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...]
Exploding the House of Atreus
Ann Liv Young's Elektra at New York Live Arts, January 20-30 The chronically grumpy comedian W.C. Fields advised fellow actors never to work with children or animals if they wanted the audience’s attention full-time. He knew what he was talking about, but Ann Liv Young is a creatively flagrant disregarder of many conventions. During her new Elektra at New York Live Arts, my gaze … [Read more...]
A Dance Morsel
Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham bring their Morphia Series to the Coil Festival. Sometimes what surrounds a performance affects your experience of it. My experience of Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham's Morphia Series included the journey to and from it—in terms of both mind and body. And then a fruitless online trip to access an essay about it: Loadingloadingloadingloading. . . … [Read more...]
The Tales They Tell
Big Dance Theater and Noche Flamenca dissect and reconnect narratives. Once upon a time, dances told their stories the way fairytales and plays did|; they began at the beginning, charted the conflicts that led to a climax, and slid into a denouement. Martha Graham with her Cubist deconstructions of space and time was among the first choreographers to alter the expected narrative flow. After … [Read more...]
Tangling, Tiptoeing Through Mysteries
Donna Uchizono premieres a new work at Gibney Dance's Agnes Varis Performance Center. “Donna Uchizono: Woman of Mystery.” Does that sound about right? No, it’s too much of a cliché to apply to a choreographer whose next step you can never anticipate and whose every new work adjusts your perceptions. Her 1995 Drinking Ivy, for instance, began with Levi Gonzalez standing alone at the rear of … [Read more...]
Dancing Down to the Bone
luciana achugar premieres An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love. It’s November, 2006, and I’m sitting on one of the highest carpeted risers in St. Mark’s Church watching Luciana Achugar’s Exhausting Love. Suddenly one of the performers (Hilary Clark) works her way toward me and my companion and wedges herself between us. Other cast members are also bridging the audience-performer divide. … [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...]
Together As One
Tere O'Connor's The Goodbye Studies creates a world of hidden depths at The Kitchen. City dwellers know what it’s like to be part of a crowd. In Grand Central Station at rush hour, people speed along—dodging one another and laying down complex swerving paths. In a breadline or trying to push their way en masse through a single entrance or exit, they move toward their goal in small steps. … [Read more...]
Intimations of the Unseen Haunt the Seen
Pavel Zuštiak & Palissimo Company at New York Live Arts. It’s very dark down here. This is not how we’re used to entering New York Live Arts’ black-box theater: down the stairs, walking along a narrow corridor at the edge of the performing area. There are a couple of people with flashlights, but they don’t fully light the way. Is this a birth canal of sorts? And into what? The … [Read more...]