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A Nightmare Turns Fifty

March 22, 2013 by 6 Comments
Paul Taylor's Scudorama. Laura Halzak (prone), Michelle Fleet (in air), Jamie Rae Walker (L), Julie Tice (in an earlier cast). Photo: Paul B. Goode

Wishing Happy 50th birthday to a dance like Paul Taylor’s Scudorama mightn’t be a good idea. The cake could blow up in your face. You have to be a bit crazy to love this dance. Made the year after Aureole, which lives on in an indestructible springtime, Scudorama cringes and crawls and hides from view. The current revival dates from 2009. Scudorama’s 1963 premiere at the American Dance Festival in New London, Connecticut, was, by all accounts, disastrous.  The score by Clarence Jackson didn’t arrive in time. Neither did the set by … [Read more...]

03/22/13 4:54 PM | filed under: classic modern dance |

Taylor Made

March 13, 2013 by 2 Comments
Sean Mahoney and Amy Young in Paul Taylor's Perpetual Dawn. Photo: Paul B. Goode

Can one refer to someone as a perpetual dark horse, or is that a contradiction?  If not, I’d like to apply it to Paul Taylor.  You can never predict what he’ll come up with, or what thumbscrews he’ll apply to his essentially buoyant vocabulary of steps. Among the 21 works on view during the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s three-week season at Lincoln Center, some, such as Speaking in Tongues, are big and tormented; others are nightmarish, e.g. Last Look. Some are ineffably tender and mellow like Eventide; others are tart and joke-filled … [Read more...]

03/13/13 11:00 PM | filed under: classic modern dance |

Looking Back, Journeying Forward

March 5, 2013 by 2 Comments
Miki Ohara costumed for Martha Graham's Errand into the Maze. Photo: John Deane

The Martha Graham Company, aged 87, is a determined survivor. It has soldiered on past the death of its sole choreographer in 1991, the sale of its 63rd Street building, and a lawsuit over its rights to Graham’s dances. Then, not long after the company took over the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s studios in Westbeth, hurricane Sandy caused flooding in the basement storage space and damaged sets, costumes, and archival materials. Graham might not have approved of all the company’s survival strategies—certainly not of cuts to her … [Read more...]

03/5/13 3:00 PM | filed under: classic modern dance |

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 |

Looking Back, Forging Ahead

June 30, 2012 by 2 Comments
The Emperor Jones, Daniel Fetecua Soto (red pants) amid his memories. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

A man in a fancy military jacket—gold epaulettes and all—sits slumped on an outsized throne. Six men creep in warily, circle him, bow mockingly, jump about, seem to confer. The man doesn’t move. This is how José Limón’s The Emperor Jones begins. Limón choreographed the dance, based on Eugene O’Neill’s play of the same, in 1956, to a turbulent commissioned score by Heitor Villa-Lobos. The décor and costumes by Sharon Liu are new. In one sense, the piece is very much of its era. When the title character rises and pulls himself … [Read more...]

06/30/12 6:18 PM | filed under: classic modern dance |

Re-entering Martha’s Inner Landscapes

March 22, 2012 by 6 Comments
AJ CIRCUS Lloyd Knight Xiaochuan Xie3

The program that the Martha Graham Dance Company presented on the opening night of its Joyce Theater season (March 13 through 18) concluded with a gripping performance of Graham’s 1947 masterwork Night Journey. The audience clapped and cheered and rose to its feet. In my heart, I muttered, “That’ll show them.”  Show whom what?  Show the world? Show the directors of the company that audiences can take their Graham neat, that they don’t need explanations and works by others that riff off Graham’s themes? But is that last true? … [Read more...]

03/22/12 2:51 PM | filed under: classic modern dance |

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