La La La Human Steps / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, NY / February 1-5, 2002 There’s a part of the dance audience that—to hell with the classical tradition and the classical canon—only wants to see a vivid show. Increasingly, producing organizations are catering to these spectators. How else, the (just possibly faulty) logic […]
RAIN DATE
New York City Ballet / New York State Theater, NYC / through February 27, 2005 Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain is the new ballet that’s making news in the New York City Ballet’s winter season. One of Wheeldon’s bare-bones works, it’s set to a pair of unrelated short pieces by Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer […]
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MR. INTEGRITY
Peter Boal, with the New York City Ballet / New York State Theater, NYC / through February 27, 2005; April 25 – June 26, 2005 At the end of the 2005 spring season, the New York City Ballet’s Peter Boal will retire from the company (and its affiliate, the School of American Ballet, where he […]
ASHES, MOSTLY
Kirov Ballet of the Maryinsky Theatre: Cinderella / Kennedy Center: Opera House, Washington, DC / January 11-16, 2005 At the behest of the Kirov Ballet, Alexei Ratmansky (now head of the Bolshoi Ballet, late of the Royal Danes) took Perrault’s seventeenth-century, definitive text of the fairy tale and Prokofiev’s haunting 1944 score and concocted a […]
GOING TO THE WOOD
Savion Glover, the undisputed king of tap, will be installed at the Joyce Theater in New York June 19 – July 14. He charms the aficionados and the general public alike, though his reluctance to make eye contact with his audience has almost become his trademark. Here’s my take on him in 2005.
New Dances at Juilliard
All four choreographers—Janis Brenner, Susan Marshall, Ronald K. Brown, and Robert Battle—displayed an astute understanding of the newcomers’ formidable gifts and limited experience plus well-nigh palpable affection and respect for the rising generation. Village Voice 12/20/04
Himiko Minato & Dancers
A tense, haunted figure, Minato plays a tormented pilgrim in a dark forest, involved with lethal human threats as well as a portentously symbolic rope hanging from above. Village Voice 12/20/04
OUT OF THE ORDINARY
Merce Cunningham Dance Company / Joyce Theater, NYC / December 14 – 19, 2004 “Presented without intermission, each Event consists of complete dances, excerpts of dances from the repertory, and often new sequences arranged for the particular performance and place, with the possibility of several separate activities happening at the same time—to allow not so […]
Margot Fonteyn: A Life, by Meredith Daneman
Daneman’s sensibilities, thinking, and writing style are insufficiently sophisticated for the task of making Fonteyn live on paper. I suspect only a poet would be equal to it. Village Voice 12/14/04