Emily Coates' Incarnations premieres at St. Marks' Church, March 16 through 18. I know how to re-wire a lamp. I aced high school physics (eventually). While researching Merce Cunningham and John Cage, I read Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, which fit the zeitgeist of the 1970s. But my brain has to struggle to keep its head above water, so to speak (a lousy metaphor) during Danspace … [Read more...]
What Will Have Happened in the Woods?
Vim Vigor Dance Company presents the New York premiere of Shannon Gillen's FUTURE PERFECT. The woods are full of shadows and lurking danger. We’ve known that ever since we first heard about Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood. Too, anyone sitting in the Baruch Performing Arts Center’s black-box theater who saw Shannon Gillen’s Vim Vigor Dance Company perform her Separati last … [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...]
Two for One
Dylan Crossman Dans(c)e shares a program with Caleb Teicher & Company at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center. Gibney Dance’s “DoublePlus” series at its Agnes Varis Dance Center invited three choreographers to each curate a double bill and serve as mentors. You might legitimately wonder what Dylan Crossman, formerly with Merce Cunningham, and tap artists Caleb Teicher and Nathan … [Read more...]
Celebrating Lucinda
Lucinda Childs Dance Company samples fifty-three years of her choreography at the Joyce, November 29-December 11. When I first saw Lucinda Childs’ choreography in the early 1970s, I knew little about Judson Dance Theater, which had presented her as a radical worthy of being linked with Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, et al. Nor was I a seasoned critic. What fascinated me then was her … [Read more...]
The Rise and Fall (?) of a Superhero (or Not)
Faye Driscoll presents Thank You for Coming; Play at BAM Fisher. I could swear that Faye Driscoll has done something to her eyebrows. They seem to slant downward the way they would if she were an Indian dancer portraying one of the nine permanent emotions: “karuna” (compassion or “the pathetic”). Even though the guy I’m sitting next to in BAM Fisher’s front row laughs boisterously at the … [Read more...]
Lives in Layers
Jonah Bokaer and Daniel Arsham bring their latest work to BAM Howard Gilman Opera House. Hooded figures swathed in pale clothing stand, isolated in pools of light, on the stage of the BAM Gilman Opera House, as part of BAM's Next Wave Festival. Their faces are hidden, and they’re frozen in diverse positions. In place when we enter the theater, they could be statues awaiting renovation. This … [Read more...]
Remembering and Re-imagining an Era
Danspace Project's Platform 16: Lost & Found revisits and examines the decades when HIV/AIDS felled so many. I look around St. Mark’s Church. It’s really filling up; people are sitting on risers well beyond the usual cut-off place. Friday, November 4th is the second night of this three-night performance: Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and Other Works by … [Read more...]
Colliding Ideas
Tere O'Connor Dance appears at the Joyce Theater in the second week of NY Quadrille. It’s no secret that Tere O’Connor wants the dances he makes to be about themselves. He reveals this on his website, in his program notes, and in interviews. He puts it more eloquently than I can, stating that over his decades-long immersion in dance, “I’ve discovered that traits such as inference, essence, … [Read more...]
Re-envisioning Shreds of Memory
John Jasperse presents a new work at BAM Harvey, September 21-24. John Jasperse’s new Remains has a clarity so exquisite that images from it have pasted themselves into my memory. The piece, which premiered at the BAM Harvey this past week, shows some of these images to us many times, but in different ways; imagine a painted group scene, from which someone has clipped individual figures and … [Read more...]