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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 |

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