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.

April 21, 2007 1:05 PM | | Comments (0)

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Topics on Tap

Apollinaire, Saturday July 5: Neil Greenberg's surface unconscious
Apollinaire, Wednesday June 11: Premieres by the Bolshoi's Alexei Ratmansky, Twyla Tharp, and Michael Clark--lot o' thoughts
Saturday May 17, Apollinaire:  Eleanor Bauer's refreshing and expansive "At Large"
May 10, Lori Ortiz and Apollinaire: war dances and the new Inertia Movement
Tuesday May 6, Apollinaire:  The unbearably anxious "Watermill"
Sunday, May 4, Apollinaire, Paul, and Claire Willey: What's going on with the loss of so many critics?
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Contributors

Eva Yaa Asantewaa 

has written dance journalism and criticism since 1976, published most notably in Dance Magazine, Soho News, The Village Voice, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Gay City News, and on her own blog, InfiniteBody.

Paul Parish 

is a regular contributor to Danceviewtimes and San Francisco magazine, and has contributed to many other publications. He was a Rhodes Scholar same time as Bill Clinton. He lives and dances in Berkeley.

Me Elsewhere

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by foot in mouth published on April 21, 2007 1:05 PM.

Doug Fox: Skip the Funders--and go direct to the Internet [revised, Friday night] was the previous entry in this blog.

Tonya Plank: More reflections on the Nothing Festival [expanded version, Monday 11 pm] is the next entry in this blog.

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