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 December 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...]