pretty much satisfied my own Xmastide cravings. Come the new year, repertory programs would resume, and I, like many avid followers of the company, was eager for them.

This year, the Nutcracker marathon will be followed by two unbroken weeks of Peter Martins’s speeded-up version of The Sleeping Beauty. Whether or not you care for this take on the Petipa/Tchaikovsky classic–I don’t, as it happens–is almost irrelevant. The issue at hand is that, with this scheduling tactic, the NYCB suggests that repertory programs, its mainstay for over half a century, have taken another step toward becoming an endangered species.

This move has got to be entirely about money. Program-length story ballets with an emphasis on elaborate costumes and scenery sell tickets. They are what the general audience wants to see. The specialist audience is too small to support a big classical company’s season in any meaningful way. Which accounts for American Ballet Theatre’s programming of its yearly spring run at the Metropolitan Opera House: a week of back-to-back swans followed by a week of star-crossed lovers, and so on. This modus operandi gives the ballerinas, their cavaliers, and a handful of soloists a chance to rotate in the featured parts. It makes the corps de ballet feel suicidal. It makes the specialist audience stay home.

I’m not done with the NYCB programming yet. When the company finally gets around to doing repertory–three or four ballets per performance, usually by an assortment of choreographers–it will now confine said repertory to set “packages.” In other words, if you want to see Balanchine’s Serenade, you’re going to get his Stravinsky Violin Concerto on the same combination plate even though you’re more interested, at the moment, in his Agon–and you’ve got to buy into the Robbins Dybbuk as well.

Each of the ten repertory programs has been given a title, and most of these titles are both vague and fatuous: “A Banquet of Dance,” “Visionary Voices,” “For the Fun of It.” Apparently the idea behind the strategy is that it will make the occasional ticket buyer feel more secure. Marketing stays up nights devising these ploys. They may well encourage commerce, but they don’t do a helluva lot to advance the (lost?) cause of art.

The NYCB will perform its rigid repertory programs from January 16 through the end of the season on February 25. In other words, for six weeks–merely a few days over the length of the Nutcracker run, about two weeks less than the siege of Nuts and Beauty combined.

None of this is specifically Peter Martins’s fault. The NYCB’s present methods of recruiting and maintaining an audience are employed everywhere. They are both a symptom of (and a causal factor in) a malaise prevalent in today’s culture. ABT, for example, had a ludicrously tasteless advertising campaign a couple of years back that I railed against in the Village Voice. I bring up the policies evident in the City Ballet’s brochure because I was genuinely shocked by how far the commercialization had progressed on that turf. And because this company was the first great classical troupe that I saw, because it shaped my aesthetic, and because I used to love it so much.

© 2006 Tobi Tobias

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on September 29, 2006.

Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) — Who could resist Trisha Brown’s “Set and Reset”? The choreographer’s fluid movement pairs with Robert Rauschenberg’s translucent costumes and fleeting background images to create a ravishing, ephemeral world.

This piece is just one of 30 items in “Fall for Dance,” City Center’s “tasting” series. Now in its third year, the project is meant to lure people who don’t yet love dancing.

Six programs, each showcasing five companies, provide the proverbial something for everyone. And the price is right: Every seat at the huge and historic theater goes for 10 bucks.

Program 1, which has its second showing tonight, juxtaposes the sensuous yet cerebral Brown with Bill T. Jones, master of sociopolitical argument, the Dutch National Ballet, the Pennsylvania Ballet and the Yi-Jo Lim Sun Dance Company, which promises nothing less than “Heaven and Earth.”

Program 2, on view Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, features modern and postmodern choreography by the celebrated New York-based dance makers Paul Taylor and Stephen Petronio cheek by jowl with work from other lands (France, Canada) and in other genres (mixed-media, hip-hop).

Veteran aficionados join dance newcomers to sell out the house for these shows.

“Fall for Dance” is at the New York City Center through Oct. 8. See http://www.nycitycenter.org .

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on September 27, 2006.

Sept. 27 (Bloomberg) — The stage is thickly strewn with blue and white bits of paper arranged in a mandala-like pattern of circles within squares. Ani Choying Dolma, a Buddhist nun, kneels at its center, singing and chanting, her voice alternately powerful and haunting.

This is the hypnotic setting for Shen Wei’s “Re–,” on view at the Joyce Theater through Sunday. The dreamlike mood is shattered as four dancers rush across the space, destroying the design.

