This year, Ballet Hispanico will celebrate its 47th anniversary. I know, I know. In the performing-arts world, we only go all out for a year that ends in zero or five. But what’s immodest about a company being proud of its achievements in other years? Especially since the modestly scaled school and company that Tina Ramirez founded in 1970 has extended its dedication to dance and Hispanic culture … [Read more...]
Cunningham Redivivus
Compagnie CNDC Angers - Robert Swinston bring three dances by Merce Cunningham to New York. Merce Cunningham didn’t want us to try to find stories in his dances. We obeyed. But dance can hint at the essential stories that lie deep under narratives that deal with, say, characters falling in love with the wrong person or being transformed into swans. Cunningham presented us with quiet … [Read more...]
Acknowledging the Past, Moving On
The Stephen Petronio Company revives works by those who have influenced him and offers a world premiere. Once upon a time, a choreographer of “modern dance” was expected to create his/her unique style—a difficult task, since human bodies are the material, and human bodies inevitably become imprinted with their histories. I think I would know a dance by Stephen Petronio if I met it in a dark … [Read more...]
Operas That Dance
The Brooklyn Academy of Music presents Mark Morris: Two Operas, March 15 through 19. On the last day of July, 2013, I saw and heard an unforgettable performance in Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall. Mark Morris had directed Benjamin Britten’s Curlew River for a cast of Tanglewood Fellows and paired it with his 1989 visualization of Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, performed by the Mark … [Read more...]
Speaking of Gender. . .
Richard Move and MoveOpolis! performs at New York Live Arts. I have warm, twenty-year-old memories of a cold corner in New York’s meatpacking district (you entered the funky, all red nightclub called Mother on Washington Street and exited on 14th Street). On certain weekends, lines waited to get into the latest iteration of Martha@Mother, the variety show co-produced by Richard Move and … [Read more...]
The Pleasures of Taylor
Paul Taylor American Modern Dance at Lincoln Center, March 7 through 26. If Paul Taylor were a visual artist we wouldn’t be so hard on him. Picasso could paint a fish plate and serve lunch on it, and no one would fault it for not being as memorable as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It could even get broken or never make it to the table. A Taylor dance involves a set, costumes, music, … [Read more...]
The Serene Eye of a Storm
Danspace Project presents Julie McMillan in Benjamin Kimitch's KO-BU. Waiting for the crosstown bus that will taken me home from St. Mark’s church, I think only about what I have just seen: Danspace Project’s presentation of Benjamin Kimitch’s uncannily beautiful Ko-bu, performed by—embodied by—Julie McMillan, his creative collaborator. A little later, I can link the experience to that of … [Read more...]
The Martha Graham Dance Company’s New Visions
The Martha Graham Dance Company commissions works by Annie-B Parson, Pontus Lidberg, and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. There’s no point in wondering how Martha Graham would react to her seeing her company onstage today (Rant and rave? Smile approvingly? Wade in and make changes?). She disowned many of the 191 dances that she choreographed during her creative lifetime (1926-1991); others were … [Read more...]
Merce in Nancy
CCN - Ballet de Lorraine presents three works from its repertory at the Joyce Theater. In 1984, France’s Ministry of Culture decentralized dance. No more choreographers holed up in Paris while the rest of the country, for the most part, did without. To date, France has nineteen Centres Chorégraphiques Nationaux, almost all of them headed by choreographers of consequence. The Ballet de … [Read more...]
Meetings Across Space and Time
Douglas Dunn + Dancers' Antipodes comes to roost in Danspace St. Mark's. If Douglas Dunn could see himself from behind, would his mind flip as well? This is not the kind of question most choreographers ask themselves. He does. Nor might many be tempted to name a dance of theirs Antipodes and then consider the many ways in which that term can be defined—say, as opposites, congenial or in … [Read more...]