Here are the first few paragraphs of my Financial Times review, out tomorrow:

If cultural appropriation didn't already have a bad name, Karole Armitage's Itutu (until Saturday) would give it one. That the choreographer doesn't notice that her troupe mixes with the charming and engrossing experimental Afropop band Burkina Electric like oil with water would be dumb enough. But to use the Burkinabè band members as props for her preening dancers is something else again. Has the lady not heard of colonialism?

At the start, Itutu diminishes the Africans only a little. Electric guitarist Wende K. Blass and singer-enchantress Maï Lingani flirt with a couple of dancers while strumming and singing, as if these antics and their music were on a par. The sound's overamplification buries the guitar's lilting melodies, but Armitage has a point to make: this isn't your average ballet.

Soon her slick crew is copying the moves of the band's own dancers, Vicky and Zoko Zoko, and depriving the steps of sense. When Zoko Zoko undulates from side to side, it's as if an electric wire were running through him. Burkina Electric includes dancers in its mix not to prove its choreographic mettle but to show us musical possession in the flesh. Armitage doesn't care. When she borrows, she takes without transforming or honouring.

Megumi Eda and Zoko Zoko

The disrespect culminates in a duet between Megumi Eda, the choreographer's favourite and most self-regarding performer, and the burly Zoko Zoko in which he serves as ballet barre, providing Eda with the leverage to power her leg overhead (for the millionth time). That Lingani can bring some gravity and humanity to Itutu, looking upon the dancers buzzing around her with the magnanimity and delight of a strict vegetarian towards flies, is a testament to the singer's star power.

Without the band....

For the whole thing, click here.

Your time would be much better spent at the Joyce this weekend, watching and listening to a Taiwanese troupe that specializes in bringing ancient dance and music forms to life. Here, some of the Financial Times review published today:

About a millennium ago in China, as the Song Dynasty was swallowing up the Tang, the statesman Han Xizai realised his political career was over and retreated to his mansion for a life of debauchery. When word spread of nights where "guests mixed with ladies, shouting in wild excitement", as one chronicler put it, Emperor Li Yu sent the court painter Gu Hongzhong to gather intelligence. Voilà "The Feast of Han Xizai", a painting with enough intrigue and side plots to make Gu Imperial China's demimondaine answer to Bruegel. Now hanging in the Beijing Palace Museum, the delectable 11-foot scroll has spawned imitations and tributes down the centuries.

The latest is a dreamily slow, meticulously constructed dramatisation by the Taiwanese music and dance troupe Han Tang Yuefu (at the Joyce until Sunday as part of Carnegie Hall's bicoastal festival Ancient Paths, Modern Voices). Like the painting, the dance forgoes the "shouting" for ladies singing, dancing, fluting and plucking the lute, and men drumming, flirting and, mainly, watching. Unlike the painting, no beds with rumpled sheets frame the circumspect action to hint at where it all is leading or has led. Nor do several mini-dramas transpire at once, in that loose, improvisatory rhythm of a promiscuous night that will inevitably bleed into morning. Rather, Han Tang turns "The Feast" into an extended ritual, with one part discretely following another.

The stagey approach damps the mood of possibility but doesn't destroy it. And it has little impact on what would always have been formal, such as the musical numbers. Mix the stir-and-beat rhythms of an ancient raga with the dissonance of Beijing opera, and you come close to the captivating idiom of the ancient Nanguan music that the lady flautists and lutenists play, each with her own kind, and the singers sing. Music is the show's star.

But Han Xizai's consorts - particularly the head concubine (Ho-wen Hsiao, pictured above) - aren't far behind. Above tiny, gliding steps, their heads bob like a marionette's: they seem always to be yielding.....

Click here for the whole shabang.

Mudan 175/39 by Garth Fagan. Photo by Paula Summit.

I don't think this year's Joyce season is the best showing of Fagan's work. There's only one premiere--the lovely Mudan--but even that wouldn't be a problem if the rep didn't also fall on the minimalist end of the Fagan scale.

Still, I admire the Rochester choreographer's aim and method enough to not much mind if one year is less revelatory than another. I want to avoid being one of those critics who uses an artist's previous seasons against him (that is, via invidious comparison). It should matter that this is Fagan's 39th year at his post.

