“Ooh that feels so good!” The speaker was not involved in a semi-pornographic film. She was a teenager watching a filmed pas de deux at a summer dance festival years ago. Others shushed her; this was art! Indoctrinated, did they even notice that the male dancer, hoisting his partner overhead, had placed one hand on her crotch? Please be forbearing when I tell you that this memory edged into my … [Read more...]
Horses and Humans Together
When I was about eleven years old, my family moved into a house on a Southern California palisade overlooking a country club that included a golf course, stables, a polo field, and a stadium. Sometimes I awoke to the sound of hoof beats—a horse pulling a sulky and its passenger around one of the rings below. I don’t remember why my parents signed me up for riding lessons (although I can’t … [Read more...]
Dancing the Flu Away
Here I go, repeating myself again: Dancers can’t not dance. Their bodies—their instruments—need to be kept in shape. Strategies emerge. Must they practice battements by lifting their legs between their refrigerator and their tv set? Even though the pandemic wanes, if they’re close to colleagues, do they need to be masked? Sometimes, a simple iPhone on a stand documents their … [Read more...]
Red on Green
Let’s hear it for dancers! They can’t not dance. And they all have i-phones or the equivalent—and maybe obliging friends to operate these. However, I confess that after a while of sitting at my laptop watching, say, six performers dancing in their bedrooms, I can get too interested in the sites themselves. A lot of books! What pictures hang on their walls? Dig that cookstove. But what if … [Read more...]
Four by Morris
I’ve seen Mark Morris’s work for many years, starting in 1980. I remember him dancing half naked with a mane of black curls in his 1984 O Rangsayee. I interviewed him in Brussels, when he and his company had taken over the Théâtre de la Monnaie (1988 to 1991).A few years ago, I watched him rehearse his dancers in one of the nine studios in the Mark Morris Dance Group, built on a corner in … [Read more...]
Alone Together
I have never been in Philip Johnson’s immense second-floor lobby in the New York State Theater when it was empty of audience members. I’m not familiar with the grids marked on its floor. Before the pandemic, it was a place where friends and colleagues chatted, compared notes, and maybe bought drinks during intermissions of the New York City Ballet’s performances. (I usually remembered not to leave … [Read more...]
Dancing on Stone and in Water
I’ve said it before, and forgive me if I say it again: Dancers can’t not dance. There they are on my laptop’s window—at work in their apartments, in parks, on piers, and in empty streets. Photographing yourself, all alone, practicing grand battements may not constitute a convivial class, but it keeps you in shape while a pandemic sputters and swells and diminishes around you. Maybe partners … [Read more...]
Two Hours of Twenty-Four
by Deborah Jowitt Here’s what surprises me. I’m used to watching dance while sitting in a darkened theater surrounded by mostly silent people who’ve been given a fragile world to watch, examine, and think about. Every extraneous thought (well, almost every one), and every momentary discomfort gets pushed aside. These days, peering at dancing figures on a small screen, or past them to a grove of … [Read more...]
Event for Jasper
Happy 90th birthday, Jasper Johns! Many thanks for sharing your present with who knows how many thousands of people. Most of them honor you as a superb and radical visual artist, but you may be less well known to them as artistic advisor to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1967 to 1976. And not just an advisor, but the guy who, like his partner Robert Rauschenberg, designed and … [Read more...]
David/Valda Over the Years
I sit at my laptop, looking out the window into a green world far from New York City. The screen announces “The Philadelphia Matter 1972/2020,” and glimpsed behind it is the large, alarmed face of its creator: choreographer David Gordon. The piece (no surprise) is propelled, guided, and shaped by words. Printed, hand written, large and small, the words reinforce what we also may hear spoken, and … [Read more...]