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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 |

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 |

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 |

East to West to East

October 29, 2012 by 3 Comments
(L to R) Nathan Makolandra, Morgan Lugo, and (aloft) Charlie Hodges in Benjamin Millepied's Moving Parts. Photo: Stephanie Berger

A choreographer who has just formed his own small company must be very, very brave to make Merce Cunningham’s 1964 Winterbranch the centerpiece of its debut program. Benjamin Millepied is certifiably brave. Starting a group in Los Angeles and naming it the L.A. Dance Project is already adventurous. I’m an Angeleno by birth, with the scent of eucalyptus and Pacific salt air embedded in my environmental DNA, and though the city’s cultural profile has soared in recent decades, I know that live performance isn’t a major component of what … [Read more...]

10/29/12 7:14 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

Forty Years of Magical Thinking

August 24, 2011 by 4 Comments
Building a Bower: Les Yeux et l'âme. Photo: Deen van Meer

Labels like “ordinary” and “everyday” have often been pasted onto Trisha Brown’s movement, especially when someone is alluding to her early work as a member of the iconoclastic Judson Dance Theater. But when has anything she’s ever made been ordinary? Walking may be ordinary, but getting a dancer (to whom she was married at the time) to walk down the side of a very tall building is not your usual stroll (Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, 1970). Many people have rummage sales, but what choreographer stages one underneath a … [Read more...]

08/24/11 12:36 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

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