Here's the start of my Friday review for the Financial Times:

Since founding his company four decades ago, Garth Fagan has lived and worked upstate, impervious to the fret and ferment surrounding novelty that absorbs our local choreographers. The resulting palette of often refreshingly démodé moods and methods is prominently on display this year at the Joyce (until Sunday), perhaps because of the subdued character of the season's premiere and featured repertory.

Shades of calculatedly guileless cheer or gloomy anomie dominate contemporary dance; Fagan - who mounted annual seasons downstate for years before achieving broad acclaim with a 1998 Tony for his Lion King choreography - prefers an easy, friendly cool.

The Jamaican émigré treats his wide array of music - jazz, ska, fusions of western and eastern classicism - as neither mood thermostat nor metronome but like a lover or brother whose drift he knows so well that he can dip in and out in unhurried conversation. Many dances today stop only long enough to implode; Fagan's can be brazenly slow, with the dancers become a garden of stone before they calmly carry on. He does not forgo steps for vectors of energy; he likes his shapes. A "Y" tilted off its axis, a body hinged forward or back at the hips, split leaps: he angles limb to torso in clean geometries. Most of the time, the shapes don't speak except to say "shape". Fagan is a proud formalist.

This year, I found myself wishing he were less proud....

For the whole review, click here.

I asked my friend and Foot colleague Paul Parish whether I could paste some of his review last week of Bill T. Jones's and Joe Goode's latest shows--Jones's is the big Lincoln fete we New Yorkers will be getting some side dishes from later this month at the Joyce--and he said, yes, please. 

There's all sorts of observations Paul makes that have me starting up with excitement--the unusual way he defines dance theater, his mix of admiration and skepticism for Jones "work[ing] your nerves," etc.  Here, from The Bay Area Reporter:  

It's just a coincidence that Bill T. Jones and Joe Goode, two major gay choreographers who deal with gay themes, have opened shows back to back (and at the same time as the national LGBTQ protest for Equal Rights in Washington, DC). Just a coincidence, but it feels portentous, like something's about to give. I have to say, I don't know which way things are going to break.

Not all dances are "about" something. There's a kind of pure-dance theater that is "just about the movement." But there is, at the other end of the spectrum, a kind of dance theater that's about life in the body: movement, physicality, relationship, sexuality, love, hate, anger. It's made of stylized, heightened action, is sometimes closer to acting than to "dancing," and can be gritty, naturalistic, even journalistic. Both Jones and Goode work this end of the spectrum, using gay themes that obviously grow directly out of their lives. Both of them rose to prominence in the AIDS era - i.e., when there was no cure in sight. Dancers then often performed as if there were no tomorrow.

Goode's breakthrough piece, 29 Effeminate Gestures, could have been the anthem of ACT UP. It put gay anger on the map in a new way that made him famous nationally. The pieces he made about his friends dying of AIDS melted your heart and made you love him, and won him New York's Bessie Award, their highest honor for modern dance.

Goode does not have HIV, but Jones does; back in the 1980s, Jones and his partner, Arnie Zane, who had AIDS and was dying, made dances about their relationship which were formally innovative and electrifying theatrical exploitations of personal material. I'm using the word exploitative retrospectively; at the time, it was a fighting word - who were critics to tell dying people that they were exploiting themselves? When Arlene Croce, the great critic at The New Yorker, did rebuke Jones for such self-abuse, she was destroyed in one of the great critical contretemps of that era, from which the dust has not yet settled.

Goode and Jones are both still here, and they've both made spooky shows - reverberating, echo-filled theater-pieces with some thrilling dance, moves that seem quite secondary to the words that careen like cannonballs in a war inside the psyche. Both resemble those dreams from which you can't wake up, where the sounds in your head set up a cacophony of tension, and you can't decide what they mean or what to do.