It’s the only violent moment. The rest of the action is all gentle swiveling and rolling, limbs extending softly, bodies folding back in on themselves.

The moving bodies stir up the fragments so that they travel lightly through the air before falling slowly back to the ground, like snow. Other scraps stick to the dancers’ clothes, like the debris that clung to the fugitives from the attacks on the Twin Towers.

In a lecture-demonstration at Asia Society, Shen explained that his creation of “Re–” was inspired by two visits to Tibet. It’s easy to imagine that the dancers represent the Tibetan people, whose geographic, cultural and spiritual homeland was ravaged by China in the mid-20th century. And that the people keep going, centered and calm.

Still, the viewer’s imagination has to work overtime, since the choreography isn’t convincing in itself.

The piece’s most persuasive element is the performance of Dai Jian, the single male member of the quartet and the only one who has fully mastered Shen’s concept of movement impelled by breath. This dancer is a phenomenon, embodying the Eastern idea of egoless action.

Apart from the singing, the rest of the dance leans dangerously in the direction of the inauthentic and the pretentious.

Plotless Rites

Shen’s 2003 “Rite of Spring,” set to the four-hand piano rendition of Stravinsky’s arresting 1913 score, completed the program.

The composer had narration in mind — a pagan community’s yearly sacrifice of a virgin to make the crops grow. Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography, though a radical departure from classical ballet, still told the story.

Shen’s version remains adamantly abstract. It tries to make an effect solely through sharp-focused, weaving stage patterns and violent athletic movement. Gymnasts and break dancers would recognize a lot of what’s going on.

Too Pretty

The simplistic movement dulls through repetition. The work is further weakened by being overly prettified: The dancers are too lithe and fluid, balletic in their elegance.

What’s more, the idea of dancing to one’s death becomes defused when everyone’s doing it, and the force compelling the barbaric ritual is nowhere to be seen.

Born in China, the 38-year-old Shen Wei trained as a youngster for the Chinese opera and spent the latter half of the 1980s performing in this highly stylized, theatrically vivid genre.

He has described his first experience watching modern dance as an epiphany. It led him, in 1990, to become a founding member, both dancer and choreographer, of one of China’s first modern dance companies.

In the mid-1990s he emigrated to the States. By 2000 he had his own troupe, and encouraged by today’s accelerated globalization of dance, it has quickly become the next new thing.

Shen Wei Dance Arts is at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave. at 19th Street through Oct.1. Tickets: (1)(212) 242-0800. Information: http://www.joyce.org .

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on September 22, 2006.

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) — Four dancers stride across the stage, seeming oblivious to one another. Two collide violently, triggering entanglements and wild cantileverings that identify them as lovers one moment, enemies the next.

This is the opening of Elisa Monte’s new “Hardwood,” set to high-voltage, often haunting music by John King. The piece is featured in the 25th-anniversary program of Elisa Monte Dance, at the Joyce Theater through Sunday.

Monte is remembered for her fierce-spirited dancing as a principal with Martha Graham. She put herself on the map as a choreographer in 1979 with “Treading,” a postmodern duet with a sensual undercurrent to a mesmerizing score by Steve Reich.

Today, her dances are in the repertories of well-known modern dance and classical companies, from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater to the San Francisco Ballet.

Monte’s work is notable for coupling high energy with frank sensuality and for its humanist themes. Often her dances hint at primordial impulses and tribal ritual.

Her performers — physically diverse, united in spirit — constitute a tribe of their own. It’s characterized by grace, daring and an almost palpable camaraderie.

Elisa Monte Dance is at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave. at 19th Street, tonight through Sunday. Tickets: (1)(212) 242-0800. Information: http://www.elisamontedance.org.

Fusion Choreographer

Call the Japanese-born, former Paul Taylor dancer Takehiro Ueyama a fusion choreographer.

He melds movement, music and themes derived from his roots in both East and West. Tonight through Sunday, his 3-year-old Take Dance Company will be at the Ailey Citigroup Theater showing how he does that without looking artsy.

In his new “One,” the Eastern elements are used as if they were natural occurrences, not highly wrought artifice. The Western ones energize the material, giving it a daring athletic quality and a visceral impact.

Ueyama’s at his most inventive with the ever-shifting pattern of the figures on stage. Any given moment offers a picture that’s exquisitely balanced yet often surprising.

He’s adept, too, at devising forceful, fluid movement. Happily, it’s not too derivative of Taylor.

