Seeing Things: September 2006 Archives

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on September 29, 2006.

Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Who could resist Trisha Brown's ``Set and Reset''? The choreographer's fluid movement pairs with Robert Rauschenberg's translucent costumes and fleeting background images to create a ravishing, ephemeral world.

This piece is just one of 30 items in ``Fall for Dance,'' City Center's ``tasting'' series. Now in its third year, the project is meant to lure people who don't yet love dancing.

Six programs, each showcasing five companies, provide the proverbial something for everyone. And the price is right: Every seat at the huge and historic theater goes for 10 bucks.

Program 1, which has its second showing tonight, juxtaposes the sensuous yet cerebral Brown with Bill T. Jones, master of sociopolitical argument, the Dutch National Ballet, the Pennsylvania Ballet and the Yi-Jo Lim Sun Dance Company, which promises nothing less than ``Heaven and Earth.''

Program 2, on view Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, features modern and postmodern choreography by the celebrated New York-based dance makers Paul Taylor and Stephen Petronio cheek by jowl with work from other lands (France, Canada) and in other genres (mixed-media, hip-hop).

Veteran aficionados join dance newcomers to sell out the house for these shows.

``Fall for Dance'' is at the New York City Center through Oct. 8. See http://www.nycitycenter.org .

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on September 27, 2006.

Sept. 27 (Bloomberg) -- The stage is thickly strewn with blue and white bits of paper arranged in a mandala-like pattern of circles within squares. Ani Choying Dolma, a Buddhist nun, kneels at its center, singing and chanting, her voice alternately powerful and haunting.

This is the hypnotic setting for Shen Wei's ``Re--,'' on view at the Joyce Theater through Sunday. The dreamlike mood is shattered as four dancers rush across the space, destroying the design.

It's the only violent moment. The rest of the action is all gentle swiveling and rolling, limbs extending softly, bodies folding back in on themselves.

The moving bodies stir up the fragments so that they travel lightly through the air before falling slowly back to the ground, like snow. Other scraps stick to the dancers' clothes, like the debris that clung to the fugitives from the attacks on the Twin Towers.

In a lecture-demonstration at Asia Society, Shen explained that his creation of ``Re--'' was inspired by two visits to Tibet. It's easy to imagine that the dancers represent the Tibetan people, whose geographic, cultural and spiritual homeland was ravaged by China in the mid-20th century. And that the people keep going, centered and calm.

Still, the viewer's imagination has to work overtime, since the choreography isn't convincing in itself.

The piece's most persuasive element is the performance of Dai Jian, the single male member of the quartet and the only one who has fully mastered Shen's concept of movement impelled by breath. This dancer is a phenomenon, embodying the Eastern idea of egoless action.

Apart from the singing, the rest of the dance leans dangerously in the direction of the inauthentic and the pretentious.

Plotless Rites

Shen's 2003 ``Rite of Spring,'' set to the four-hand piano rendition of Stravinsky's arresting 1913 score, completed the program.

The composer had narration in mind -- a pagan community's yearly sacrifice of a virgin to make the crops grow. Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography, though a radical departure from classical ballet, still told the story.

Shen's version remains adamantly abstract. It tries to make an effect solely through sharp-focused, weaving stage patterns and violent athletic movement. Gymnasts and break dancers would recognize a lot of what's going on.

Too Pretty

The simplistic movement dulls through repetition. The work is further weakened by being overly prettified: The dancers are too lithe and fluid, balletic in their elegance.

What's more, the idea of dancing to one's death becomes defused when everyone's doing it, and the force compelling the barbaric ritual is nowhere to be seen.

Born in China, the 38-year-old Shen Wei trained as a youngster for the Chinese opera and spent the latter half of the 1980s performing in this highly stylized, theatrically vivid genre.

He has described his first experience watching modern dance as an epiphany. It led him, in 1990, to become a founding member, both dancer and choreographer, of one of China's first modern dance companies.

In the mid-1990s he emigrated to the States. By 2000 he had his own troupe, and encouraged by today's accelerated globalization of dance, it has quickly become the next new thing.

Shen Wei Dance Arts is at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave. at 19th Street through Oct.1. Tickets: (1)(212) 242-0800. Information: http://www.joyce.org .

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on September 22, 2006.

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Four dancers stride across the stage, seeming oblivious to one another. Two collide violently, triggering entanglements and wild cantileverings that identify them as lovers one moment, enemies the next.

