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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 |

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