GO: Jennifer Allen's "Open" at the Kitchen
Tonight's the last night. If you live in or around New York, treat yourself. With the Kitchen's commitment to rock-bottom ticket prices, admission is only 10 bucks. "Open" is second on a double bill with Kimberly Bartosik's "Ecsteriority1," which for me was neither here nor there, but not excruciating. The dancers were engaging, anyway.
About "Open": Jennifer Allen offers not what childhood looks like, but what it feels like.
Choreographers and especially novelists are returning often to childhood these days--not out of nostalgia, I don't think, but because they want to approach experience before the veil of convention has fully descended. (Of course, children have conventions of their own; as Allen shows, they're constantly making them up.) So you get double vision without the usual irony.
Tone is everything in these works: if they fall into cutesiness or treacly sentiment for one second, all's lost. Allen sustains a wonderfully idiosyncratic tone of weightless intensity that allows a multitude of activities to harmoniously, deliciously, and hypersensically coexist.
She creates a child's world of tiny or huge but always unremarked shifts in scale and time (think Alice from deeper inside her body); of feathery yet absolute absorption in one experiment, then another; of adults on the margins facelessly supplying the props.
The extraordinary dancers (many, familiar downtown faces) are Eleanor Hullihan, Heather Olson, Jillian Peña, Katy Pyle, and Allen. They grace "Open" with dandelion precision.
I hope you can make it.
Categories:
AJ Blogs
AJBlogCentral | rssculture
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
rock culture approximately
Laura Collins-Hughes on arts, culture and coverage
Richard Kessler on arts education
Douglas McLennan's blog
Dalouge Smith advocates for the Arts
Art from the American Outback
Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world
For immediate release: the arts are marketable
No genre is the new genre
David Jays on theatre and dance
Paul Levy measures the Angles
Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture
John Rockwell on the arts
innovations and impediments in not-for-profit arts
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude
dance
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...
jazz
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
media
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Martha Bayles on Film...
classical music
Fresh ideas on building arts communities
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
Bruce Brubaker on all things Piano
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds
Joe Horowitz on music
publishing
Jerome Weeks on Books
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera
theatre
Wendy Rosenfield: covering drama, onstage and off
visual
Public Art, Public Space
Regina Hackett takes her Art To Go
John Perreault's art diary
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary

Leave a comment