To the Reader: This is the first in a projected series of brief pieces that I’ll be posting on SEEING THINGS along with my longer essays. Believe it or not, I thought Boris Eifman’s Rodin (holding forth at the City Center) better than the earlier works we’ve been subject to here in New York. The […]
“This Is the Sound of Your Heart Hitting the Floor”
Crystal Pite / Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM / Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC / February 13 and 24, 2012 The Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and her Germany-based troupe, Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM, remain well worth watching, as their recent New York showing of The You Show demonstrated. Anne Plamondon and Peter Chu in Crystal Pite’s The […]
Fantasias
Mark Morris Dance Group / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, NY / March 1-3, 2012 The only information I have to offer about the world premiere of Mark Morris’ A Choral Fantasy is descriptive. The relatively brief, high-spirited piece is set to Beethoven’s Fantasia in C Minor for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra, Op. 80. Amber […]
Lèse-majesté
Kings of the Dance: Opus 3 / New York City Center / February 24-26, 2012 For the third time, Ardani Artists, an outfit specializing in the spectacular, brought us Kings of the Dance, a series of star turns contradicting Balanchine’s famous pronouncement that “ballet is woman.” This time the kings were—in alphabetical order, of course—Guillaume […]
Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Rising Generation
DTH II / Joyce Theater, NYC / February 7, 9, and 11 matinee and evening, 2012 Dance Theatre of Harlem, with its mission of countering classical ballet’s unspoken policy of no-blacks-need-apply, was founded in 1969. Its leaders were Arthur Mitchell (a charismatic African-American principal with the almost exclusively white New York City Ballet) and Karel […]
A Charmed Life?
New York City Ballet: All-Wheeldon program / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 28, 2012 He started out as a prodigy. He got better and better at what he was good at: the architectural organization of a dance; the seamless incorporation of non-traditional dance movements into the classical matrix he had inherited; […]
Weegee / Cunningham
Weegee: “Murder Is My Business” / ICP, NYC / through September 2; Bill Cunningham: “On the Street” / weekly in the New York Times online Is it too strange that, seeing the latest Weegee exhibition (subject: violence), I thought of Bill Cunningham (subject: fashion)? Weegee (the moniker Arthur Fellig gave himself) was, as you may […]
The Boss: Personal Indulgences No. 21
Just when the Seventies were starting, I looked up from my overlapping worlds of academia, motherhood, and housewifery and decided I wanted to write about dancing. Having managed to publish two pieces—both, fairly accidentally, about Twyla Tharp’s early ventures—in little-read journals, I proceeded, with the faith of the innocent, to disperse these samples among the […]
One Last Time
Merce Cunningham Dance Company / Park Avenue Armory, NYC / December 29-31, 2011 A Merce Cunningham Event, as the choreographer described it in a program note, is a performance of about 90 minutes, without intermission, “consist[ing] of complete dances, excerpts of dances from the repertory, and often new sequences for the particular performance and place, […]
Ave Atque Vale
Merce Cunningham Dance Company / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, NY / December 7-10, 2011 In addition to showing us wonders we’d never even dreamed of, Merce Cunningham (1919-2009), that inscrutable genius of modern dance, taught us a tough, valuable lesson: Dance is not forever. Its very evanescence increases its intensity at the moment […]