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Three for One

June 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment
L to R: Elisa Osborne, Ann Chiaverini, Alexandra Berger, and Emily Gayeski in Dusan Tynek's Widow's Walk. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Zvi Gotheiner, Cherylyn Lavagnino, and Dusan Tynek share a series at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, June 12 through 22. I should have sat down at the computer right after getting home from the opening of Musa! A Festival of Dance with Music at Baruch Performing Arts Center. The inaugural performance was so dense with dancing that keeping my memories of it intact has been a challenge. Also, although the remaining programs in this series (produced by Philip W. Sandstrom and Equilateral Theatre Inc.) showcase no more than three dances … [Read more...]

06/18/13 1:02 PM | filed under: ballet, contemporary dance |

Here and Now with Hip-Hop

June 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Patricia Noworol Dance Theater in ?Culture. On chair: Patrick Williams Seebacher. On ladder: Noworol. Photo: Aeric Meredith Goujon

Patricia Noworol strategizes culture and arts politics via hip-hop. Decades ago, some writers considered that ballet was on its way to becoming an international language, despite its obvious roots in western European courts, culture, and dance forms. Other people raised the issue of cultural imperialism. Hip-hop—emerging from American city streets, its roots tangling back to Africa—has outdistanced ballet in its nearly world-wide migration.  Battles, festivals, competitions, scholarly articles, classes in universities, … [Read more...]

06/16/13 2:10 PM | filed under: New Dance from Abroad |

Women in Distress

June 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Members of RIOULT Dance New York in Pascal Rioult's Bolero. Photo: Basil Childers

RIOULT Dance New York premieres "Iphigenia" at the Joyce Theater, June 5 through 9. Pascal Rioult was an important member of Martha Graham’s company during the last part of her life. Three years after her death in 1991, he founded RIOULT Dance New York and built it into a prospering entity, with performances in the U.S. and abroad, a wide-ranging outreach program to introduce children and adults to modern dance, and year-round health insurance for his dancers. His choreography has been warmly received, and the audience for the … [Read more...]

06/8/13 5:36 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

Dmitri and Alexei, Heart to Heart

June 3, 2013 by 2 Comments
Cory Stearns and Diana Vishneva in Piano Concerto #1. Photo: Gene Schiavone

American Ballet Theatre presents a trilogy of ballets by Alexei Ratmansky to Shostkovich's music. When American Ballet Theatre premiered Alexei Ratmansky’s Symphony #9 last October, it was understood that this was to be the first in a trilogy of ballets set to music by Ratmansky’s fellow Russian, Dmitri Shostakovich. That trilogy made its debut with four performances during the company’s spring season at the Met, sandwiched between seven showings of Don Quixote and six of Le Corsaire. Cross your fingers that Ratmansky’s three … [Read more...]

06/3/13 4:53 PM | filed under: ballet |

Tell Me a Story, and Another and Another

June 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Emily Pope-Blackman (L) and Petra van Noort in Tiffany Mills' The Feast (Part 1). Photo: Julie Lemberger

The Tiffany Mills Company presents two new works at BAM Fishman. Remember when dancers rarely talked onstage?  No? Then you’re probably still in your twenties. Beginning in the 1980s, when narrative and emotion began to slip  back into contemporary American dance and knock its movement-and-form-only stance askew, some choreographers tackled stories that couldn’t be told through dancing alone. Personal narratives, revamped fairy tales, social and political messages—all needed the spoken word. In Tiffany Mills’s Berries and … [Read more...]

06/2/13 1:16 PM | filed under: dance theater |

Playing Hard, Game Unknown

May 26, 2013 by 1 Comment
Jonathan Royse Windham (L) and Dan Walczak upend Francesca Romo in Andrea Miller's Blush. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Gallim Dance at BAM Fisher, May 21-26, 2013 What does “blush” convey to you?  A person becomingly embarrassed? A person ashamed? The reddening sky of dawn?  If it were not for the association of “flush” with toilets and wealth, I’d consider it an apter title than Blush for Andrea Miller’s revised 2009 dance. The six go-for-broke members of her Gallim Dance do indeed turn red in the face over the course of this powerful work, but the cause is their exertions. Vincent Vigilante’s lighting design often turns the BAM … [Read more...]

05/26/13 5:28 PM | filed under: postmodern views |

Dancing Love and Love of Dancing

May 25, 2013 by 5 Comments
Hee Sao and David Hallberg in American Ballet Theatre's production of Frederick Ashton's A Month in The Country. Photo: Morty Sohl

American Ballet Theatre’s new production of Frederick Ashton’s “A Month in the Country” on a program with Mark Morris’s “Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes” and George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C.” Metropolitan Opera House, May 21-23. Frederick Ashton’s A Month in the Country distills the five acts of Ivan Turgenev’s eponymous play and the passage of several weeks into 40 minutes of dancing, during which a summer wind blows erratically through a country house, stirring passions to life.  It’s a wind quite … [Read more...]

05/25/13 1:04 PM | filed under: ballet |

The Attraction of Opposites

May 19, 2013 by 2 Comments
Foreground: Ingle (L) and Wright. Behind them: Denisova and Phillips. Reflected in mirror: Ossorio and Thomas. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu.

Pam Tanowitz's The Spectators at New York Live Arts, May 15 through 18; Bill Young and Colleen Thomas's A Place in France at 100 Grand Street, May 16 through 19. Pam Tanowitz’s new The Spectators at New York Live Arts is so clean you could eat off it. Pristine patterns control the six dancers she deploys, and no move they make is blurred or loose. One of Tanowitz’s talents is making cool choreography heat up. Its precision creates a tension with its full-out strenuousness. If these performers were the kind who sweat heavily (and, … [Read more...]

05/19/13 6:32 PM | filed under: Postmodern New York |

From Tunis to Ithaca

May 15, 2013 by 1 Comment
Inverting the world. Photo: Bénédikte Longechal

Jonah Bokaer performs his The Ulysses Syndrome with his father, Tsvi Bokaer, May 9 and 10, during the French Institute's World Nomads Festival. Ithaca is the island in the Ionian sea that Odysseus (aka Ulysses) left when he armed himself for the Trojan War, and it’s the place he returned to after ten postwar years of wandering. Ithaca, New York, is the city where Tsvi Bokaer finally settled after roaming from his native Tunis to other Mediterranean cities, to France, and to California, where he became a screenwriter. In Ithaca, he … [Read more...]

05/15/13 10:17 PM | filed under: postmodern views |

All American

May 11, 2013 by 7 Comments
Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild in Christopher Wheeldon's A Place for Us. Photo: Paul Kolnik

New York City Ballet, Lincoln Center, April 30 through June 9 In the Spring of 1988, the New York City Ballet put on an American Music Festival. George Balanchine had been dead for five years, and the two Ballet Masters in Chief, Peter Martins and Jerome Robbins, commissioned enough new ballets to keep dancers, guest choreographers, and resident choreographers rushing in and out of the company’s studios, gnawing on health bars. Was this Eliot Feld’s rehearsal? No, it was Bart Cook’s. Then when was Martins scheduled? Not too many … [Read more...]

05/11/13 2:38 PM | filed under: ballet |
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