True, he can’t resist borrowing the doom-charged herded- animals image from the master’s “Esplanade.” He also co-opts the buoyant loping run with turning head and slashing arms from “Aureole” — which Taylor cheerfully confesses he stole from Martha Graham.

The Take Dance Company performs at the Ailey Citigroup Theater, 405 W. 55th St. at Ninth Avenue, tonight through Sunday. Tickets: 1(212)868-4444. Information: http://www.takedanceny.com.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Traditionally, dancers–especially classical dancers, who commit to their profession in childhood or adolescence–had the reputation of being essentially physical creatures and thus nonverbal. Even when it was admitted that they might be intelligent, they were still often labeled “dumb” in the sense of “mute.” This myth has constantly been challenged. Today, the argument for the articulate dancer is strengthened further by the fact that dancers in ever-increasing numbers are finding their voice through writing about dancing–and editing dance publications as well.

A look at veteran writers on the New York scene alone reveals precedents. Deborah Jowitt, longtime chief dance critic at the Village Voice, with several books to her credit, began as a dancer and choreographer. The well known dance historian Nancy Reynolds was a member of the New York City Ballet. Gus Solomons jr, who danced with Merce Cunningham and still performs with a chamber group of senior artists, reviews dance regularly for Metro Daily and Gay City News. A generation before them, Edwin Denby, arguably the most gifted English-language dance critic, also started his career on stage. Distinguished dance writers like David Vaughan, Nancy Goldner, and Mindy Aloff never had a full-fledged stage career but were dedicated dance students.

Casting the net farther back in time and wider in space reveals a slew of worthy books written by dancers. The most natural form for the dancer who sits down and takes pen in hand is, of course, the memoir. Dancers recording their own lives and careers fall into two groups–the “as told to”s (in which a collaborator’s hand grasps the pen) and those who go the course independently.

In the first category, Suzanne Farrell composed her Holding on to the Air with the help of Toni Bentley, a former New York City Ballet dancer who has published several of her own books. But Tamara Karsavina’s Theatre Street, arguably the most evocative and touching of all dance memoirs, is said to have been written by the Maryinsky ballerina herself–and in her adopted language, English.

Allegra Kent, the most poetic of Balanchine’s ballerinas, found her own voice in prose for Once a Dancer . . . . Twyla Tharp’s voice (blunt, tough, and intermittently ecstatic) is authentic in her autobiographical Push Comes to Shove, as is Margot Fonteyn’s (exquisitely tactful) in Autobiography. In both cases, the personality in prose closely resembles the woman’s dance temperament. Paul Taylor (Private Domain) and Agnes de Mille (Dance to the Piper) produced books that resonated beyond the confines of the dance world–his for its literary distinction, hers for its vitality and human interest.

Why, then, have dancers have been considered functionally illiterate, inarticulate, or both? One reason is that, with few exceptions, classical dancers must begin their training as children. The ideal age is eight, when ordinary kids are in third grade. If the training is serious–that is, career-oriented–their academic education naturally takes second place. Until the mid-twentieth century, in the state-run ballet academies that feed into Europe’s grandest troupes, the education provided alongside the rigorous dancing lessons was at times perfunctory. In the States, youngsters often studied via correspondence courses, which could be sketchy. Even at best, these studies cut off at the high school level, since that’s when a successful ballet student begins his or her stage career. By contrast, the last decade has witnessed a significant surge in the number of dancers in earning college degrees, during as well as after their performing years.

Again, until fairly recently, the traditional modus operandi in ballet companies was a dictatorship imposed by a powerful director or choreographer upon dancers whose voiced opinions were implicitly if not overtly discouraged. The performing artists, cultivated for their bodies, not their brains–as if the two were separate entities–understood that they were to “shut up and dance.”

Modern dance, a field in which a performer can begin as a young adult, is not so exigent. Still, like their classically trained cousins, these contemporary dancers pass most of their working hours in silence. In daily class, rehearsal, and performance they are rarely required, let alone encouraged, to speak.

Times have changed, however, and today’s trend toward self-empowerment has permeated the ivory towers and prison walls that once sheltered dance (or, depending on how you look at it, cut it off) from many worldly realities. More and more, dancers, are speaking out and, having found their voice, writing–commenting on, judging, and influencing the activities in their profession.

