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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 |

Face as Fact

March 21, 2013 by 2 Comments
L to R: Silas Riener, Cori Kresge, Rashaun Mitchell, and Melissa Toogood in Mitchell's Interface. Photo: Stephanie Berger

I remember years ago attending a evening of solos by an Indian dancer; it could have been Balasaraswati or Ritha Devi, and shortly after that, going to a performance by (maybe) American Ballet Theatre’s Bayadère. My friend and colleague, Marcia B. Siegel also saw both performances. When we spoke later, we both remembered how the familiar classical arm and hand movements of ballet had suddenly seemed so simple and the faces of the dancers so expressionless, compared to the precise complexity of the Indian performer’s fingers and hands,  … [Read more...]

03/21/13 6:02 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

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 |

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 |

The Animals Within

February 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment
(L to R) Maggie Thom, Kayvon Pourazar, and Benjamin Asriel in Juliana F. May's Commentary = not thing. Photo: Ian Douglas

Over the years, thoughtful choreographers have turned to nature as a way of thinking about choreography. Isadora Duncan was drawn to wind and wave motion, Martha Graham to the ways in which emotion structures the body, Merce Cunningham to ideas about chance and indeterminacy in nature’s processes. It’s an interesting coincidence that, just recently, two groups—Jennifer Monson/iLAND at the Kitchen, February 14-23, and Juliana F. May/MAYDANCE at New York Live Arts, February 19-23) presented works that delved into the relationship among … [Read more...]

02/24/13 5:53 PM | filed under: Postmodern New York |

Fair Winds from the West

February 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Seth Orza as Balanchine's Apollo with (front to back) Carla Körbes, Maria Chapman, and Lesley Rausch. Photo: Lindsay Thomas

Lincoln Kirstein has written that while the New York State Theater (now the Koch) was under construction, George Balanchine wandered in and saw that the pit would hold no more than 35 musicians. He immediately threatened to withdraw the New York City Ballet as the principal designated tenant. The pit was redesigned to accommodate 70 players. Had Balanchine, to whom music was so important, visited City Center during the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s recent season, he would, I’m sure, have been overjoyed to hear the scores for three of his … [Read more...]

02/22/13 11:58 PM | filed under: ballet |

Men at Work

February 20, 2013 by 3 Comments
Paul White in The Oracle, by Meryl Tankard and White. Photo: Ian Douglas

Neal Beasley and Bradley Teal Ellis staged their joint appearance on one of Dance New Amsterdam’s SPLICE series more intimately than other choreographers sharing a SPLICE program have done. They took the word “splice” seriously—dividing Ellis’s (american) guilt and Beasley’s every adam belonging to me into three parts, and splicing them into each other in alternating segments. They evidently saw, too, the kinship of their pieces—the way both examine in very personal, oblique, and fragmented ways the business of growing up gay in … [Read more...]

02/20/13 11:38 AM | filed under: mixed bill |

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 |
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