Goode's Dead Boys is a melodrama he's written for UC's Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies (where he's been invited onto the faculty). It centers on a young gay artist, kind of a loner, who lives in a boardinghouse with some friends, but suffers nightmares about gay boys being choked, beaten, drowned; he comes to find out they're real. Most of the action is psychodrama, and it's expanded and made eloquent by the shimmering, sad music of Holcombe Waller, the folk/indie Portland composer who's collaborated with Goode; the piece is not through-composed like an opera, but previews of it put me in mind of an opera like Dialogues of the Carmelites. The show opened the weekend of Oct. 10, and continues this weekend at Zellerbach Playhouse. David K.H. Elliott's visionary lighting creates haunting effects.

The actors (aside from Prof. Lura Dolas, who is tremendous as the landlady) are students, but they are talented. It remains to be seen how well they can maintain an atmosphere which requires so much suspension of disbelief, but the material itself is haunting, and, in the sketches I've seen so far, I recognize much of my own experience as a queer trying to sort out my identity, my hopes and fears, and find ways of connecting to others. I had to leave for DC before the show opened, but it seems very promising, and honest in its conception.

Honest Abe
Jones' ambitious Fondly do we Hope, Fervently do we Pray arrived at the Yerba Buena Center hot from its premiere last month at Chicago's Ravinia Festival, which commissioned a piece about the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. It owes a lot to Ken Burns' Civil War documentaries and our familiarity with them. Jones quotes Lincoln like a preacher quoting Scripture, and bends old hymn tunes to his purposes.

It's dangerous not to praise Bill T. Jones. (Look what happened to Croce.) He's in a position to flip liberal guilt like a ju-jitsu artist, since he's both gay and African-American, and as a postmodern New Yorker, he's seen how his fellow artists in the visual media pay more attention to crafting their reputations than their pictures. The fascinating thing is that he really does play it close to the edge. He used to parody "I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not" by coming out onstage. He'd posture, strip down to a little white skirt or the altogether, and harangue the audience, "I've got AIDS, and you don't," and he'd get away with it. Or he'd get his mother onstage to sing a gospel song (she's great) and dance to that. He worked your nerves.

He's still doing that. The center of the piece is a poetry slam echoing the Lincoln-Douglas debate. He's on both sides of every question, even suggesting that he's got sympathy with states' rights.

A piece with so much discord requires powerful containing forces to keep it from exploding, and the organizing forces were glorious.....

For the whole thing: here.

So about that movement, Cherkaoui has devised an edgeless, Gumby style mosaic of motion. No limb ever straightens all the way; no phrase ever finishes, it simply subsides. After a while it makes me feel blurry. On the one hand, I've never seen anything quite like it before (though nearly). On the other, I don't really care if I see anything quite like it again.

Is newness so important that it doesn't matter what is new?

Probably.

Speaking of novelty and problems, I'd been listening to Saul Bellow's Augie March on CD and marveling over--everything, really, but I guess what I could land on as blowing my mind was the way he lined up adjectives, each one pushing and pulling against the ones nearby to create something entirely more alive than each would be alone. It infected me and I tried my own version. Couldn't pull it off.  

Here's a bit of the Cherkaoui review. (And here's the whole review): 

Like many ironists, Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui harbours a secret gushy heart, and in Orbo Novo it leaks out.

The fault may lie with the 70-minute work's inspiration, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor's Oprah-endorsed account of chancing upon a world of peace, love and understanding: the right hemisphere of her brain. When a blood vessel burst in the chattering, contentious, obsessive-compulsive left half, "the little voice that says, 'Hey, remember to pick up bananas on the way home'," went mute, she writes, and left her "an energy being" floating in the here and now, "perfect, whole and beautiful".

This first stateside commission for Cherkaoui - from Cedar Lake, New York's answer to pointe-free athletico-conceptual European contemporary dance - begins by throwing up defensive barriers to Taylor's woozy utopia.....

For the whole thing: here

I go on to complain about the dancers. I know half the town adores the Cedar Lake crew--as do many professional dancers in illustrious New York companies--so what's wrong with me? There's something about them that seems professional in the bad sense: proficient, versatile, but insufficiently invested in the movement before them. I have no doubt they're invested in dancing, but I'm not convinced they care enough about what they're dancing. It's the liability of an ominivore rep company.

Here, though, some dancers I liked:

Golan Yosef, Jon Bond, Acacia Schachte, Jason Kittelberger. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

After posting Foot contributor Paul Parish's eloquent and provocative outcry on the YouTube crackdown on user Ketinoa's large video collection, I received some illuminating information on copyright law from Marc Kirshner, of the newly formed Tendu TV.

