Bill Young/Colleen Thomas & Co. February 22 & 23 I’m sitting in Bill Young and Colleen Thomas’s loft waiting for the rest of the audience to straggle in, greet friends, maybe pick up something to drink, and settle down for the program of dance in LIT No. 19 (Loft into Theater). Memories assail me, specifically those filed away under “good old days in NYC,” when … [Read more...]
Celebrating a 40-Year Career
Jane Comfort & Company Revisit Forty Years of Work In 1978, Jane Comfort and I were both forty years younger. Not a surprise? I guess not. But that sentence may prove a snappier lead than my starting off by recounting what Comfort has accomplished over those forty years and how many dances of hers I’ve seen. (See how I snuck the facts into my non-lead? Or should I spell it “lede” as did … [Read more...]
Meredith Monk’s Journey
Meredith Monk's Cellular Songs at the BAM Harvey Theater, March 14 through 18. When I began to search the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s website for images of Meredith Monk’s Cellular Songs, I went astray. I couldn’t categorize the work the way the site expected me to. If I clicked on “theater,” I couldn’t also click on “music.” When, with help, I found the photographs I sought, “theater,” … [Read more...]
What Makes a Body Seem New?
The Guggenheim Museum's Works & Process series presents two works by Jodi Melnick on January 14th and 15th. I didn’t try to count the gestures in One of Sixty-Five Thousand Gestures, a 2012 collaboration between Trisha Brown and Jodi Melnick. Nor did I think about the “one” of the title while Melnick was dancing alone on the small stage of the Guggenheim Museum’s Peter B. Sharp Theater … [Read more...]
Tracking Everyday Mysteries
RoseAnne Spradlin's X at New York Live Arts, January 13 and 14. Is this dance I’m looking at boring? More graciously put: am I bored? Etymology kicks in: do I feel as if something is being bored into my brain? I don’t deal with this issue while watching RoseAnne Spradlin’s compelling X at New York Live Arts. Well, maybe I do, briefly, since I notice that, near the end, I am uncrossing and … [Read more...]
Seems Like It Was Just Yesterday. . .
Big Dance Theater premieres a new work at the BAM Harvey, November 14 through 18. I’d like to browse Annie-B Parson’s book shelves. What will she read to inspire the next dance theater piece that she choreographs for Big Dance Theater and, with Paul Lazar, directs? She slides together two or more disparate texts together and makes them strike sparks off each other. Maybe it’s not just her … [Read more...]
Artifacts Reinvented
Sally Silvers' three new works at Roulette, June 15 through 17. I love pondering the palimpsest that is New York City. Sometimes when a building’s skeleton is all that’s left, you lay what you know of its past over its present. The eye-level, horizontal strip of a Bleecker Street window that once displayed antique toys has vanished under the big-deal plate glass that’s there now, fronting … [Read more...]
Circles of Life
Tamar Rogoff's Grand Rounds at La MaMa, April 27 through May 14. Choreographer Tamar Rogoff grew up in the 1950s reading Helen Wells’ mystery novels about a nurse named Cherry Ames, who’d risk the wrath of the doctors she served by resourcefully breaking the rules in order to save a patient’s life, if no one else was around. From Cherry Ames, Student Nurse (1943), Nurse Ames went on being … [Read more...]
Four Dances Mingle As One
Bill Young revives his Interleaving at 100 Grand Street, December 9 through 11. I was beginning to write about Bill Young’s revival of his Interleaving after he'd given it a 30-year vacation, when my planned opening struck a chord. Yes, there it was, the start of my 2013 review of A Place in France (a collaboration between Young and his wife, Colleen Thomas): me at 100 Grand Street, … [Read more...]
Dancing Alone and Together
Wendy Whelan, Brian Brooks, and Brooklyn Rider at Jacob's Pillow, July 7-31 “Adventuress” isn’t a word I’d use to describe the marvelous dancer Wendy Whelan. Not because it’s a politically incorrect term in today’s porous and egalitarian vision of gender, but because it conjures up a glamorous, unprincipled woman using her charms in order to fleece men of their money or marry them. No, … [Read more...]