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Erotic Geometry

February 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Cristian Laverde König eyes Abby Roesner. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

When I look closely at a broccoli floret, I don’t ponder fractal geometry; I may marvel at images derived from Fibonacci sequences, but I don’t pretend to understand Walsh functions. Choreographer Karole Armitage might consider me an intellectual wimp. Her Three Theories premiered in 2010 at the World Science Festival. Although Armitage’s new Mechanics of the Dance Machine at New York Live Arts (1/31-2/2 and 2/7-9) attests to her ongoing fascination with physics, you don’t need to see her sources reflected in the choreography in … [Read more...]

02/7/13 3:25 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

When An Artist’s Newest Works Are Her Last. . .

February 3, 2013 by 2 Comments
(L to R): Stuart Shugg, Nicholas Strafaccia, Neal Beasely, and Samuel Wentz. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

On Thursday, January 31, the second day of the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it was announced that Brown, because of health problems, had retired as artistic director of the company she founded over forty years ago, and would choreograph no more dances. Consider these words bordered in black—mourning for the works she might have continued to give us. Although many in the BAM audience that night had been expecting just such an announcement, most did not yet know of it. The occasion was festive. The … [Read more...]

02/3/13 11:46 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

Dances Galore

January 27, 2013 by 2 Comments
Jason MacDonald (L) and Eric Bourne in Black Flowers. Photo: Eric Bandiero

It’s hardly fair to David Parsons to see one of his company’s performances at the Joyce the night after the New York City Ballet’s first all-Tchaikovsky program of the season. Wednesday, Balanchine’s Mozartiana, Thursday, Parsons’s Wolfgang. The company that Parsons founded in 1987 is wildly popular with audiences. He gives them a lot: lively, accomplished dancers; eye-catching lighting (by Howell Binkley) and costumes; variety in terms of subject matter and mood. His movement style, which owes something to his own years as a major … [Read more...]

01/27/13 1:04 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

See the Music

January 27, 2013 by 10 Comments
Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky, keeping an eye on his creations

George Balanchine once said that during his grueling years as a pupil in the Imperial St. Petersburg Theatrical School, he didn’t fall in love with ballet until he was twelve. The change occurred the first time he appeared onstage in Marius Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty, set to Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky’s ravishing score, and young Georgi Melitonovitch was cast as a Cupid. His arrows, so to speak, boomeranged back, and he was smitten. Tchaikovsky remained Balanchine’s favorite Russian composer (barring Stravinsky, of course), and the … [Read more...]

01/27/13 11:46 AM | filed under: ballet |

Oh Those Feet!

January 24, 2013 by 1 Comment
(L to R): Gene Shields, Noellia Garcia Carmena, and Shamar Rooks of the New Ballet Ensemble and School. Photo: Nicolette Overton

Silence doesn’t play a large role in Michelle Dorrance’s SOUNDspace. In the Danspace performances of Dorrance Dance/New York, the choreographer treats St. Mark’s Church as an acoustic instrument, and the building is happy to comply. Back in 1795, when its cornerstone was laid, ministers had no microphones, and the voices of parishioners hymning their lungs out could make it seem as if the high vaulted ceiling overhead was merely a stop on the way to heaven. To a tap artist like Dorrance, resonance goes hand in hand with rhythm, and a … [Read more...]

01/24/13 2:17 PM | filed under: tap and. . . |

Slow Down; Now Breathe

January 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Eiko rising. Photo: Anna Lee Campbell

You’re informed by program material that the compellingly idiosyncratic French choreographer Myriam Gourfink works with scores, sometimes with computers, in devising her dances, and that the breathing techniques of yoga are fundamental to her process. You learn that she is concerned with the “micro-movements” affiliated with breath and how these infinitesimal inner adjustments conspire to move her through space. All this projects to the spectator as uncannily extreme slowness on the part of the performer, as well as a pungent duality. In … [Read more...]

01/22/13 9:23 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

And Then They Talked Some More

January 17, 2013 by 7 Comments
Cameron (L) and Aoki turn creaturely. Photo: © Christ Cameron

Whoever said that dancers can’t talk well in public? These days, shutting up and just dancing is often not in the cards (there are some particulars that movement alone can’t reveal). This struck me when five of the seven performances that I managed to take in during four days of the annual event-crammed conference of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) involved speech. Thursday, 1/10, 6PM, Florence Gould Hall at the French Institute/Alliance Française: Gustavia. In this collaborative duet, the noted French … [Read more...]

01/17/13 3:37 PM | filed under: dance theater |

Dancing around the Bride

January 10, 2013 by 4 Comments
Dancing Cunningham, October 26. Front (L to R): Melissa Toogood, John Hinrichs, Emma Desjardins. Rear: Marcie Munnerlyn, Brandon Collwes. Photo: Constance Mensh

“May I have the next dance, Marcel?”  “But of course, John!”  “Thank you. By the way, Bob and Jap hope to have a chance too. Merce, of course, is already leaping about somewhere.”  Dancing around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and Duchamp, the stunning exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (through January 21), affirms the close artistic and personal connections among John Cage (1912-1992), Merce Cunningham (1919-2009), Jasper Johns (b. 1930), and Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008); Cage was Cunningham’s … [Read more...]

01/10/13 11:48 AM | filed under: mixed media |

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 |
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