This is the opening of Elisa Monte's new ``Hardwood,'' set to high-voltage, often haunting music by John King. The piece is featured in the 25th-anniversary program of Elisa Monte Dance, at the Joyce Theater through Sunday.

Monte is remembered for her fierce-spirited dancing as a principal with Martha Graham. She put herself on the map as a choreographer in 1979 with ``Treading,'' a postmodern duet with a sensual undercurrent to a mesmerizing score by Steve Reich.

Today, her dances are in the repertories of well-known modern dance and classical companies, from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater to the San Francisco Ballet.

Monte's work is notable for coupling high energy with frank sensuality and for its humanist themes. Often her dances hint at primordial impulses and tribal ritual.

Her performers -- physically diverse, united in spirit -- constitute a tribe of their own. It's characterized by grace, daring and an almost palpable camaraderie.

Elisa Monte Dance is at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave. at 19th Street, tonight through Sunday. Tickets: (1)(212) 242-0800. Information: http://www.elisamontedance.org.

Fusion Choreographer

Call the Japanese-born, former Paul Taylor dancer Takehiro Ueyama a fusion choreographer.

He melds movement, music and themes derived from his roots in both East and West. Tonight through Sunday, his 3-year-old Take Dance Company will be at the Ailey Citigroup Theater showing how he does that without looking artsy.

In his new ``One,'' the Eastern elements are used as if they were natural occurrences, not highly wrought artifice. The Western ones energize the material, giving it a daring athletic quality and a visceral impact.

Ueyama's at his most inventive with the ever-shifting pattern of the figures on stage. Any given moment offers a picture that's exquisitely balanced yet often surprising.

He's adept, too, at devising forceful, fluid movement. Happily, it's not too derivative of Taylor.

True, he can't resist borrowing the doom-charged herded- animals image from the master's ``Esplanade.'' He also co-opts the buoyant loping run with turning head and slashing arms from ``Aureole'' -- which Taylor cheerfully confesses he stole from Martha Graham.

The Take Dance Company performs at the Ailey Citigroup Theater, 405 W. 55th St. at Ninth Avenue, tonight through Sunday. Tickets: 1(212)868-4444. Information: http://www.takedanceny.com.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Traditionally, dancers--especially classical dancers, who commit to their profession in childhood or adolescence--had the reputation of being essentially physical creatures and thus nonverbal. Even when it was admitted that they might be intelligent, they were still often labeled "dumb" in the sense of "mute." This myth has constantly been challenged. Today, the argument for the articulate dancer is strengthened further by the fact that dancers in ever-increasing numbers are finding their voice through writing about dancing--and editing dance publications as well.

A look at veteran writers on the New York scene alone reveals precedents. Deborah Jowitt, longtime chief dance critic at the Village Voice, with several books to her credit, began as a dancer and choreographer. The well known dance historian Nancy Reynolds was a member of the New York City Ballet. Gus Solomons jr, who danced with Merce Cunningham and still performs with a chamber group of senior artists, reviews dance regularly for Metro Daily and Gay City News. A generation before them, Edwin Denby, arguably the most gifted English-language dance critic, also started his career on stage. Distinguished dance writers like David Vaughan, Nancy Goldner, and Mindy Aloff never had a full-fledged stage career but were dedicated dance students.

Casting the net farther back in time and wider in space reveals a slew of worthy books written by dancers. The most natural form for the dancer who sits down and takes pen in hand is, of course, the memoir. Dancers recording their own lives and careers fall into two groups--the "as told to"s (in which a collaborator's hand grasps the pen) and those who go the course independently.

In the first category, Suzanne Farrell composed her Holding on to the Air with the help of Toni Bentley, a former New York City Ballet dancer who has published several of her own books. But Tamara Karsavina's Theatre Street, arguably the most evocative and touching of all dance memoirs, is said to have been written by the Maryinsky ballerina herself--and in her adopted language, English.

Allegra Kent, the most poetic of Balanchine's ballerinas, found her own voice in prose for Once a Dancer . . . . Twyla Tharp's voice (blunt, tough, and intermittently ecstatic) is authentic in her autobiographical Push Comes to Shove, as is Margot Fonteyn's (exquisitely tactful) in Autobiography. In both cases, the personality in prose closely resembles the woman's dance temperament. Paul Taylor (Private Domain) and Agnes de Mille (Dance to the Piper) produced books that resonated beyond the confines of the dance world--his for its literary distinction, hers for its vitality and human interest.

