Mark Morris's The Hard Nut at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House. Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut sets the knowing audience at the Brooklyn Academy laughing in ways that most ballets set to Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker do not. But I doubt that ballet aficionados in St Petersburg in 1892 found their eyes moisting up either. This revival of Morris’s music-wise, tradition-flouting version melds human … [Read more...]
Born in Vail
Vail Dance Festival: Re-Mix NYC performs at City Center, November 3 through 6. Damien Woetzel is celebrating his tenth year as director of Colorado’s Vail Dance Festival. And whatever you might have expected from a former principal dancer in the New York City Ballet, Vail Dance Festival” ReMix NYC is probably not it. Still, you may have had glimpses of others of Woetzel’s projects before … [Read more...]
Twyla Tharp: Past, Present, Future
Twyla Tharp presents one new creation and two golden oldies at the Joyce. Watching Reed Tankersley perform the long opening solo in Twyla Tharp’s 1980 Brahms Paganini confirmed my sense that Tharp considers dancers as heroes. In this work, which closes the program at the Joyce Theater billed as “Twyla Tharp and Three Dances,” Tankersley, alone onstage, performs Book I (a theme and fourteen … [Read more...]
Redefining Wilderness in Music and Dance
Choreographer Brian Brooks and composer Jerome Begin collaborate at The Kitchen. I don’t know why Brian Brooks titled his fascinating new work Wilderness, since the word conveys that there’s no man-made order involved, while his “wilderness” is precisely structured with a considerable amount of over-and-over repetition by eight black-clad dancers (costumes by Karen Young). On a white floor, … [Read more...]
An Ancient Dance Play Meets New Music
Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto dance together again in a new approach to a Noh play. It is a marvelous robe! Well, not a robe exactly; it looks more like a shawl—light as feather, shimmering with gold, unearthly. It gives its name to a Japanese legend and to Hagoromo, the 16th-century Noh drama it inspired; the robe belongs to a celestial dancer who can depict through her movements the changes … [Read more...]
Follow that Brook at your Peril!
Jessica Lang Dance in The Wanderer at Jacob's Pillow July 29-August 9. Die schöne Mullerin, a suite of Romantic-era poems by Wilhelm Müller, set to ravishing music by his friend Franz Schubert, conjures up visions of a mystical natural world in which a swift-moving brook urges a wandering miller to follow its course—one that brings him to a mill. What does this rushing water have in mind? … [Read more...]
Piaf Lives!
Pascal Rioult celebrates the centennial of Edith Piaf's birth in a nightclub setting. To get myself in the mood to write about Pascal Rioult’s Street Singer, a work celebrating what would have been Edith Piaf’s hundredth birthday, I dug up a relic from my family’s past: a 10-inch LP from the 1940s, Chansons Parisiennes (it had cost three dollars) and listened to Piaf sing “La Vie en Rose” (by … [Read more...]
Celebrating 50 Years of Artistry
Meredith Monk's new On Behalf of Nature at the BAM Harvey. “I work in between the cracks, where the voice starts dancing, where the body starts singing, where theater becomes cinema.” Meredith Monk said that in 1981. And although many of us knew her first as a startlingly original downtown 1960s choreographer, she has since composed music that interweaves various modes of performance and … [Read more...]
A Playwright and a Composer Meet in a Forest
Christopher Caines directs and choreographs Purcell's Fairy Queen for the Dell'Arte Opera Ensemble. If I had looked carefully at the program for The Fairy Queen before the Dell’Arte Opera Ensemble’s ambitious conflation of Henry Purcell’s opera and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream had begun, I might have been tempted to make a run for it. Here, for example, are the roles that actor … [Read more...]
A Fountain of Music and Love
Mark Morris directs and choreographs Handel's Acis and Galatea for Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival. It is beguiling to imagine George Frideric Handel’s pastoral opera Acis and Galatea receiving its first performance at the Duke of Chandos’s mansion on the terrace overlooking the gardens and their newly installed fountain. If the part about the terrace were true, guests at this 1718 … [Read more...]