Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker/Rosas / LaGuardia Concert Hall, NYC / August 25, 27, and 28, 2004 Mostly Mozart is looking to update its image. The annual summer festival at Lincoln Center, now in its 38th year, and its second under a new director, Louis Langrée, has ventured beyond pure concert work to what it terms—adopting corporate-world lingo—“new program initiatives.” One of these initiatives turns out to be theatrical presentation—specifically a couple of partnerships with dance. Last week, the Mark Morris Dance … [Read more...]

Mark Morris Dance Group / New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / August 19 and 21, 2004 Typical Mark Morris! His company gets invited (for the third year running) to perform in Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival—where dancers rarely tread—and he weighs in with a program of four pieces, not a single one of them choreographed to a Mozart score. Instead, the bill consists of Marble Halls (from 1985, to Bach), A Lake (1991, Haydn), Jesu, Meine Freude (1993, Bach), and I Don’t Want to Love (1996, Monteverdi). Since … [Read more...]

The Frogs / Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / July 22 – October 10, 2004 I can’t imagine why Susan Stroman—best known as the choreographer of Broadway shows, sometime provider of diversions for highbrow sites like New York City Ballet and the Martha Graham Dance Company—didn’t make dance a stronger element as director and choreographer of The Frogs. Surely her collaborators on this entertainment, Nathan Lane (libretto, lead role) and Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics), knew what she does best. The show itself … [Read more...]

Universal Ballet / New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / July 30 – 31, 2004 Korea is a land with its own venerable dance traditions. Classical ballet, which had taken root there by the 1960s, was a distinctly foreign import (just as it once was in the U.S.). The major influence on the development of ballet in Korea has come from Russian practitioners who brought it a Russian approach to technique and a Russian repertory—nineteenth-century classics like Swan Lake and twentieth-century works in the Soviet style. A … [Read more...]

Boccatango / Joyce Theater, NYC / July 26 - August 12, 2004 The New York dance audience knows Julio Bocca best from his star turns with American Ballet Theatre. These days, he’s also starring in Boccatango, teamed with members of Ballet Argentino, the company he leads back home in Buenos Aires. This touring vehicle is neither classical ballet nor tango, though. Rather, it's a show in which the choreographer Ana Maria Stekelman exploits both genres (as well as modern dance and jazz) to produce an entertainment more fit for a cabaret than … [Read more...]