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Heat and Ice

March 16, 2013 by 1 Comment
Annika Hyvären (L) and Natasha Lommi in Tero Saarinen's

I regret not having been able to see Carte Blanche, the Norwegian National Dance Company, perform Corps de Walk at the Joyce Theater. In this piece by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, the dancers, I read, have whitened hair and wear blue contact lenses. What better illustration of the Nordic mini-festival’s name: Ice Hot? The other participants were the Tero Saarinen Company and  Danish Dance Theatre. If Saarinen’s  Scheme of Things tells us something about his Finnish homeland, that may because of his fascination with light, which in far … [Read more...]

03/16/13 4:02 PM | filed under: New Dance from Abroad |

A Pas de Deux and a Society in Chaos

October 14, 2012 by 1 Comment
Raimund Hoghe. A sash becomes a hat. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

  Dance doesn’t happen in a vacuum. One evening, I’m at the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Howard Gilman Space—glancing from time to time at the night city glowing outside two big windows, listening to some rich recorded music, and watching a delicately intense, sometimes barely moving dance by two people that traverses two hours without intermission.  The next night I’m in another theater named after the same generous patron, BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House. This time, the music is loud and calamitous, the dancing … [Read more...]

10/14/12 3:41 PM | filed under: New Dance from Abroad |

Out of Africa

September 23, 2012 by 1 Comment
Nora Chipaumire in her Miriam. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

In the not-so-distant past, white explorers, colonizers, missionaries, and historians referred to Africa as “the dark continent” or dramatized it as “darkest Africa.”  They may have been alluding to the skin color of most of its native inhabitants, but certainly to their own inability (and unwillingness) to understand its customs and lore. Over two September weeks, at two different New York theaters, choreographers born in African countries (and all but one still living there) confronted that perceived darkness, especially the part of … [Read more...]

09/23/12 11:04 AM | filed under: New Dance from Abroad |

Pounding the Earth, Aspiring to the Air

July 11, 2012 by 1 Comment
Nitsan Margaliot flying onto Eyal Vizner. Photo: Christopher Duggan

Cultural identity, terrain, traditions, body types, beliefs. How many other markers reveal how we like to move, how we define dance? Two very dissimilar styles appeared last week some miles north of New York City in pastoral surroundings. Israel’s Vertigo Dance Company performed in Jacob’s Pillow’s Ted Shawn Theater July 4 through 8, and on July 6, France’s Compagnie Fêtes galantes opened Bard’s Summerscape 2012 (which runs through August 19) with three performances. If Mana (2009) is typical of the pieces in Vertigo’s … [Read more...]

07/11/12 5:55 PM | filed under: New Dance from Abroad |

A Single Dance in Four Chapters

July 1, 2012 by 2 Comments
Shantala Shivalingappa in Ushio Amagatsu's Ibuki. Photo: Laurent Philippe

Shantala Shivalingappa has always been an artistic voyager. Trained in India’s classical Kuchipudi style (first by her mother, Savitry Nair, then by Vempati Chinna Satyam), she danced with an unbridled white horse in Bartabas’s equine spectacle Chimère. She played Ophelia in Peter Brooks’s production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Miranda in his The Tempest. She has performed with Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. In 2010, she collaborated on a duet with choreographer-performer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui that I wish they would present … [Read more...]

07/1/12 6:36 PM | filed under: New Dance from Abroad |

My Hand, Your Head, Por Favor

June 25, 2012 by 1 Comment
Nayane Diniz and Murilo Borges in Mimulus's Por Um Fio. At back, Fabiana Dias and Rodrigo de Castro. Photo: Christopher Duggan

The man leads. Right? In the social and ballroom dances of Europe and the Americas, the man always leads. Still, when you watch couples who are adept at, say, the Argentinian tango or the Viennese waltz, the man and his partner seem so bonded that you can envision them as complicit equals. Never mind that his right hand pressing on her back and his left arm pulling at her right arm are guiding her; power is disguised as a shared adventure. The Mimulus Dance Company presents a different vision of what happens when two people dance together. … [Read more...]

06/25/12 7:05 PM | filed under: New Dance from Abroad |

Cherish The Dancers

May 26, 2012 by 1 Comment
Simply Marvel, Jubal Battisti engulfed. Photo: Juiieta Cervantes

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet is the most stable mid-sized company in New York.  Its top-notch funding guarantees that its dancers are very well taken care of, which means that they don’t come and go. Every time artistic director Benoit-Swan Pouffer puts together a new program for a season at the company’s own black-box theater on West 26th street or at the Joyce Theater (this spring, May 15 through 27), I look forward to seeing the dancers in new guises. They’re virtuosos, but more importantly, they seem to approach each work with … [Read more...]

05/26/12 1:25 PM | filed under: New Dance from Abroad |

Living in a Green World

March 11, 2012 by 5 Comments
Ia'ara Moses and Chen-Wei Lee (at back Rachel Osborne, Matan David) in Ohad Naharin's Hora. Photo: Stephanie Berger

When Ohad Naharin left New York for Israel, his homeland, in 1990 and took over Batsheva Dance Company, he developed a distinctive movement style. In all his dances, the performers are muscular in unconventional ways. Watching them, I imagine elements of the inner apparatus that moves the human body trying to find new conduits into motion. Sometimes a dancer’s hip or a shoulder is impelled to trace a path on the air; sometimes the residue of an experience flutters out his fingers. Gaga, the training technique that Naharin devised, treats the … [Read more...]

03/11/12 12:12 PM | filed under: New Dance from Abroad |

Traveling The Upward Path

February 12, 2012 by 2 Comments
The cast of Akram Khan's Vertical Road. Photo: Laurent Ziegler

The sound of distant dripping fills the darkness. Lights gradually, dimly, reveal a barely discernible standing figure. Suddenly the person plunges forward against what turns out to be a translucent curtain that stretches from one side of the stage to the other. Whenever his hands or his scribbling finger or his head presses against the flexible membrane separating him from us, that part comes instantly into sharp focus, while the rest of him remains blurry. His last thrust brings blackness again, and the sound of wind. This is the stunning … [Read more...]

02/12/12 5:01 PM | filed under: New Dance from Abroad |

Surviving the Flood

January 17, 2012 by 2 Comments
Camacho and His Garden Swan

Somewhere out there, there must be people who, happening on—or dragged to— a contemporary performance, will venture, “but is it dance?”  Others more confident will re-frame the question as an assertion, possibly an outraged one. But anyone regularly attending productions in New York’s forward-looking theaters and the equivalent in Europe will have become accustomed to the wide-armed, eclectic embrace of postmodern art. You don’t sit in New York Live Arts’s black-box performing space watching Francisco Camacho struggle through Meg … [Read more...]

01/17/12 2:30 PM | filed under: New Dance from Abroad |
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