The six dancers in Liz Gerring’s she dreams in code move as if tracking along known paths—or maybe it’s the animals being tracked that they resemble in their supple physicality and intent focus. Premiering last fall at the Baryshnikov Center and shown in Jacob’s Pillow’s Doris Duke Studio Theater August 15 through 19, Gerring’s wonderfully poetic work creates an ambiance through stage design, … [Read more...]
Reconfiguring One’s Past in Art
In the iconoclastic Judson Dance Theater of the 1960s, visual artists Robert Rauschenberg, Alex Hay, and Robert Morris were among the choreographers and performers. The negotiations among them and their dance-world colleagues were boundlessly fruitful to both. In 1968, Yvonne Rainer wrote an essay titled “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity … [Read more...]
Hiding in Plain Sight, Becoming the Other
In November, 2010, I saw Bastard, the first part of Pavel Zustiak’s extraordinary trilogy, The Painted Bird, inspired by Jerzy Kozinski’s novel of that name. In June, 2011, I saw the second installment, Amidst. From May 3 through 13, 2012, Zustiak’s group, Palissimo, is performing the final work, Strange Cargo. The novel’s passage over time and distances, as well as its themes of displacement, … [Read more...]
Knowing How Your Dinner Sees The World
When writing about art with a message, critics tend to soft-pedal and back-pedal. Perhaps their hearts are with the messenger, yet they have reservations about the forms in which the ideas are delivered. Perhaps, for some, the message doesn’t come through strongly enough. There’s little doubt as to what Carrie Ahern wants to put across in in her provocative and deeply felt Borrowed Prey: If we … [Read more...]
What Can I Tell You?
Once upon a time there were program notes—maybe a provocative line of poetry would serve. Then there were no program notes; all you needed to know about a dance was there for the looking. Recently, programs for dance events outside the mainstream have begun to publish short essays by choreographers and/or seasoned non-dancing thinkers. In terms of theorizing and probing into the ideas behind the … [Read more...]
Testing Realness
You’re Me. That’s the name of Faye Driscoll’s duet for herself and Jesse Zaritt. And the chosen title is a pretty blunt way of putting out an idea that longtime couples acknowledge in more honeyed syntax—possibly with damp eyes. I hope it won’t turn you off, dear reader, if I note that this no-holds barred encounter between a man and a woman is about identity and gender roles. You’re Me tackles … [Read more...]
Deconstructing Fame
You wouldn’t expect LeeSaar The Company’s new piece, Fame, to re-create the eyes-on-stardom world of the two movies and the television show that bear that name. Teenagers in New York’s High School of Performing Arts striving, bitching, and shining their way to success and successful hookups? No. The fascinating Fame choreographed by Lee Scher and Saar Harari—and premiered by Peak Performances at … [Read more...]
Two Black Women, Two Dark Journeys
In 1982, Ishmael Houston-Jones asked himself some questions about Black Dance (a term embraced at the time by those who considered themselves part of it) and how that aesthetic related to the work that he and some of his African American colleagues on the downtown New York scene were interested in creating. The result: two weekends of performances produced that year by Danspace Project at Saint … [Read more...]
Three Women, Three Styles
College basketball has nothing on the March Madness that seems to overtake the New York dance season just as spring is trying to inch in. I find myself momentarily mixing up dancers and works in my mind and trying to read notes scribbled on top of one another in a dense, black blob. Then there’s the pen that ran out of ink. . . . Three performances have been running around in my mind on … [Read more...]
Walking Backward in Devotion
The first time I saw dancing at the Whitney Museum of American Art, it was 1971 and Trisha Brown’s dancers were walking on two walls of one of the huge galleries, via ropes, pulleys, and tracks mounted on the ceilings. The last time I saw dancing at the Whitney, it was 2012 (March 1 to be exact), and Sarah Michelson’s Devotion Study #1—The American Dancer had taken over most of the museum’s fourth … [Read more...]