New York City Ballet:  All-Wheeldon program / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 28, 2012 He started out as a prodigy.  He got better and better at what he was good at:  the architectural organization of a dance; the seamless incorporation of non-traditional dance movements into the classical matrix he had inherited; a deep understanding of the partnership of dance and music. Born in England in 1973, Christopher Wheeldon began studying dance at 8, entered the Royal Ballet School at 11, and graduated into the … [Read more...]

Weegee:  “Murder Is My Business” / ICP, NYC / through September 2; Bill Cunningham:  “On the Street” / weekly in the New York Times online Is it too strange that, seeing the latest Weegee exhibition (subject:  violence), I thought of Bill Cunningham (subject:  fashion)? Weegee (the moniker Arthur Fellig gave himself) was, as you may well know, the mid-twentieth-century tabloid photographer who turned his genre into an art form.  A retrospective, accurately titled “Murder is My Business,” is at ICP through September 2.  … [Read more...]

Merce Cunningham Dance Company / Park Avenue Armory, NYC / December 29-31, 2011 A Merce Cunningham Event, as the choreographer described it in a program note, is a performance of about 90 minutes, without intermission, “consist[ing] of complete dances, excerpts of dances from the repertory, and often new sequences for the particular performance and place, with the possibility of several separate activities happening at the same time to allow not so much an evening of dances as the experience of dance.” In the course of his career, … [Read more...]