The Martha Graham Dance Company brings new and old works to the Joyce. I only recently realized that Martha Graham must have been choreographing her evening-length Clytemnestra and Embattled Garden at more or less the same time. Both premiered during her company’s 1958 season. Perhaps she needed a respite from the marital quarrels, passions, and jealousies that precipitated the Trojan War. … [Read more...]
Nothing To Be Ashamed Of
Douglas Dunn + Dancers premiere Aidos at BAM Fisher. Aidos seems to have been a goddess slightly confused about her own identity. No wonder she is said to be the last of the Greek gods to leave earth after the Golden Age. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language calls her “the personification of conscience,” but she is also seen as representing shame and modesty. I see a … [Read more...]
Filming Dance, Dancing Films
The 43rd annual Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center. The coats, the hats, the scarves, the shawls, the gloves, the bag, the boots. You needed them for the long, cold walk along West 65th Street in late January and early February. And then, when you got to the Walter Reade Theater, where most of the screenings in the 2015 Dance on Camera Festival took place, you had to shed these … [Read more...]
Tripartite Triumph
Three choreographers shower their talents on New York City Ballet The only perplexing thing about Justin Peck’s new work for the New York City Ballet is its diacritically enriched title: ‘Rōdē,ō: Four Dance Episodes. In every other way, his ballet for a company in which he is both a soloist and its resident choreographer is clear, brilliant, and brave. Brave because he has set his work to … [Read more...]
How Beautiful Can Age Be?
Miguel Gutierrez's Age & Beauty, Parts 1 and 2, presented during American Realness 2015. I didn’t see Miguel Gutierrez’s Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:/ when it was first performed as part of the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Instead I saw it in Studio C of Gibney Dance’s Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center (the rescued and handsomely re-conceived former Dance … [Read more...]
From Denmark With Love
Royal Danish Ballet: Principals and Soloists appears at the Joyce Theater, January 13 through 17. Guess what! August Bournonville has a website (bournonville.com). Since he died in 1879 and didn’t expect the many works he choreographed for the Royal Danish Ballet to long survive, he would undoubtedly be gratified to learn that eight of his ballets and a handful of divertissements weathered … [Read more...]
Two Becoming One Remaining Two
My introduction to the work of Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith was a more intimate one than I would have expected. I had missed—my loss—their Beautiful Bone (2012) and Tulip (2013) and trekked to the Chocolate Factory to see the Rude World, with my eyes and mind wide open and my ears pricked. For the third part of this triptych (a co-commission and co-presentation of the Chocolate Factory and … [Read more...]
From California with Gusto
In 2007, two women, Lilian Barbeito, a Juilliard graduate, and Tina Finkelman Berkett, an alumna of the Barnard College’s dance department, founded a contemporary dance ensemble in Los Angeles. What are the chances of that endeavor failing in a balmy city where it takes nerve, courage, and good business sense for a dance company to nose its way out of the prevailing motion picture culture? Iffy at … [Read more...]
Dreams and Journeys, Destination Uncertain
Keely Garfield Dance premieres Wow at St. Mark's Church (a Danspace Project presentation). I’m pretty sure that Keely Garfield does what most of us do: mop the floor, rustle up some dinner, move close to the other person in the bed, tell the kids what they can do and what they shouldn’t do. Garfield, however, is a yoga teacher and a Donna Karan/Urban Zen Integrative Therapist (working in … [Read more...]
Fire and Ice: Both Burn
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performs at New York's City Center. The members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater have always been able to do practically anything a choreographer might ask of them: thrust their legs astonishingly high, spin like tops, act sassy or sexy, and dance with an ardor that burns across the footlights. But it’s always exciting to see how they … [Read more...]