Seeing Things

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.