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Calm Thou My Soul

October 9, 2012 by 3 Comments
Douglas Dunn's Cassations (foreground: Christopher Williams). Photo: Jules Bakshi

Lovesick swains praying for either consummation or forgetfulness, maidens lamenting their lovers’ absences, men excoriating their faithless mistresses, women attacking men like bacchantes on a rampage, nymphs and shepherds, captive creatures, fever and repose, solitude and tender companionship. You might imagine that’s rather a lot to put into a dance, but Douglas Dunn expresses all that and more in his fantastically beautiful Cassations.  Dunn is one of the most imaginative, distinctive, and occasionally eccentric choreographers I can … [Read more...]

10/9/12 1:12 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

Listen Well, Children

August 19, 2012 by 4 Comments
Ryan Redmond and Travis Walker upend Benjamin Behrends in McIntyre's Ladies and Gentlemen. Photo: Taylor Crichton, courtesy of Jacob's Pillow

When Trey McIntyre Project unveiled its new Ladies and Gentlemen in Jacob’s Pillow’s Ted Shawn Theater (August 8-12), you could feel a sunny haze of nostalgia settle over the audience. I’m betting that a good percentage of the spectators could have raised their voices along with the recorded score—songs from the epochal 1972 album Free to Be. . .You and Me, instigated by Marlo Thomas. Maybe—as parents strong on feminism—they’d played it for their kids (the proceeds from the LP went to the new organization that Gloria Steinem, … [Read more...]

08/19/12 8:59 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

Men Dancing: Then and Now

July 25, 2012 by 4 Comments
Robert Swinston (front) and Germaul Barnes in The Men Dancers: From the Horse's Mouth (dress rehearsal). Photo: Taylor Crichton

Eighty years ago, when Ted Shawn assembled the all-male company that toured the U.S. with him during the 1930s, he aimed to eradicate the notion that dancing was for sissies (the polite, if bullying term for boys whose masculinity was in doubt). Almost all of those who joined Shawn’s Men Dancers were graduates of Springfield College’s Physical Education Department, and he toughened them further in those Depression years by having them hammer, hew, and dig to make the Massachusetts farm known as Jacob’s Pillow into their headquarters. … [Read more...]

07/25/12 8:03 AM | filed under: contemporary dance |

Midsummer, Music, Morris

July 5, 2012 by 5 Comments
The Mark Morris Dance Group in Festival Dance. Photo: Stephanie Berger

  In 1931, Noël Coward walked out of the first public performance of William Walton’s Façade: An Entertainment in 1923, and a critic described the music for flute, clarinet, trumpet, saxophone, cello, and percussion as “relentless cacophony.” Coward may have been put off by the fact that Edith Sitwell, the author of the poems that formed Walton’s libretto, sat behind a screen and read the text into a megaphone that poked through. Ernest Newman, however, writing in London’s The Sunday Times, said of Walton, “as a … [Read more...]

07/5/12 9:08 AM | filed under: contemporary dance |

Channeling Chekhov

April 13, 2012 by 2 Comments
David Krugel and Cora Bos-Kroese in Jirí Kylián and Michael Schumacher's Last Touch First. Photo: Robert Benschop

If this is a summerhouse somewhere in Europe around the end of the 19thcentury, why is the furniture still shrouded in dust sheets and marooned on a rumpled, sheeted floor?  This question is not the only one you might ask yourself while watching the inhabitants of the room move in slow motion through 50 or so minutes of a deceptively uneventful day. Last Touch First (at the Joyce Theater, April 10 through 15) by Jirí Kylián and Michael Schumacher is an expanded version of Last Touch First, created by Kylián in 2003 for Nederlands Dans … [Read more...]

04/13/12 11:07 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

Afterlife Meeting

April 6, 2012 by 1 Comment
(L to R) Dylan Crossman, Daniel Squire, and Jamie Scott. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The composer John Cage died suddenly in August 1992. In March 1993, his partner, choreographer Merce Cunningham, premiered a new dance, Doubletoss. These two facts resonated together for anyone watching the work’s first performances. Cunningham said at the time that he had made two dances and merged them—ensuring that all 14 dancers knew both and using chance procedures to determine how the separate pieces intersected. With Susan Gallo, he devised two sets of costumes, both worn over flesh-colored leotards. Whenever any of the dancers … [Read more...]

04/6/12 4:18 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

Taylor: Then, Now, and Forever

March 24, 2012 by 2 Comments
Eran Bugge, Robert Kleinendorst, and Aileen Roehl in The Uncommitted. Photo: Rick McCullough

Happy 50th birthday, Aureole!  Sorry I missed the celebration. You certainly don’t look your age. When I think of all the ideas you spawned for your boss, Paul Taylor, I’m amazed at your daisy-freshness. This is some season for the Taylor company: three weeks at the capacious, formerly named New York State Theater, instead of the usual two at the smaller New York City Center. Twenty-two works and repetitions of each stuffed into 21 performances that began March 13 and end April 1. Is Taylor trying to kill his dancers? Probably not. But … [Read more...]

03/24/12 7:44 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

Contending with Loss

March 9, 2012 by 9 Comments
Davalois Fearon, Emily Stone (center back), Natalie McKessy, and men in Stephen Petronio's The Architecture of Loss. Photo: Julie Lemberger.

Stephen Petronio’s melancholy, disturbingly beautiful new Architecture of Loss is, I’m pretty sure, fraught with more stillness and more silence than any of the works he’s made over the last couple of decades. The word “architecture” in the title tells us that he’s not trying to show us mourning as a response to loss; he’s showing us loss as absence and the evanescence of supporting structures. Except for visual designer Ken Tabachnik and Ravi Rajan, who created the slides, Petronio’s collaborators are all Icelanders: … [Read more...]

03/9/12 12:39 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

So, Ludwig. . .

March 7, 2012 by Leave a Comment
(L to R) Amber Star Merkens, Lesley Garrison, Chelsea Lynn Acree leaping. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Ludwig van Beethoven must have had more stamina than he’s usually credited with. If you research his Fantasy in C Minor for Piano, Orchestra, and Chorus, Op. 80, you find that its first public performance in 1808 ended a program that lasted four hours and included among its nine items the premieres of Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies (conducted by the 38-year-old composer), his Fourth Piano Concerto (played by the composer), and three movements of his C major Mass. No wonder he forgot that he had cancelled a repeat in the Fantasy’s … [Read more...]

03/7/12 5:02 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

Hail and Farewell

January 4, 2012 by 5 Comments
AJ 1 Berger photo, all

In January, 2011, one-and-a-half years after Merce Cunningham died, the second half of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s two-year Legacy Tour began in Hong Kong. It ended at 10:00 P.M. on December 31 in New York. The immense crowd of spectators in the Park Avenue Armory applauded and cheered the dancers for many minutes, as if keeping them onstage, bowing over and over, not only showed them how much we treasured them; it delayed the moment when they would thread their way through the crowd to the dressing rooms, and the company Cunningham … [Read more...]

01/4/12 1:22 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |
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