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Deborah Jowitt on bodies in motion

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Close-Up Worlds

February 26, 2019 by Deborah Jowitt

Bill Young/Colleen Thomas & Co. February 22 & 23 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 me, specifically those filed away under  “good old days in NYC,” when … [Read more...]

Finding a World

February 16, 2019 by Deborah Jowitt

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 Epstein’s score for piano, electronics, voice, percussion, synthesizers, saxophone, plus … [Read more...]

Dancing Community

February 10, 2019 by Deborah Jowitt

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 requisite warning. It also might have been an invitation to see the performers as a tribe and, as much … [Read more...]

New York City Ballet Presents a New Work

February 9, 2019 by Deborah Jowitt

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 Mathematica? You never know. But he might have understood bodies onstage being subject to gravitational pull and … [Read more...]

Transfigured Night

February 3, 2019 by Deborah Jowitt

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 whether she would perform a solo, like her 1980 Violin Phase (incorporated into the four-part Fase two years … [Read more...]

Tribal Disintegration

November 7, 2018 by Deborah Jowitt

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...]

Hunger Appeased? Maybe Not

October 17, 2018 by Deborah Jowitt

Kimberly Bartosik/daela premieres I hunger for you at Lumberyard. Lumberyard first appeared in Maryland in 2011, providing residencies for dance artists who were preparing new work. It resurfaced this past summer in stunning new quarters in Catskill, New York as a center for performances and film showings and opened its inaugural season at the end of September. On October 12 and 13, … [Read more...]

Together in a Shrinking Space

October 15, 2018 by Deborah Jowitt

Lucy Guerin Inc performs Guerin's Split at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, October 13 through 15. Some European and American choreographers focus primarily on illuminating music, creating light-hearted romps, or re-envisioning beauty and nobility in tragedy (think Giselle, think Odette). However, impelled in part by Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and their contemporaries, others have probed … [Read more...]

De Keersmaeker and Bach Shake Hands

October 6, 2018 by Deborah Jowitt

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's The Six Brandenburg Concertos at Park Avenue Armory, October 1 through 7. In 1721, Johann Sebastian Bach, then thirty-six years of age, sent the Margrave of Brandenburg some concertos that he had composed with the following message: “Your Highness deigned to honor me with the command to send Your Highness some pieces of my Composition: I have in accordance with … [Read more...]

The New York City Ballet Enters a New Era

October 4, 2018 by Deborah Jowitt

The New York City Ballet presents its annual Fall Gala The crowd attending the New York City Ballet’s Gala on September 27th was certainly elegantly dressed (sometime daringly so: two men eschewed tuxes and appeared in floral-print suits). During the pre-performance performance of sipping drinks and snagging hors d’oeuvres, you had to be alert to the possibility of stepping on filmy trains. … [Read more...]

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Deborah Jowitt

Deborah Jowitt began to dance professionally in 1953, to choreograph in 1961, and to write about dancing in 1967. Read More…

DanceBeat

This blog acknowledges my appetite for devouring dancing and spitting out responses to it. Criticism that I love to read—and have been struggling to write ever since the late 1960s—probes deeply and imaginatively into choreography and dancing, … [Read More...]

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