I've seen many exciting ballets in the last few weeks--and I knew if I didn't write about them soon (all of them), I'd forget what I was thinking. So this roundup is altogether too long. In order not to fall into a stupor, perhaps you should read it in installments. The photos serve to separate the parts. About Alexei Ratmansky's "Concerto DSCH," my friend Elaine exclaimed, "It's so … [Read more...]
Coming soon (I hope)…
To those of you who check in regularly: Thank you, I'm honored. And I apologize for the lull here. I have a backlog of ballets I'm eager to respond to: Alexei Ratmansky's incredible premiere for New York City Ballet; Michael Clark's worthy Stravinsky nights at Lincoln Center Great Performances, too easily dismissed by the Times (the only paper to review it, I think); Tharp's admirably epic and … [Read more...]
Julian Barnett’s “Sound Memory” and other odes to retro habits at La Mama Moves
La Mama is a casual kind of place. I've shown up to review a dance version of "Medusa" without anyone mentioning that there would be lots of talking--in Japanese. Or, a couple of Sundays ago, only half the advertised performers actually performed. The other half had gone the day before. This easy spirit is perfect for the La Mama Moves festival, which just finished up (sorry!) its glorious three … [Read more...]
GO: Eleanor Bauer’s “At Large”
"At Large" is bursting with ideas, dances, experiments in approaching the audience and the world--probably too much of everything, with some of the connecting threads too thin. But how nice for a change, this rigorous excess rather than the usual dour minimalism or clubby encodedness (like a party where every cluster is a closed circle--to you, anyway, as you wander, with plastic cup of bubbly … [Read more...]
“Far,” “tanks under trees,” other war dances, and the new Inertia Movement
I received this email recommendation from freelance dance writer Lori Ortiz of exploredance.com and the Performance Arts Journal yesterday: Hi Apollinaire, I saw Douglas Dunn's press preview of "tanks under trees" last night. The show runs through Sunday at his SoHo loft, which he has turned into a theater with stadium seating. It's an opportunity to see amazingly evocative … [Read more...]
On the other hand, “Dybbuk”: the flipside of “Watermill”
"Dybbuk's" excellent male chorus. Photo by Paul Kolnik for NYCBSo, while Robbins' "Watermill" (1972) has something of a story but you don't know why it matters (see the last post), "Dybbuk's" meaning and pathos are perfectly clear, even if the plot you worry you're supposed to be following isn't. Of the two problems, I'll take the second every time. After all, even with "Swan Lake," I can't … [Read more...]
Milling around in “Watermill”
Sometimes when a Jerome Robbins ballet is making me cringe, I think of Deborah Jowitt's observation in her wonderful Robbins bio that if the choreographer felt a conflict between Broadway and ballet--the standard take on his career--it was only because of a more fundamental opposition he set up for himself: between theatrical effect and "the delicious ambiguity that dance permits," she says. The … [Read more...]
What’s going on?
Readers have wanted to know why I haven't said anything about all the critic layoffs these past several weeks. Here's Claire Willey from San Francisco (to represent you all!): Apollinaire- I was saddened that nobody has spoken up about the nationwide loss of fulltime dance critics. Deborah Jowitt has lost her place at the Village Voice, Lewis Segal was dismissed from the … [Read more...]
Robbins Celebration at City Ballet: Exclusive interviews with Baryshnikov, Wendy Whelan, and Damian Woetzel on the man and his dances
Natalia Makarova rehearsing "Other Dances" with Jerome Robbins for "Dance in America." The NYC Ballet fetes Robbins' work through June 29. (Photo by Brownie Harris for WNET/13, 1980.) Here's my tiny story for Newsday on the huge Robbins Celebration at New York City Ballet, followed by Q&As with Baryshnikov and City Ballet principals Damian Woetzel and Wendy Whelan that didn't make the cut. … [Read more...]
GO: Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s “zero degrees”
About a decade ago, the London-born choreographer Akram Khan and his Bangladeshi cousin were boarding a train from India to Bangladesh when police confiscated their passports and wouldn't return them until Khan's cousin slipped them some money. Then the cousins found a dead man in their carriage. Khan moved to help the man's distraught wife, but his cousin told him to stay put. "They'll just … [Read more...]