New York Theatre Ballet's Legends and Visionaries series at Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church. The cover photo for New York Theatre Ballet’s season at Danspace Saint Mark’s does not show any of the company’s fine performers. Instead it bears a photo of artistic director Diana Byer and David Vaughan, the dance historian, critic, lecturer, and performer widely known as the author of … [Read more...]
Tea for Three? Take a Seat
Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer get together at Saint Mark's Church. “It is better to have loved and lost than to have put linoleum on your living room floor.” Yvonne Rainer read that aloud during her 2016 The Concept of Dust: Continuous Project— Altered Annually. And she read it again from one of the sheets of paper taped to the pillars in Saint Mark’s Church during Danspace … [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...]
Inauguration, Dreaming, Rebelling
Ruth Patir's I dream of the elections at Danspace and Isadora Duncan in the 21st Century at the 92 Y Harkness Dance Center. In troubled times, we do strange things and see familiar ones differently. On Thursday night, January 19, 2017, I enter Saint Mark’s Church through the “wrong” door, because of construction work on the main entrance. From this small room, where occasionally during past … [Read more...]
Bewitched
Danspace Project presents Vicky Shick and Dancers, January 5 through 7. I didn’t see Vicky Shick’s Another Spell when it premiered last April, but I know that the evening I attended the revival of this Danspace Project commission, it began the same way it did back then. Shick genially confronts those of us sitting in St. Marks Church waiting for the performance to begin. What? The … [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...]
City Flock
Jennifer Monson/iLAND performs in tow in St. Mark's Church. Improvised dance performances, however they are structured, have something in common. Performers keep a sharp eye out for one another, whether they’re moved to join a comrade, pursue a solitary investigation, instigate a change, or draw on some prearranged material. Sitting in St. Mark’s Church watching Danspace Project’s … [Read more...]
Stories Only Dance Can Tell
Juliette Mapp and Beth Gill present brave new works in New York. Once in a while you go to a dance performance and think you’re in a mysterious world, whose inhabitants are familiar to you. . .and yet. . .not. You think about them, ask yourself questions. Then you try to stop asking questions and just watch what they’re doing. That’s how I felt during two recent, deeply absorbing works: … [Read more...]
Dancing in Places
PLATFORM 2016: A Body in Places (February 17-March 23). Did you happen to see Eiko in the summer of 2014 when she danced in Fukushima, Japan, the site of the fallible nuclear plant damaged in the 2011 earthquake and the terrible consequences to the people and the territory around it? Or on Governor’s Island that same summer? Did you see her in Valparaiso, Chile this past January? Maybe you … [Read more...]
What Do We See and How Do We See It?
Danspace St. Mark's presents Moriah Evans's "Social Dance 9-12: Encounter." Leaving St. Mark’s Church after seeing Danspace Project’s presentation of Moriah Evans’s Social Dance 9-12: Encounter, I had a surprising thought about the experience: “This is so non-interesting that it’s interesting.” Then I spent the bus trip home wondering what I meant by that. Note that I didn’t think the … [Read more...]