New York City Ballet's Spring Gala celebrates with new ballets and a recent masterwork. Fundraising galas are strange beasts. The New York City Ballet’s May event was no exception. Women swan by in improbable gowns, assuming no one would dare to step on their trains; some display—intricately—enough skin to make you wonder how the garment is anchored. Festive roped-off tables and a … [Read more...]
Archives for 2016
Marching Forward, Sometimes on Tiptoe
The Martha Graham Dance Company performs at City Center Erick Hawkins once claimed that he never knew that Martha Graham, his partner, lover, and onetime wife was fifteen years older than he. She knew it, however (and habitually chopped several years off her age when documentation was needed). In 1946, a period when he and she were temporarily on the outs, she choreographed Cave of the … [Read more...]
Embodying The Erased Father
Nora Chipaumire premieres a new work at Montclair State University's Peak Performances. You go out to Montclair State University to attend the world premiere of Nora Chipaumire’s portrait of myself as my father on Peak Peformances’ 2015-2016 season, and note that Spring is greening the lawns. The immense construction machines that are ripping up turf and erecting buildings sit brooding and … [Read more...]
Bracing Winds from Miami
Miami City Ballet bursts into Lincoln Center. Ten years ago this summer, Miami City Ballet performed at Jacob’s Pillow. This is what I wrote in the Village Voice: “Miami City Ballet’s dancers tear into Balanchine’s works with such appetite for speed and scale that you wonder how they stay in control. Their legacy is clear. They came to Balanchine through Miami’s artistic director Edward … [Read more...]
Flesh and the Gaze
Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner's Eskasizer, at The Boiler February 26 through April 3. Over the centuries, women’s bodies have been compared to many things. The amorous speaker in the Bible’s “Song of Songs” hymns his beloved’s breasts as being “like two young roes that are twins which feed among the lilies.” (He also likens her teeth to a flock of evenly shorn sheep). But how closely … [Read more...]
The Old and the New Dancing Together
Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance continues its Lincoln Center run through April 3. In a program essay by Susan Yung for the Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance season (through April 3), guest choreographer Doug Elkins mentions that Taylor’s Esplanade was the first dance he ever saw on PBS’s “Dance in America” and acknowledges its influence on him. Not that you’d guess it at the opening … [Read more...]
Taking Folk Dancing into Today’s World
Tina Croll + Company performs in New York with Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band. I haven’t seen Tina Croll’s choreography for quite a while, although she and I were early members of Dance Theater Workshop, and I’ve performed in several versions of From the Horse’s Mouth, a structured improvisation involving text and dance that she devised with Jamie Cunningham (there’s one coming up in honor … [Read more...]
Paul Taylor’s Dancers on an Adventure
Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance presents it New York season, March 15-April 3. Last year inaugurated the transformation of the Paul Taylor Dance Company into Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance. During that season, Shen Wei’s Rite was performed by his own company, and the José Limón company danced Doris Humphrey’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. During the company’s current two-week … [Read more...]
Anna Sokolow’s Dark Spirit
Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble revives three Anna Sokolow works. I’ve told this story before, but it slid into my mind again as I left the 14th Street Y after seeing the Sokolow Dance/Theatre Ensemble perform works by Anna Sokolow dating from 1968. About a decade earlier, I, a newly minted member of Juilliard Dance Theater with a knee problem, was watching Sokolow choreograph a piece for … [Read more...]
Tracing Bloodlines
The Stephen Petronio Company premieres a new work and revives one by Trisha Brown. Stephen Petronio’s five-year project, Bloodlines, pays homage to his heritage in the most loving and laborious of ways. He introduced it last year by having his dancers learn and perform Merce Cunningham’s great 1968 RainForest. This year, for the company’s season at the Joyce Theater, they tackled a work by … [Read more...]