Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Lin Hwai-min's "Rice." When Lin Hwai-min brought his Cloud Gate Dance Theatre from Taipei to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in 2000, one performer stood in a near corner of the stage all through Songs of the Wanderers while gold-dyed rice streamed down on his head and pooled around him. That … [Read more...]
Images within Images within Images
Wayne McGregor's "Tree of Codes" turns the Park Avenue Armory into a 21st-century phantasmagoric playground. Why when I meditate on Tree of Codes, the dance-and-design spectacle on view at the Park Avenue Armory, do I flash back almost 150 years to the spectacle-extravaganza, The Black Crook? The two productions have in common little but their desire to astonish. The Black Crook opened in … [Read more...]
Step Quickly; Don’t Fall Off the World
Canadian dancer-choreographer Louise Lecavalier brings her "So Blue" to New York Live Arts. I’m not sure when and where I first saw Louise Lecavalier dance with Édouard Lock and La La La Human Steps, a company she worked with from 1981 to 1999. Perhaps it was during the late 1980s at the biennial Festival International de Nouvelle Danse in Montréal (1985-2003). I also saw her at Dance … [Read more...]
Messages from Above
Summation Dance celebrates its fifth anniversary at BAM Fisher. Perhaps someone some day will write an essay about dance titles, how they vary —encapsulating a theme, for instance, or borrowing from literature, or throwing spectators off the track with a word or phrase that has a secret meaning for the choreographer. Summation Dance titled its latest work At the Hour. What strikes you … [Read more...]
Newcomers in Grahamland
The Martha Graham Dance Company presents new, recent, and classic works at Jacob's Pillow. The last week of Jacob’s Pillow’s 83rd anniversary season corresponded with the Martha Graham Dance Company’s upcoming 90th year, and MGDC appeared in the Ted Shawn Theater that August week. Anniversaries are meant as celebrations. I’m only sorry Ella Baff couldn’t wait until her 20th year as the … [Read more...]
From Florida with Skill and Devotion
The Sarasota Ballet brings Ashton classics and 21st-century ballets to Jacob's Pillow. With art and culture kiting around in cyberspace and responding instantly to our keyboard-trained fingers, we are constantly jumping over boundaries. Crossing them in real time with tangible objects is another matter. Who would have imagined that The Sarasota Ballet would become a treasure house of over … [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...]
A Small Ballet Ensemble Looks on the Bright Side
Daniel Ulbricht has a mission in life that goes beyond being a buoyant, dramatically expressive principal dancer with the New York City Ballet. Forming and re-forming Daniel Ulbricht & Stars of American Ballet in NYCB’s off-season enables him to bring first-rate dancers to communities around the country. The group he brought to Jacob’s Pillow this summer for its second appearance there numbers … [Read more...]
The Dancers You Need to Love
Gauthier Dance//Dance Company Theaterhaus Stuttgart Comes to Jacob's Pillow. Only nine of the fourteen members of Gauthier Dance//Dance Company Theaterhaus Stuttgart were on hand when this Germany-based company made its United States debut at Jacob’s Pillow this July, and only once during its program (in Cayetano Soto’s (2014) Malasangre) did more than three people appear onstage at the … [Read more...]
Shirley MacLaine, Meet Omar Sharif
Every time I see a work by Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar of Big Dance Theater, I wish I could’ve been a fly on the wall while they were dreaming it up (although, since the collaborators are married, brainstorming gusts may happen erratically, at any hour of the day or night). Their constructions are so intricately layered, their often highly dissimilar ingredients stirred together so startlingly … [Read more...]