luciana achugar premieres An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love. It’s November, 2006, and I’m sitting on one of the highest carpeted risers in St. Mark’s Church watching Luciana Achugar’s Exhausting Love. Suddenly one of the performers (Hilary Clark) works her way toward me and my companion and wedges herself between us. Other cast members are also bridging the audience-performer divide. … [Read more...]
Archives for 2015
Urban Bush Women Channel John Coltrane
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's Urban Bush Women celebrates its 30th Anniversary. How time dawdles when you’re young! At six years old, looking back on what it meant to be three? That was ages and ages ago. After you pass sixty, you may find yourself thinking that an event took place just a few years back, when it happened two decades earlier. Luckily, progress and change help fasten you to … [Read more...]
Together As One
Tere O'Connor's The Goodbye Studies creates a world of hidden depths at The Kitchen. City dwellers know what it’s like to be part of a crowd. In Grand Central Station at rush hour, people speed along—dodging one another and laying down complex swerving paths. In a breadline or trying to push their way en masse through a single entrance or exit, they move toward their goal in small steps. … [Read more...]
Intimations of the Unseen Haunt the Seen
Pavel Zuštiak & Palissimo Company at New York Live Arts. It’s very dark down here. This is not how we’re used to entering New York Live Arts’ black-box theater: down the stairs, walking along a narrow corridor at the edge of the performing area. There are a couple of people with flashlights, but they don’t fully light the way. Is this a birth canal of sorts? And into what? The … [Read more...]
The Ailey Dancers Welcome In the Holidays
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater opens its City Center run, December 2 through January 3. During the curtain call at City Center that followed the world premiere of Robert Battle’s Awakening, the twelve members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater joined the audience in clapping enthusiastically for him. Sweaty, their faces alight, their hands slamming together, they showed their … [Read more...]
Playgrounds of the Mind
Andrea Miller's Gallim Dance at the Joyce 12/3-6; Anneke Hansen Dance at the Irondale Center, 12/2-5. Andrea Miller’s powerful dances always make me think of tribes pursuing their goals, whether spiritual or practical. What lies behind that fiercely arduous, sometimes bizarre way of life may remain mysterious. Take a passage from her momentous new Whale. Six of her eight marvelous dancers … [Read more...]
One Composer, Four Choreographers
Dance celebrates the music of Thomas Adès at New York City Center. “His music moves from here to there in a way that is at heart choreographic.” Music critic and historian James M. Keller wrote those words in a program note for “Thomas Adès: Concentric Paths—Movements in Music,” the Sadler's Wells London’s production of four dances set to Adès scores, an event in Lincoln Center’s White … [Read more...]
Adieu, Sylvie, et Merci
Sylvie Guillem dances into retirement. Force of Nature. That’s the title of a documentary about the career of the formidable French dancer, Sylvie Guillem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmMaNQBED8Q). You can see her at 19, when she was promoted to the rank of étoile in the Paris Opera Ballet by its then director Rudolf Nureyev. She is startling as a ballerina. Although her long neck, … [Read more...]
Twyla Tharp: Fifty Years of Making Dances
Twyla Tharp ends her 50th Anniversary Tour in New York City. Twyla Tharp premiered her first work, Tank Dive, on April 29, 1965, in room 1604 of Hunter College’s Art Department (where she was not a student). It was the only dance on the program and lasted four minutes, which she considered to be the longest amount of time she thought she could fill to perfection. Besides, she noted in a … [Read more...]
Dancing to Beat the Reaper
Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion brings three works to the Joyce Theater. Seated at a piano in a corner of the Joyce Theater, Kris Bowers begins to play a quiet, rippling tune—familiar yet unfamiliar. Beside the instrument and close to the front rows of spectators, Kyle Abraham performs a prelude to his company’s season, never moving outside a muted spotlight’s beam. Just as Bowers dreamily … [Read more...]