This social evolution has combined with the resources of the Internet to make today’s dancers more articulate than their predecessors. Anyone with a computer and access to cyberspace can set up shop on the Net, cost-free, in something like twenty minutes and publish what he has to say, bypassing (at his peril, of course) the roadblocks of editors. Rachel Feinerman’s blog (www.downtowndancer.com) and the choreographer Leigh Witchel’s (www.leighwitchel.com/blog) are highly developed examples of such letters to the world.

The most thoroughgoing dance publication on the Internet, however, is currently being done at the DanceView Times www.danceviewtimes.com), originated and run by Alexandra Tomalonis, and The Dance Insider (www.danceinsider.com), originated and run by Paul Ben-Itzak and his colleagues. Both sites feature reviews of a wide spectrum of dance by a regular stable of writers, professional dancers among them. The Dance Insider, as its name suggests, makes a point of engaging dancers as writers. The Danceview Times is more eclectic. “I’m interested in finding and using vivid writers,” Tomalonis says. “Their background may be in dancing–or in history, theater, literature, or music. Each one brings something interesting and meaningful to the mix.”

The more traditional realm of print publication includes two major dance journals whose editors in chief are well known former dancers. Dance magazine, the most lavish and widely read periodical of its kind, is run by Wendy Perron, a postmodern dancer and choreographer, who still performs and choreographs occasionally. Virginia Johnson, former ballerina of Dance Theatre of Harlem, edits Pointe magazine.

Perron, who also teaches seminars in dance writing–a phenomenon that has recently seen great increase in interest–uses this tactic to enable dancer-writers in the making: “I encourage them to bring the equipment they have as dancers to their writing. First, their highly developed sense of rhythm and phrasing. Then, their ability to communicate, as they do on stage.”

Among the relative newcomers whom Perron publishes are Lisa Kraus, an independent postmodern dancer and choreographer, whose style is lush and visceral; Lise Rinehart, a former American Ballet Theatre soloist, a paragon of clarity who also writes for the DanceView Times; and Rosalynde LeBlanc, a veteran of Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, whose writing style recalls Agnes de Mille’s in its freshness and vigor.

Johnson is actively trying to encourage dancer-writers. Among her recruits is Tai Jimenez, a veteran of Dance Theatre of Harlem, now a principal with Boston Ballet, whose articles reveal her spiritual orientation and her sensitivity to racial issues.

“A dancer who writes,” Johnson believes, “is especially good at helping an audience understand how a performer makes choreography expressive–how she takes the steps, stuff so cut and dried you could notate it, and infuses them with feeling.”

Not surprisingly, the newly minted dancer-writers are nimble at expressing their reasons for taking up a second trade. Kraus says, “I need to be more involved with dance than simply watching it. If I’m not in it–performing in it or another aspect of creating it–I very much like to take it home with me and dwell with it.”

LeBlanc, who has produced some eloquent personal essays, explains, “For me, writing is instinctive–the thing I do behind closed doors at the end of the day to fall into synch with my own drummer. Dancing has always been the cerebral struggle for me, and it is only by writing about that struggle that I have chosen again and again to keep dancing.”

It’s evident, of course, that a writer needn’t have danced to write well about dancing. The achievement of the non-dancing Arlene Croce, called “the Jane Austen of dance,” settles that question for good. But it can certainly be argued that a dance writer’s understanding is enlarged by firsthand experience of what is involved in getting the body to speak worlds.

© 2006 Tobi Tobias

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on September 15, 2006.

Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) — Dancers in 18th-century dress
playing ancient Greeks, socially pretentious Europeans and an
occasional supernatural facilitator like Cupid will be
celebrating Mozart’s 250th birthday tonight and tomorrow at
Florence Gould Hall.

Catherine Turocy’s esteemed New York Baroque Dance Company, which brings painstaking scholarship to life, is presenting
“Invisible Dances” (a suite from the opera “Idomeneo”) and
“Les Petits Riens” (the composer’s only ballet). The
reconstructed choreography reveals the genesis of classical
ballet as we know it.

The women in “Les Petits Riens,” dressed in wide, ankle-
grazing gowns, concentrate on bouncy filigreed footwork gently
accented by hands tracing curlicues in the air. The men bare more
of their white-stockinged legs and have lustier jumps and beats,
but they move with the same fine precision. In the seaside idyll
of “Invisible Dances,” the celebrants’ dancing shuttles between
aristocratic formality and a freer lyrical style.

Instrumentalists from Concert Royal, James Richman’s early-
music ensemble, will provide the accompaniment and play the
quartet version of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A Major as well.

