Dear readers, I was invited by Art Forum to be one of three dance writers providing their responses to this extraordinary celebratory Event, which occurred exactly one hundred years after Merce Cunningham's birth in three cities: New York, San Francisco, and London. Seventy-five dancers participated and a host of former Cunningham company members taught material from his dancer. Here is the … [Read more...]
Tracing Bloodlines
The Stephen Petronio Company at Skirball Stephen Petronio's American Landscapes. (L to R): Bria Bacon. Jaqlin Medlock (back to camera), Ryan Pliss, unidentified, and Megan Wright. Photo: Ian Gibson American choreographers in the modern dance world have tended to disavow their heritages as they made new discoveries. In the 1930s, Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey labored to find their own … [Read more...]
Martha Graham and Beyond
The Martha Graham Dance Company has titled its season at the Joyce Theater “The Eve Project.” What did artistic director Janet Eilber mean by this? Forget about Eve being conned by the biblical serpent; she tempted Adam to bite into that apple and, according to the bevy of gospel writers, more or less invented sex and paid the price. Instead, every one of the eleven works being performed between … [Read more...]
Struggling to Understand
The Vertigo Dance Company in One. One & One by Noa Wertheim. L to R: Liel Fibak, Daniel Costa, Etai Peri, and Korina Fraiman. Photo: Stephanie Berger. Watching nine members of Israel’s Jerusalem-based Vertigo Dance Company perform One. One & One at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, you don’t think of green pastures and rippling brooks, you imagine rocky or sandy terrain being dug into and … [Read more...]
Close-Up Worlds
Bill Young/Colleen Thomas & Co. February 22 & 23 Nadia Halim atop Sadi Mosco in Colleen Thomas's Diane. Still. Photo: Julia Discenza I’m sitting in Bill Young and Colleen Thomas’s loft waiting for the rest of the audience to straggle in, greet friends, maybe pick up something to drink, and settle down for the program of dance in LIT No. 19 (Loft into Theater). Memories assail … [Read more...]
Finding a World
Members of Gallim Dance in Andrea Miller's To Create a World. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu Who are these people, these inhabitants of Andrea Miller’s To Create a World? They are, of course, members of her company Gallim and collaborators in the work’s choreography, but that doesn’t answer the question. They seem to be part of an evolving world of fire and ice, themselves perhaps evolving. In Will … [Read more...]
Dancing Community
Download Maleek Washington (L) and Timothy Edwards in Camille A. Brown's ink. Photo: Christopher Duggan It wasn’t the usual impersonal voice reminding those of us sitting in the Joyce Theater to please turn off our cellphones, Instead, we who were waiting to see Camille A. Brown and Dancers perform her ink heard a muted, but excited babble and a voice that I took to be Brown’s delivering the … [Read more...]
New York City Ballet Presents a New Work
Taylor Stanley, foreground left, and Daniel Applebaum in Justin Peck's Principia, Photo: Erin Baiano If Sir Isaac Newton had time-traveled from the late 17th–century England to 21st-century New York and found himself watching the New York City Ballet perform Justin Peck’s new Principia, would he have understood the ballet’s connection to his three-volume Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia … [Read more...]
Transfigured Night
Boštjan Antončič holds Cynthia Loemij in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's Verklärte Nacht. Photo: Maria Baranova I am always amazed by the dances that Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker creates for her Belgium-based company, Rosas. To begin with, I’m never sure what I’ll see or where I’ll have to go in order to see one of them. Preparing to take in her Verklärte Nacht last week, I might well have wondered … [Read more...]
Tribal Disintegration
Sasha Waltz & Guests comes from Berlin to BAM. The title of Sasha Waltz’s Kreatur is German for “creature,” since Berlin is where her company is based. At some point during the performance of the piece by Sasha Waltz & Guests at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House, I began to wonder whether the singular noun might allude to one feverish entity, with the … [Read more...]