Foot in Mouth

Dear Reader, I hope you are enjoying your holidays. I hope that if you went home, you came back before your family forgot they invited you; that if you stayed put for a "quiet" holiday, you didn't suddenly feel bereft; that if you spent the long weekend partying like it's 1999 (it's something else), the headaches you woke up to weren't too awful. I won't have a whole lot for you in the next … [Read more...]

But first, Benjamin Millepied. The increasingly sought-after choreographer (and City Ballet principal) can make inventively odd dances, often when he's working in a minimalist mode. His 2005 quartet for men, "Circular Motion," at Fall for Dance, and his "Double Aria," at the 2005 New York City Ballet fall gala, transferred the workmanly, incremental procedures of Steve Reich or early Trisha Brown … [Read more...]

I once had dinner with a cinematographer. "There's a song about you!" I exclaimed. "It goes, I AM a cin-e-muuh-TAW-grapher...." The cinematographer smiled: "Isn't it the only song about us?" Yeah, probably. Which is one reason it works so well as prologue to Faye Driscoll's "837 Venice Blvd," the dance-drama that played at Here Arts Center in the South Village for ten days earlier this … [Read more...]

If you've been reading Foot this week, you know I was dismayed to find that the "Dance" that "Reading Dance" offered wasn't as comprehensive or as timely as an anthology of this size--1,300-odd pages--would warrant. But on second thought (says our lady of second thoughts), if you just disregard the title and reorganize the contents, there turns out to be a good book inside the dubious … [Read more...]

What a bright soul. I didn't know Clive Barnes, but we smiled--he with his lovely wife, Valerie--whenever we encountered each other on the aisle, and I always read his reviews in the New York Post and his columns in Dance Magazine with delight. He was old without ever being an old fart. Curious, never immune to enthusiasm, but no pollyanna either, he gave me faith that even a review of a couple … [Read more...]