Why, then, have dancers have been considered functionally illiterate, inarticulate, or both? One reason is that, with few exceptions, classical dancers must begin their training as children. The ideal age is eight, when ordinary kids are in third grade. If the training is serious--that is, career-oriented--their academic education naturally takes second place. Until the mid-twentieth century, in the state-run ballet academies that feed into Europe's grandest troupes, the education provided alongside the rigorous dancing lessons was at times perfunctory. In the States, youngsters often studied via correspondence courses, which could be sketchy. Even at best, these studies cut off at the high school level, since that's when a successful ballet student begins his or her stage career. By contrast, the last decade has witnessed a significant surge in the number of dancers in earning college degrees, during as well as after their performing years.

Again, until fairly recently, the traditional modus operandi in ballet companies was a dictatorship imposed by a powerful director or choreographer upon dancers whose voiced opinions were implicitly if not overtly discouraged. The performing artists, cultivated for their bodies, not their brains--as if the two were separate entities--understood that they were to "shut up and dance."

Modern dance, a field in which a performer can begin as a young adult, is not so exigent. Still, like their classically trained cousins, these contemporary dancers pass most of their working hours in silence. In daily class, rehearsal, and performance they are rarely required, let alone encouraged, to speak.

Times have changed, however, and today's trend toward self-empowerment has permeated the ivory towers and prison walls that once sheltered dance (or, depending on how you look at it, cut it off) from many worldly realities. More and more, dancers, are speaking out and, having found their voice, writing--commenting on, judging, and influencing the activities in their profession.

This social evolution has combined with the resources of the Internet to make today's dancers more articulate than their predecessors. Anyone with a computer and access to cyberspace can set up shop on the Net, cost-free, in something like twenty minutes and publish what he has to say, bypassing (at his peril, of course) the roadblocks of editors. Rachel Feinerman's blog (www.downtowndancer.com) and the choreographer Leigh Witchel's (www.leighwitchel.com/blog) are highly developed examples of such letters to the world.

The most thoroughgoing dance publication on the Internet, however, is currently being done at the DanceView Times www.danceviewtimes.com), originated and run by Alexandra Tomalonis, and The Dance Insider (www.danceinsider.com), originated and run by Paul Ben-Itzak and his colleagues. Both sites feature reviews of a wide spectrum of dance by a regular stable of writers, professional dancers among them. The Dance Insider, as its name suggests, makes a point of engaging dancers as writers. The Danceview Times is more eclectic. "I'm interested in finding and using vivid writers," Tomalonis says. "Their background may be in dancing--or in history, theater, literature, or music. Each one brings something interesting and meaningful to the mix."

The more traditional realm of print publication includes two major dance journals whose editors in chief are well known former dancers. Dance magazine, the most lavish and widely read periodical of its kind, is run by Wendy Perron, a postmodern dancer and choreographer, who still performs and choreographs occasionally. Virginia Johnson, former ballerina of Dance Theatre of Harlem, edits Pointe magazine.

Perron, who also teaches seminars in dance writing--a phenomenon that has recently seen great increase in interest--uses this tactic to enable dancer-writers in the making: "I encourage them to bring the equipment they have as dancers to their writing. First, their highly developed sense of rhythm and phrasing. Then, their ability to communicate, as they do on stage."

Among the relative newcomers whom Perron publishes are Lisa Kraus, an independent postmodern dancer and choreographer, whose style is lush and visceral; Lise Rinehart, a former American Ballet Theatre soloist, a paragon of clarity who also writes for the DanceView Times; and Rosalynde LeBlanc, a veteran of Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project, whose writing style recalls Agnes de Mille's in its freshness and vigor.

Johnson is actively trying to encourage dancer-writers. Among her recruits is Tai Jimenez, a veteran of Dance Theatre of Harlem, now a principal with Boston Ballet, whose articles reveal her spiritual orientation and her sensitivity to racial issues.

"A dancer who writes," Johnson believes, "is especially good at helping an audience understand how a performer makes choreography expressive--how she takes the steps, stuff so cut and dried you could notate it, and infuses them with feeling."

