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Different Circuses: Elizabeth Streb and Sarah East Johnson

December 19, 2011 by 1 Comment
AJ Human Fountain. Photo by Stephanie Berger

Elizabeth Streb has the mind of a physicist, the heart of a circus performer, and a movie stuntman’s appetite for risk. Upping the ante while balancing all the factors involved seems to be what sustains her. In the 1980s, when she first started showing her work in small downtown black-box theaters or loft spaces, watching her performers topple—straight as boards, faces down—onto a mic’d mattress could make you wince and gasp. From December 14 through 22, 2011, in the Park Avenue Armory, some of Streb’s dancers—preparing in sight of … [Read more...]

12/19/11 2:03 PM | filed under: dance acrobatics |

At the Threshold of the Closet

December 16, 2011 by 2 Comments
Comrades in Arms. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

One of the most intriguing things about Tere O’Connor’s Cover Boy is its overall rhythmic structure. During the hour it takes the piece to unfold, the movements of the four performers (Michael Ingle, Niall Jones, Paul Monaghan, and Matthew Rogers) set up subtle interplays between asserting and backing off, between attacking and melting. This dynamic formalizes and expresses the implications contained in the title. Yes, photos of any one of these four could grace the cover of a magazine for men. The performers also convey the wariness of … [Read more...]

12/16/11 3:48 PM | filed under: Postmodern New York |

Walking With Merce

December 11, 2011 by 7 Comments
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Roaratorio. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

So long, Roaratorio. Goodbye, Biped. Farewell, Second Hand. And Pond Way, Split Sides, Rainforest, it’s been great to know you. Pardon the tears. New Yorkers may see scraps from these works in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Events at the Park Avenue Armory on the last days of 2011. Then silence and stillness. Or, as Cunningham’s longtime collaborator, composer John Cage, might remind us, a silence filled with the sounds of life going on and a stillness fraught with beautiful remembered motion. As the two-year MCDC Legacy Tour … [Read more...]

12/11/11 6:40 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

Home Is Where The Dance Is

December 6, 2011 by 3 Comments
Bringing it Home (Alicia Graf Mann, center). Photo: Paul Kolnik

What do we crave from the thirty dancers who make up the Alvin Ailey American Dance Company? That they be gorgeous, sleek, limber, powerful, virtuosic—sassy when the choreography calls for it, soulful ditto. They do not stint. They can knock dancing into the stratosphere or into our laps. Sometimes they turn the wattage up too high—forgoing subtleties for the highest, the biggest, the baddest, the most heartfelt. Last July, when Judith Jamison retired, Robert Battle took over as artistic director of AAADC. A member of David Parsons’s … [Read more...]

12/6/11 2:50 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

Jump for Mother Ann’s Love

December 2, 2011 by 3 Comments
Asli Bulbul Receiving Heaven's Gift

What fascinates people about the Shakers—members of religious communities that settled in New England in the late 18th century, proselytized, expanded, and began to wither a hundred or so years later?  We marvel at the austerely beautiful furniture they made, their ingenuity, and the fact that they considered drawing, singing, and dancing gifts from God that were to be practiced freely and diligently—all that and more, but what seems to boggle many contemporary minds is that Shakers were celibate. Doris Humphrey barely hinted at … [Read more...]

12/2/11 10:15 AM | filed under: dance theater |

Goodbye to the Green

November 18, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Peterson (foreground), Diamond, and Martel in Wooden

Since Laura Peterson began to show her choreography in New York around six years ago, she has become increasingly interested in transforming theater spaces through lighting, audience placement, and movement ideas. I’m thinking in particular of her 2007 I Love Dan Flavin, which I saw in the funky, cramped intimacy of the old Dixon Place, and Forever (2009), which utilized the columns and mirrored wall of Dance New Amsterdam. Between November 4 and 12, her new Wooden transformed HERE in more ambitious ways. And though, like all Peterson’s … [Read more...]

11/18/11 4:53 PM | filed under: Postmodern New York |

Going with the Flow

November 17, 2011 by 4 Comments
Lar Lubovitch's new Crisis Variations (Laura Rutledge aloft). Photo: Paula Lobo

In 2000, I saw Lar Lubovitch’s Men’s Stories: A Concerto in Ruins at the Angel Orensanz Center on the Lower East Side. The former synagogue with its dark wood paneling, high blue vault of a ceiling, and stained glass windows gave the nine superb dancers who rushed in and out of it a slightly mystical aura—as if they’d channeled the ghosts of rabbinical students maddened by their studies. The dance’s title refers to the fact that much of the music in Scott Marshall’s sound collage for the piece is Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 … [Read more...]

11/17/11 11:44 AM | filed under: contemporary dance |

November Potpourri

November 14, 2011 by 3 Comments
Kristi Boone and Gray Davis in Paul Taylor's Black Tuesday. Photo: Gene Schiavone

Seeing American Ballet Theatre during its too-brief season at City Center (nine works and eight performances in five days) could give spectators who devour the company’s spring shows at the Metropolitan Opera a new slant on the dancers. No tutus or tiaras on view, no see-me-ace-this displays of virtuosity, no hordes of elaborately costumed courtiers standing around watching some princess do what it takes to live happily ever after. And we get to see the splendid dancers in a more intimate setting. In fact, since most of the music was on … [Read more...]

11/14/11 11:28 AM | filed under: ballet |

The Sculpture Dances

November 9, 2011 by 1 Comment
Marnie Palomares and Alisdair Macinroe (original cast). Photo: Jeff Busby

The star of Gideon Obarzanek’s Connected isn’t someone whose autograph you’d ask for, nor would you wish he/she/it would friend you on Facebook. The most compelling presence onstage during Chunky Move’s early November season at the Joyce was a kinetic sculpture designed by California artist Reuben Margolin. Obarzanek, the director and choreographer of the Melbourne-based company, has always been interested in the interactions between dance, the visual arts, and media. His wonderful 2003 Tense Dave (co-choreographed with Lucy Guerin) … [Read more...]

11/9/11 9:54 AM | filed under: contemporary dance |

Pairs Made in Heaven: Reitz & Rudner, Burrows & Fargion

November 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Sarah Rudner (left) and Dana Reitz in Necessary Weather. Photo: Stephanie Berger

In 1994, we were all younger. Yet in the photo accompanying the review I wrote that year of Necessary Weather, the luminous collaboration by Dana Reitz, Sara Rudner, and Jennifer Tipton, Reitz and Rudner look almost exactly the way they do performing the piece at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in late October, 2011. They wear the same white pants and flowing, diaphanous white shirts. Reitz’s hair is shorter now. Of course, the women aren’t the same, nor am I. They’re not even the “same” women they were at the first revival of … [Read more...]

11/6/11 7:45 PM | filed under: postmodern views |
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