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Occupy Lincoln Center

March 22, 2012 By 2 Comments
Aureole3ip

Paul Taylor Dance Company / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC /  March 13 – April 1, 2012 What dance company director could resist the opportunity of playing the grand-scale Lincoln Center house formerly known as the New York State Theater, even if his or her usual venue were the now handsomely refurbished City Center?  Not even Paul Taylor, who has firm, if sometimes oddball, principles. The Paul Taylor Dance Company seized the opportunity to perform there for three weeks and the people in charge of such things shrank the space … [Read more...]

03/22/12 12:47 PM | filed under: main |

Glimpses #2: Susan Marshall

March 20, 2012 By 1 Comment

To the Reader:  This is the second in a projected series of brief pieces that I’ll be posting on SEEING THINGS along with my longer essays—and, of course, on Facebook. Susan Marshall—a thinking person’s choreographer for sure—gave a weekend of performances in 92 Y’s Stripped/Dressed series, curated by Doug Varone.  She transformed the dour, dance-history laden Buttenwieser Hall into a do-it-yourself Spiegeltent, a mobile cabaret-dance hall, in which she first talked about the origins of her Sawdust Palace, created for such a … [Read more...]

03/20/12 1:00 PM | filed under: main |

Martha

March 16, 2012 By 16 Comments
175crip

Martha Graham Dance Company / Joyce Theater, NYC, and City Center, NYC / March 13 – 18, 2012 Martha Graham, performing Lamentation (courtesy YouTube) Everything that lives must die, as a colleague explained gently to her very young daughter, when the child was wrestling for the first time with the idea of death.  The idea is also applicable to even the most glorious dance institutions, such as the Martha Graham Dance Company, on view for a week at the Joyce Theater. I saw the first of the two ordinary repertory programs offered.  … [Read more...]

03/16/12 11:55 PM | filed under: main |

Glimpses #1: Boris Eifman’s “Rodin”

March 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

To the Reader:  This is the first in a projected series of brief pieces that I’ll be posting on SEEING THINGS along with my longer essays. Believe it or not, I thought Boris Eifman's Rodin (holding forth at the City Center) better than the earlier works we've been subject to here in New York.  The Eifmanesque absurdities, portentousness, pretentiousness, and lowbrow concepts of "Life" remain; they are a given—a mirror of the man's soul, as E himself might put it.  As for his dated sexual politics, they’re a shame for the … [Read more...]

03/12/12 12:44 PM | filed under: main |

“This Is the Sound of Your Heart Hitting the Floor”

March 10, 2012 By 1 Comment
Crystal Pite / Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM

Crystal Pite / Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM / Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC / February 13 and 24, 2012 The Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and her Germany-based troupe, Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM, remain well worth watching, as their recent New York showing of The You Show demonstrated. Anne Plamondon and Peter Chu in Crystal Pite’s The You Show Photo:  Julieta Cervantes The two Pite works that I’d seen before, including Dark Matters, throbbed with intent, offering the viewer a rich cache of meaning though they operated literally only … [Read more...]

03/10/12 1:28 PM | filed under: main |

Fantasias

March 3, 2012 By 5 Comments
Mark Morris Dance Group

Mark Morris Dance Group / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, NY / March 1-3, 2012 The only information I have to offer about the world premiere of Mark Morris’ A Choral Fantasy is descriptive.  The relatively brief, high-spirited piece is set to Beethoven’s Fantasia in C Minor for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra, Op. 80. Amber Star Merkens in Mark Morris’ A Choral Fantasy Photo:  Julieta Cervantes The dance opens with a single tall, lean figure taking the stage and, after a few bold, vigorous movements, flying off to leave the … [Read more...]

03/3/12 12:36 PM | filed under: main |

Lèse-majesté

February 27, 2012 By 7 Comments
Their majesties Photo: Gene Schiavone

Kings of the Dance:  Opus 3 / New York City Center / February 24-26, 2012 For the third time, Ardani Artists, an outfit specializing in the spectacular, brought us Kings of the Dance, a series of star turns contradicting Balanchine’s famous pronouncement that “ballet is woman.” This time the kings were—in alphabetical order, of course—Guillaume Côté (National Ballet of Canada), Marcelo Gomes (American Ballet Theatre), David Hallberg (ABT and Bolshoi Ballet), Denis Matvienko (Mariinsky Ballet), and Ivan Vasiliev … [Read more...]

02/27/12 1:45 PM | filed under: main |

Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Rising Generation

February 9, 2012 By 3 Comments
Virginia Johnson, Artistic Director of Dance Theatre of Harlem Photo: Martine Basagni

DTH II / Joyce Theater, NYC / February 7, 9, and 11 matinee and evening, 2012 Dance Theatre of Harlem, with its mission of countering classical ballet’s unspoken policy of no-blacks-need-apply, was founded in 1969.  Its leaders were Arthur Mitchell (a charismatic African-American principal with the almost exclusively white New York City Ballet) and Karel Shook (a white former dancer and star teacher, known for welcoming black dancers to his classes).  From its legendary New York debut at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971, the company was … [Read more...]

02/9/12 9:58 PM | filed under: main |

A Charmed Life?

January 30, 2012 By 9 Comments
Tiler Peck and Gonzolo Garcia in “Polyphonia” Photo: Paul Kolnik

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...]

01/30/12 8:08 PM | filed under: main |

Weegee / Cunningham

January 26, 2012 By 5 Comments
Weegee, "With Bomb," 1940. ©Weegee/International Center of Photography

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...]

01/26/12 2:04 PM | filed under: main |
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