Not surprisingly, the newly minted dancer-writers are nimble at expressing their reasons for taking up a second trade. Kraus says, "I need to be more involved with dance than simply watching it. If I'm not in it--performing in it or another aspect of creating it--I very much like to take it home with me and dwell with it."

LeBlanc, who has produced some eloquent personal essays, explains, "For me, writing is instinctive--the thing I do behind closed doors at the end of the day to fall into synch with my own drummer. Dancing has always been the cerebral struggle for me, and it is only by writing about that struggle that I have chosen again and again to keep dancing."

It's evident, of course, that a writer needn't have danced to write well about dancing. The achievement of the non-dancing Arlene Croce, called "the Jane Austen of dance," settles that question for good. But it can certainly be argued that a dance writer's understanding is enlarged by firsthand experience of what is involved in getting the body to speak worlds.

© 2006 Tobi Tobias

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on September 15, 2006.

Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Dancers in 18th-century dress playing ancient Greeks, socially pretentious Europeans and an occasional supernatural facilitator like Cupid will be celebrating Mozart's 250th birthday tonight and tomorrow at Florence Gould Hall.

Catherine Turocy's esteemed New York Baroque Dance Company, which brings painstaking scholarship to life, is presenting ``Invisible Dances'' (a suite from the opera ``Idomeneo'') and ``Les Petits Riens'' (the composer's only ballet). The reconstructed choreography reveals the genesis of classical ballet as we know it.

The women in ``Les Petits Riens,'' dressed in wide, ankle- grazing gowns, concentrate on bouncy filigreed footwork gently accented by hands tracing curlicues in the air. The men bare more of their white-stockinged legs and have lustier jumps and beats, but they move with the same fine precision. In the seaside idyll of ``Invisible Dances,'' the celebrants' dancing shuttles between aristocratic formality and a freer lyrical style.

Instrumentalists from Concert Royal, James Richman's early- music ensemble, will provide the accompaniment and play the quartet version of Mozart's Piano Concerto in A Major as well.

Florence Gould Hall, 55 E. 59 St. Tickets: (1)(212) 307- 4100. See http://www.nybaroquedance.org.

``New Ballet Choreographers,'' at Columbia University's Miller Theater tonight and tomorrow, is a misnomer. It's a showcase for work by Brian Reeder, Edwaard Liang and Tom Gold, all of whom have had considerable experience.

Reeder, who's performed with both the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater, has made his mark with fanciful pieces for ABT's farm team, the Studio Company.

Liang, known for his deeply nuanced dancing with the NYCB, has contributed to its repertory as well as to that of other troupes in the U.S. and abroad.

Gold, a spunky NYCB virtuoso, has the most modest local track record, but he's no beginner.

The choreographers will be putting on their show with a little help from their friends, both rising and established NYCB stars (Wendy Whelan among them) and cream-of-the-crop newbies from the Studio Company. The music -- by Jefferson Friedman, Philip Glass, Arvo Part and John Zorn -- will be played live, a luxury in the dance world.

The choreography was commissioned by the Miller Theater and the Guggenheim Museum's Works & Process program.

Tickets: (1)(212) 854-7799. See http://www.millertheatre.com

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on September 8, 2006.

Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) -- ``For a long time I wanted to do a show about underwear and armor,'' declares Valerie Steele, the erudite, ebullient director and chief curator of the Museum at FIT.

The vivid result, ``Love & War: The Weaponized Woman,'' opens tomorrow and runs through Dec. 16. It juxtaposes the ``hard body,'' defended and protected, with the ``soft,'' which is vulnerable and seductive.

Lingerie items range from conventionally sensuous second- skin concoctions to a Comme des Garcons outfit that combines leather, satin and lace in hues of scarlet and black. Steele has nicknamed it ``The Avant-Garde Harlot.''

The examples of armor include authentic historical war gear -- often as painstakingly decorated as high fashion -- and theatrical costumes like the gleaming golden armor worn by Katharine Cornell playing Joan of Arc.

Most striking are the riffs on battle garb by couturiers with rampant imagination. These range from Christian Dior's billowing, gauzy ball gown with a camouflage pattern to a suave, dark-hued outfit by Yeohlee suggesting fascist inspiration.

Questioned about the morality of high-end designers making outre glad rags out of war themes, Steele replies, ``The fashion system is like a giant Hoover. It sweeps up everything that's going on and makes you think about it. Seriously.''

See http://www3.fitnyc.edu/museum/loveandwar.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.