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Getting Down With Ailey

December 26, 2012 by 2 Comments
(L to R): Renaldo Gardner, Kirven James Boyd, Samuel Lee Roberts, Aisha Mitchell, Jamar Roberts, Belen Pereyra, Yannick Lebrun, Hope Boykin, Antonio Douthit. Phot: Paul Kolnik

Imagine a night at City Center watching the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater when the spectators cheer at the curtain calls and applaud certain stunning dancers or sections of a dance, but don’t whoop and holler in the middle of a serious (even reverent) passage. Imagine an evening in which electric high jumps, long balances, and legs kicking the sky are worked into the choreographic fabric and not presented with an eye for our approval. The night I’m talking about is one that displayed a world premiere by the extremely up-and-coming … [Read more...]

12/26/12 2:05 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

About That Nutcracker

December 16, 2012 by 2 Comments
A dream wedding: Clara and her Prince (Hee Seo and Cory Sterns). Photo: Gene Schiavone

The Nutcracker in its many manifestations is like an attic toy box into which generations of children have tossed the playthings they’ve grown too old for. Amid the dolls and stuffed animals and fairy tales and toy soldiers are folded longings, nightmares, pre-pubescent thoughts of sex, and fear of growing up. The ballet by Lev Ivanov that premiered in St. Petersburg in December of 1892 has bourréed across centuries, discarding this, adding that. Mark Morris, for his delectable The Hard Nut, even leapfrogged backward over the ballet to … [Read more...]

12/16/12 10:07 AM | filed under: ballet |

What Do You See? Look Again

December 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Paul Dunbar shows his stuff in Untrained. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fisher Space in its compact new building is proving to be dazzlingly adaptable. The seating has been configured differently for all four works that I’ve seen there as part of BAM’s 30th Next Wave Festival, and that design, in turn, influences scenic possibilities and alters the audience’s angle of vision and relationship with the performers. Lucy Guerin’s Untrained was designed for a more traditional set-up, so at the Fisher, we sat in twelve long, banked rows at one end of the space, which limited the … [Read more...]

12/12/12 5:01 PM | filed under: postmodern views |

Lie There My Art

December 9, 2012 by 2 Comments
Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) regarded by some of the "replicas" at the end of Kidd Pivot's The Tempest Replica by Crystal Pite. Photo: Geörg Baumann

I don’t think of myself as purist about Shakespeare. I’m fine with Laurence Olivier inserting a line from Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine into his Henry V film and loved David Gordon’s Dancing Henry V.  I’m okay with the 1995 film of Richard III that equates its murderous dynasties with the Third Reich.  I relished a years-ago Shakespeare and Company production of Much Ado About Nothing that was laid in a Banana Republic, and I tolerated (just) Kenneth Branagh’s presentation of Love’s Labour Lost as a musical. I’ve sat … [Read more...]

12/9/12 12:54 PM | filed under: dance theater |

Now You Know It, Now You Don’t

December 4, 2012 by 1 Comment
(L to R) Silas Riener, Michael Ingle, and Oisín Monaghan in Tere O'Connor's Poem. Photo: Ian Douglas

Tere O’Connor has been making wonderful, inscrutable dances for 20 years, and every one of them that I can remember stirred my mind around. As I watch his new double bill at New York Live Arts, Secret Mary and Poem, my life passes before me. Delete “my;” I’m experiencing life as dancing—with its beauties, its collisions, its planned meetings, and its daily load of non sequiturs that somehow add up. O’Connor is a master craftsman. He selects (or stumbles upon) movements that are not alike and makes them flow together. He tells no … [Read more...]

12/4/12 2:39 PM | filed under: Postmodern New York |

Wilding through Euripides

November 21, 2012 by 1 Comment
The tragic end of Rude Mech's reconstruction of the Performance Group's Dionysus in 69 (after Euripedes). The principal dead body: Pentheus (Josh Meyer) ruler of Thebes. Photo: Ian Douglas

“Why a dance critic?”  Richard Schechner doesn’t use those words, but he implies them as he greets me at New York Live Arts, where I’ve arrived for a reconstruction by the Austin, Texas, ensemble Rude Mechs of his Dionysus in 69. Why not? For one thing, I missed this epochal and controversial piece of “environmental theater” (Schechner’s term), when he and his actors presented it in the Performing Garage down on Wooster, beginning in the summer of 1968. For another, dance is the life’s blood—in more ways than the cliché … [Read more...]

11/21/12 7:04 PM | filed under: theater |

Portaging the ’60s into 2012

November 13, 2012 by 1 Comment
Simone Forti finding the words and the moves. Photo: Ian Douglas

Here’s how Simone Forti laid out her 1961 From Instructions: “One man is told that he must lie on the floor during the entire piece. Another is told that he must tie the first man to the wall.” (I like picturing the possibilities inherent in this structured improvisation.) In her wonderful 1974 book, Handbook in Motion, Forti mentions that the room in which From Instructions was first performed had pipes running along the wall and anyone wanting to do it needs to find a space with a similar structure. She’s aware of … [Read more...]

11/13/12 12:58 PM | filed under: postmodern views |

Is My Wife Having an Affair?

November 11, 2012 by 3 Comments
Wendy Whelan in the film Labyrinth Within. Photo: Martin Nisser

When Christopher Wheeldon founded a dance company in 2007 and called it Morphoses/the Wheeldon Company, he couldn’t have known how prophetic that name would become. From the beginning, the repertory balanced works by Wheeldon, one of the most gifted choreographers of his generation, with those by other youngish artists. Three years later, Wheeldon left Morphoses after a serious dispute over the company’s direction and organization with its executive director, Lourdes Lopez, taking his name and ballets with him. At this point, the ongoing … [Read more...]

11/11/12 6:32 PM | filed under: mixed media |

Re Winterbranch: The Comment That Grew

November 7, 2012 by 3 Comments
Winterbranch in 1971 performance. Carolyn Brown leaping. Photo: James Klosty

If you happened to read “East to West to East,” my Arts Journal response to Benjamin Millepied’s new company, L.A. Dance Project, soon after I posted it on October 29 (which was shortly before I lost power and connectivity), you will find some small but crucial changes in the early November updates. They occur in my passage about the lighting for the group’s staging of Merce Cunningham’s 1964 Winterbranch. I and a number of others remember a 1965 New York State Theater performance of this radical masterwork in which something that … [Read more...]

11/7/12 9:39 PM | filed under: classic modern dance |

Then Plus Now

November 1, 2012 by 3 Comments
Setterfield amid the winding procession of photos come to life. Photo: Paula Court

David Gordon is the King of Repetition, and I don’t want to hear any back talk. He manages dance material like someone holding an object up to direct sun, then to a candle flame, setting it against different backgrounds, turning it sideways. “Look at it now. Now look again.” He’s also a master re-arranger—juxtaposing past to present, rehearsal to performance, new to old, life to art. Gordon was one of the original members of Judson Dance Theater, so it’s fitting that his THE MATTER/2012 Art & Archive be shown as part of … [Read more...]

11/1/12 2:55 PM | filed under: Postmodern New York |
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