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...]
Rooftop Rooms
People dancing in their rooms, their legs grazing furniture, their possessions on view for all to see. People dancing in meadows, in parks, on rooftops, through empty city streets, by the ocean. They are sometimes masked and almost always alone. Only longtime mates can sweat together. It’s 2020, and a pandemic has re-envisioned solitude. What ties these dancers together is the choreography … [Read more...]
In Memoriam: Sally Banes (1950-2020)
The dance historian and critic Sally Banes died on June 14th. The last time I saw her was several years ago in front of the Joyce Theater. She was in a wheelchair, smiling at me and speaking in a gentle voice, after her husband, philosopher Noël Carroll, had discreetly mentioned my name to her. I reminded her that the necklace I was wearing had been made by her mother; she told me politely … [Read more...]
Viewing from Home
Even during a pandemic, I doubt that a pianist would send out a video link that encouraged us to watch him/her practice at home while wearing, say, a bathrobe. Would a soprano work on perfecting an aria from a fire escape? (I could, of course, be wrong.) Recently dance companies of all kinds and sizes have been posting links to works past and present. Immured out of the city, I could gorge on … [Read more...]
Paul’s Worlds
In today’s virtual world, I’m tempted by dance every day. On a hilltop miles away from the city I love, I can take an online ballet class, see parts of the many performances that had to be canceled because of Covid-19, or watch videos streaming from a dance company’s vault. Some times I’d have to make an appointment; sometimes I’d have to pay. (Meanwhile, excuse me a minute, I’ve been advised to … [Read more...]
Merce Cunningham Redux
James Klosty’s Merce Cunningham Redux is a big book in several ways (try lugging it to a sunny spot; it weighs about six pounds). Published late in 2019 by Brooklyn’s powerHouse Books and selling for $75, it first came into the world as Merce Cunningham in 1975 (Saturday Review Press) and reappeared in paperback with a new introduction in 1986 (Limelight Editions). In those earlier decades … [Read more...]