Florence Gould Hall, 55 E. 59 St. Tickets: (1)(212) 307-
4100. See http://www.nybaroquedance.org.

“New Ballet Choreographers,” at Columbia University’s
Miller Theater tonight and tomorrow, is a misnomer. It’s a
showcase for work by Brian Reeder, Edwaard Liang and Tom Gold,
all of whom have had considerable experience.

Reeder, who’s performed with both the New York City Ballet
and American Ballet Theater, has made his mark with fanciful
pieces for ABT’s farm team, the Studio Company.

Liang, known for his deeply nuanced dancing with the NYCB,
has contributed to its repertory as well as to that of other
troupes in the U.S. and abroad.

Gold, a spunky NYCB virtuoso, has the most modest local
track record, but he’s no beginner.

The choreographers will be putting on their show with a
little help from their friends, both rising and established NYCB
stars (Wendy Whelan among them) and cream-of-the-crop newbies
from the Studio Company. The music — by Jefferson Friedman,
Philip Glass, Arvo Part and John Zorn — will be played live, a
luxury in the dance world.

The choreography was commissioned by the Miller Theater and
the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process program.

Tickets: (1)(212) 854-7799. See http://www.millertheatre.com

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on September 8, 2006.

Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) — “For a long time I wanted to do a show about underwear and armor,” declares Valerie Steele, the erudite, ebullient director and chief curator of the Museum at FIT.

The vivid result, “Love & War: The Weaponized Woman,” opens tomorrow and runs through Dec. 16. It juxtaposes the “hard body,” defended and protected, with the “soft,” which is vulnerable and seductive.

Lingerie items range from conventionally sensuous second- skin concoctions to a Comme des Garcons outfit that combines leather, satin and lace in hues of scarlet and black. Steele has nicknamed it “The Avant-Garde Harlot.”

The examples of armor include authentic historical war gear — often as painstakingly decorated as high fashion — and theatrical costumes like the gleaming golden armor worn by Katharine Cornell playing Joan of Arc.

Most striking are the riffs on battle garb by couturiers with rampant imagination. These range from Christian Dior’s billowing, gauzy ball gown with a camouflage pattern to a suave, dark-hued outfit by Yeohlee suggesting fascist inspiration.

Questioned about the morality of high-end designers making outre glad rags out of war themes, Steele replies, “The fashion system is like a giant Hoover. It sweeps up everything that’s going on and makes you think about it. Seriously.”

See http://www3.fitnyc.edu/museum/loveandwar.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on August 28, 2006.

Aug. 28 (Bloomberg) — Stay-at-home ballet fans will find themselves beguiled by the latest installment in PBS’s Great Performances series: the Paris Opera Ballet dancing George Balanchine’s “Jewels.”

Created for the New York City Ballet in 1967, “Jewels” was the first plotless three-act ballet in dance history. Balanchine, for whom music always came first, chose the work of three decidedly different composers to evoke three cultures central to his life and art.

Music by the French Romantic composer Gabriel Faure, flowing like gently stirred water, sets “Emeralds” in motion. The choreography is dreamy, haunting, full of muted passions. It conjures up the France of our imagination.

“Rubies” responds in kind to the raw energy and jazzy rhythms of Stravinsky’s “Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra.” It’s all urban America, dancing blithely on the edge of danger.

“Diamonds,” to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3, evokes imperial Russia. Balanchine was schooled at the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in the final years of the Romanov dynasty. The choreography sums up the cool beauty of a classical dance tradition that reached its peak under czarist patronage.

The Parisians give “Jewels,” recorded at the ornate Palais Garnier, an impeccable performance throughout. They’re at their sublime best in “Emeralds,” moving with unsurpassed refinement while conveying subtle fugitive emotions.

Farrell’s Czarina

They make “Rubies” suaver than it is when danced by the NYCB. U.S. aficionados will miss the brashness, the rakishness and the spontaneity delivered by the home team.

Legs that slash the air like switchblades in New York translate in Paris into limbs stroking the space as if it were lined with velvet. The result is gorgeous in its own way.

In “Diamonds,” the Paris company’s Agnes Letestu lacks the magical combination of sensuousness and hauteur that Suzanne Farrell originally brought to the ballerina/czarina role. But the overall clarity and assurance of the dancing emphasizes the architecture of the choreography. The exquisitely manipulated patterns become — more clearly than I’ve ever seen — a metaphor for order and purity.