Here it is, filtered through the law-ignorant mind of moi:

--In order to maintain their right to certain dances, organizations such as the Balanchine Trust have to enforce copyright protection. If they don't complain to YouTube, for example, about the Kirov clips of Balanchine works that Ketinoa put up, they're at risk of what's known as copyright abandonment, which means that when a real risk comes along (such as did with the Martha Graham company under Ron Protas), they've relinquished their legal right to prosecute.

THIS JUST IN, from lawyer Elizabeth Russell, specializing in the arts and issues of copyright:

Regarding copyright enforcement, abandonment is a concept that applies in trademark law; but there is no statutory abandonment provision in copyright law. And there's a reason for that: trademark law serves consumers. If a business chooses not to be diligent in policing its trademarks, it is in the consumers' best interest to have the trademark become unenforceable. Copyright, on the other hand, is a constitutional balance intended to protect the rights of authors (including choreographers) for "limited times," in order to encourage the creation of, essentially, cultural material. After the "limited time" is up, that material passes into the public domain. Copyright law thus protects authors, in order ultimately to benefit the public. So there are more protections in copyright law for authors, than there are in trademark law for business owners. And one of those protections for authors is: it's hard to abandon your copyright by accident.

Well, there goes the Balanchine Trust's big excuse!

--About 95 percent of dance companies have not copyrighted their works. It's not particularly easy to do so, because you have to determine the "standard" form--called "fixation" in copyright law--which requires careful video documentation and possibly also notation. It's easy enough to determine a book's fixed form--the version published--but with dance, questions come up such as, as Kirshner put it, "Is the choreography the steps or the movement between the steps?" This made me laugh: isn't the issue of what counts as a step and what a transition a philosophical question that each choreographer answers differently? And how do you convert such aesthetic values into legal criteria?

--As little as five seconds of video can count as copyright infringement. But "fair use" dictates that you may "quote" video the same way you would a passage from a book: in a discussion that contextualizes. You could, for example, embed several Giselle mad scenes within an online essay on how each of the ballerinas approached this pivotal moment. (For more on Fair Use in dance, particularly for collections staff, see the Dance Heritage Coalition's careful, comprehensive 2009 document, "Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use of Dance-Related Materials: Recommendations for librarians, archivists, curators, and other collections staff." Via Ballet Talk.)

I asked Paul for his thoughts on the addition. Here they are:

It may be time to lobby for a MAJOR change in copyright law. Many issues are changing their look -- like the way Washington DC changes as you drive away from one of those circles, the buildings actually shifting places if you're not operating from a grid. The way things are growing now--some things growing, others shrinking--fair use doesn't have to mean "in a critical review," for example.

Paul.

Yes, these legal points in no way answer the larger questions about what and who the copyrighting etc. serves: whether the laws as they stand defeat the very artform and artists they're meant to protect (and I do think what serves the artform ultimately serves the artist.)

Here, again, is Paul's original post.

And here is my followup, about the role of borrowing in artmaking and what Balanchine's position on YouTube and the Trust's tight control might have been.

And check out comments by Marc Kirshner et. al.

Another worldwide tango show has arrived in New York, in the sixth year of its never-ending tour. Tanguera - a Movin' Out-style musical, at City Center until October 18 - is too dumb and unambitious to hate, though one can certainly resent it.
   You know where the threadbare story is headed as soon as our greenhorn heroine, Giselle of Paris, struts down the gangplank in bare legs and raincoat. The hulky dockworker she bumps into - bing, they're in love! - will rescue her from the stylish Buenos Aires pimps stealing her away to their bordello, but only after she's had to service the stoop-shouldered, myopic and middle-aged. (The other girls get the young, muscled and bronzed.)

   Better Banguera, in which Giselle leaves her loyal dockworker for the boas, bustiers and paid sex. It would oppress less. Tanguera depends on a simple opposition: the bad guys, with whom the whores don't want to dance but must, versus the good guys, with whom they want to dance but aren't allowed. In other words, half the numbers represent unwilling intimacy (to put it squeamishly). The performers couldn't actually be doing these perfectly calibrated leg waggles without consent, though, so why not a story that doesn't require so much pretence on their part and suspension of disbelief on ours?

