VIM VIGOR DANCE COMPANY premieres Shannon Gillen's Separati. A Plexiglas phone booth sits marooned in the performing area of the Gelsey Kirkand ArtCenter’s 400-seat black-box theater, glowing eerily in Barbara Samuels’ lighting. As Shannon Gillen’s Separati for her VIM VIGOR DANCE COMPANY unfolds, I think of Edward Hopper’s paintings of bleak, deserted city streets, or of people in … [Read more...]
Keep Dancing!
Parsons Dance performs at the Joyce Theater through January. Last year, the dance company founded by choreographer David Parsons and lighting designer Howell Binkley turned thirty, but it seems eternally young and optimistic. Its eight terrific dancers are as exuberant and tireless as teenagers. No perils appear to await them as they cavort in their vividly colored world. On a Thursday … [Read more...]
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...]
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...]
One Composer, Four Choreographers
Dance celebrates the music of Thomas Adès at New York City Center. “His music moves from here to there in a way that is at heart choreographic.” Music critic and historian James M. Keller wrote those words in a program note for “Thomas Adès: Concentric Paths—Movements in Music,” the Sadler's Wells London’s production of four dances set to Adès scores, an event in Lincoln Center’s White … [Read more...]
Adieu, Sylvie, et Merci
Sylvie Guillem dances into retirement. Force of Nature. That’s the title of a documentary about the career of the formidable French dancer, Sylvie Guillem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmMaNQBED8Q). You can see her at 19, when she was promoted to the rank of étoile in the Paris Opera Ballet by its then director Rudolf Nureyev. She is startling as a ballerina. Although her long neck, … [Read more...]
Twyla Tharp: Fifty Years of Making Dances
Twyla Tharp ends her 50th Anniversary Tour in New York City. Twyla Tharp premiered her first work, Tank Dive, on April 29, 1965, in room 1604 of Hunter College’s Art Department (where she was not a student). It was the only dance on the program and lasted four minutes, which she considered to be the longest amount of time she thought she could fill to perfection. Besides, she noted in a … [Read more...]
Dancing to Beat the Reaper
Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion brings three works to the Joyce Theater. Seated at a piano in a corner of the Joyce Theater, Kris Bowers begins to play a quiet, rippling tune—familiar yet unfamiliar. Beside the instrument and close to the front rows of spectators, Kyle Abraham performs a prelude to his company’s season, never moving outside a muted spotlight’s beam. Just as Bowers dreamily … [Read more...]
From Vaudeville to the Streets
Spectrum Dance Theater brings Donald Byrd's The Minstrel Show Revisited to NYU Skirball Center. Eleven dancers take the stage at NYU Skirball Center in Donald Byrd’s The Minstrel Show Revisited. They’re strutting, prancing, raising white-gloved hands. How come I don’t recognize any faces? I can hardly tell which are women and which are men. Byrd has already made a point about racial … [Read more...]
Dreaming a Never-Stopping Dance
The Seán Curran Company brings East and West together at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater. As you enter the BAM Harvey to see the Seán Curran Company’s Dream’d in a Dream, you not only glimpse an embodiment of the title, you begin to enter another kingdom. Not since Peter Brooks’ stunning production of the Sanscrit epic The Mahabharata introduced New Yorkers to the tactfully … [Read more...]