PBS Great Performances: The Paris Opera Ballet in George Balanchine’s “Jewels” will air Wednesday at 8 p.m. in New York on Thirteen/WNET (nationally some stations may show it Aug. 28; check local listings). For more information, see http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/shows/jewels/ .

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on August 18, 2006.

Aug. 18 (Bloomberg) — The birthday candles were burning fiercely last night at the New York State Theater for the premiere of Mark Morris’s “Mozart Dances.” Lincoln Center is celebrating the 40th year of its Mostly Mozart Festival, Mozart his 250th birthday, Morris his 50th and the Mark Morris Dance Group its 25th.

Morris appropriated a trio of Mozart piano works to produce three distinct, though intimately related, choreographies. The first two, glorious examples of the evocative power of dance, reveal a surge forward in Morris’s already extraordinary powers.

The performance did more than justice to the occasion. The rendering of the music was celestial, thanks to soloists Emanuel Ax and Yoko Nozaki, and Louis Langree, who conducted the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.

The opening piece, set to the “Piano Concerto No. 11 in F major,” is called simply “Eleven.” It features Lauren Grant, a tiny, lushly fleshed, feisty woman with a mop of short blond curls. Though she looks like a soubrette, she delivers dancing that is deeply sculptural and projected to giant size.

Morris recognizes a heroine when he sees one. He sets her against a chorus of seven women, and the effect is that of a mortal in daring dialogue with a sisterhood of goddesses.

Their movements are basic, powerful and accented with colloquial gesture — as when a hand is extended, index finger pointing as if to say, “Wait a minute.”

Walking, Waiting

There’s a lot of prosaic walking with firm strides, suggesting life’s endless comings and goings, meetings and partings. A ravishing passage for the chorus has the women just waiting and watching, as if the music were a breeze occasionally shifting their positions.

Sometimes the movement is strange and hieratic, like postures on a Greek frieze. Emphatic gestures alternate with melting ones and a few sudden, tragedy-laden falls.

Though the choreography is essentially abstract, it wields an emotional impact, luring viewers into making up stories they dredge from their subconscious.

Joe Bowie is the central figure in the second piece, “Double,” danced to the “Sonata in D major for Two Pianos.” I assumed, from the handsome postmodern take on an 18th-century frock coat he wore, that he represents Mozart.

At any rate, he’s an animating genius, conjuring up a bevy of men who seem to be peasants. After his introductory solo — expansive arm gestures over busy feet — he inspires and instructs them.

Circle of Men

Then, inevitably, he leaves them to their own devices, returning from time to time to counsel and support.

Later, under nocturnal lighting, six of the seven men, hands linked, dance in a circle, then take turns supporting one another in balances and recoveries from slow falls, like brothers irrevocably bonded.

The seventh man, the baby-faced, frail-bodied Noah Vinson, joins them. He remains distinct as the neediest of them and turns out to be the master’s likeliest successor.

The beauty of this passage is breathtaking, and it’s capped by a magical fantasy in which a bevy of sylphide-like women in long, gauzy skirts makes a fleeting incursion into the men’s realm.

Then dawn breaks, the supernatural vision of strange, unattainable loveliness vanishes, and the guys go back to their workaday life, bustling and cheerful.

Those who would be embarrassed to find themselves weeping in the theater should skip this extraordinary piece.

Despite its musical intelligence, “Twenty-seven,” set to the “Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat major,” is less resonant than the dances that precede it.

Obvious Moves

It elaborates a little too insistently upon earlier themes, such as the expressive quality of variously angled hands. And it emphasizes too obviously Morris’s career-long preoccupation with the force of a group, setting off small, friendly crowds with brief solos that feature individual dancers’ singularity — another of his tenets.

It also introduces material that’s rare for Morris: a series of stunning lifts. The men fling the women over their backs; sail them sideways through the air, oddly angled legs enveloped in the cloud of a flimsy skirt; or hold them aloft like prizes, their weight suddenly and touchingly evident.

But none of this churns your emotions and animates your thoughts the way the first two pieces do. They’re wonders.

Howard Hodgkin contributed the bold-slashes-of-paint backdrops; Martin Pakledinaz, the simple, inventive costumes; James F. Ingalls, the rather simplistic lighting. The piece was commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Vienna’s New Crowned Hope and London’s Barbican Centre.

“Mozart Dances” is at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, tonight and tomorrow night, Aug. 18 and 19. Information: http://www.lincolncenter.org and http://www.mmdg.org . Tickets: (1) (212) 721-6500.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.