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...]
Fire and Ice Mate. . .Can That End Well?
The Kathryn Posin Dance Company performs at 92Y. Think about Swan Lake and numerous 19th-century fairytale ballets—both tragedies and those with happy endings. Did/does anyone question why an “oriental” houri wears pointe shoes or why the vengeful ghost of a jilted bride dances in a moonlit forest with a cohort of similarly affected others? Mostly we accept the story and how it is told. … [Read more...]
Filming Dance, Dancing Films
The 43rd annual Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center. The coats, the hats, the scarves, the shawls, the gloves, the bag, the boots. You needed them for the long, cold walk along West 65th Street in late January and early February. And then, when you got to the Walter Reade Theater, where most of the screenings in the 2015 Dance on Camera Festival took place, you had to shed these … [Read more...]
Celebrating 50 Years of Artistry
Meredith Monk's new On Behalf of Nature at the BAM Harvey. “I work in between the cracks, where the voice starts dancing, where the body starts singing, where theater becomes cinema.” Meredith Monk said that in 1981. And although many of us knew her first as a startlingly original downtown 1960s choreographer, she has since composed music that interweaves various modes of performance and … [Read more...]