   Still, Tanguera would have been less awful if choreographer Mora Godoy had treated the soft-porn plot as a dancemaker's challenge....

For the whole thing, click here.

And now for the sublime, which was doubly pleasurable because I wasn't expecting it. You have only through Friday to see the young Italian choreographer Matteo Levaggi's Primo Toccare at the Joyce. Given the size of the opening night audience (woefully small--about half full), I'll bet you could get $10 tickets.

Vito Pansini (man) and Yi Chun Liu (woman) with anonymous model in the White section of Matteo Levaggi's Primo Toccare. Photo by Massimo Pinca.

The dance, with its eight elegant, soft-spoken dancers, belongs to  Balletto Teatro di Torino (Turin Ballet to you and me). The weekend program consists of older and perhaps less delectable works. Don't let the washing-machine sound effects or the chilly, portentous set or the live dead models set your mind against this dance. It has a mind and voice of its own.

Here's the start; Financial Times review out tomorrow.  (Did you know that it's not just the Clash that says spe-ci-al-ity?) 

It is a rare choreographer who makes you feel you are not waiting for anything to happen, because it already is happening - every moment "a visible action of life", as Merce Cunningham once put it. In Balletto Teatro di Torino's New York debut on Tuesday night before a small but enthusiastic audience, 31-year-old Matteo Levaggi proved to possess that elusive talent.

    For Primo Toccare (First Touch) - the first of two programmes of his work at the Joyce this week - he hedges his bets, allowing himself and his collaborators to stuff the dance with accessory meanings. Art-fashion team Corpicrudi lays the vanitas on thick with a coffin-shaped vitrine that displays first a skull and lilies, then two motionless models standing while staring blankly out at us. The sound score denatures the heavy breathing of lovemaking so it turns into white noise; on the other hand, it blasts churchy organ at such high decibels, you pray for earplugs.

   Yet Levaggi - a pure product of Turin Ballet whom long-time director Loredana Furno designated resident choreographer at the tender age of 23 - is so engaged in the essential choreographic questions of timing and juxtaposition that the Euro-angst pretensions do not stick. Primo Toccare's confidence in dance as an end in itself carries us through on a serene pulse of attention.

   Step for step, the movement is nothing special. Batsheva's Ohad Naharin achieves more dramatic effects with a torso's squiggly undulations. Other choreographers have used splay-fingered, wrist-cocked monster hands just as endearingly. The flying karate legs with cantilevered torso are a Forsythe speciality. And Levaggi's fondness for squatting fourth positions reminds me of Cunningham.

   But the tone of sublime gentleness.....

Here's the whole thing.

--Novelist Jonathan Lethem's fantastic 2007 Harper's article, "The Ecstasy of Influence," on how artmaking necessarily involves borrowing, in which he reminds us:

The first Congress to grant copyright gave authors an initial term of fourteen years, which could be renewed for another fourteen if the author still lived. The current term is the life of the author plus seventy years. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that each time Mickey Mouse is about to fall into the public domain, the mouse's copyright term is extended.

Perhaps even more to the point, he explains that the reason a film can "borrow" scenes from real life without being accused of plagiarism is the camera itself is enough to make them new. Why wouldn't that apply as well to dance on film? Balanchine certainly understood the distinction, as he made clear in the revisions to his ballets he created for film.

--For those of you wondering how Balanchine might have responded to a YouTube presence, Arlene Croce's January New Yorker article (in full for subscribers) on how most of the wise nuggets of Balanchine's were actually other people's, which he adapted, goes on to point out that this principle applied to his choreography as well.

He subscribed to the Hegelian view of history as a spiral: everything recurs, but in a different form. For this reason, he saw no harm in appropriating: he stole and was stolen from--that was the way of art.

How ironic that Balanchine's presence in the Ketinoa collection caused its demise.

NEW: For a legal perspective on why it might be necessary for the Balanchine Trust and other organizations of its size and stature to play policeman, here's info I gleaned from a Tendu TV exec.

And, again, for Paul's original letter, go here.