Author Archive
All Along the Lines
Alonzo King’s Ballet at the Joyce When Alonzo King established LINES Ballet in 1982 in San Francisco, few believed he could maintain a new company in the city where the San Francisco Ballet had long captured the area’s ballet audience. Moreover, King did not conform to the typical ballet artistic director—he grew up in Santa...
Father Issues
Max Ferguson Honors His Elder Max Ferguson has spent his life painting scenes of New York, particularly older areas of the city like Coney Island and the disappearing mom-and-pop shops. Largely autobiographical, his works usually depict himself or his father. In his evocative exhibition Painting New York—From Jerusalem, he shows 30 paintings that he has...
Spanish Steps
Corella’s Barcelona Ballet Fulfills a Dream Many great ballet dancers dream of starting their own companies, though few get the opportunity. Even as he performed with American Ballet Theater, Angel Corella was plotting to establish a ballet company in his native Spain. Unlike most European countries, Spain had never been able to sustain a first-rate...
Choreographers in the Classroom
Teaching What You Love “The connection between teacher and student creates a bond,” says Jason Samuels Smith, who like most choreographers teaches locally at studios and colleges as well as on tour, “strengthening the dance tradition and building upon it with each generation’s input and style.” There may be no better way for choreographers to...
Musiquarium
SFJAZZ Collective Plays Stevie Wonder Stevie Wonder might not seem an obvious composer for the SFJAZZ Collective’s focus, given its past performances have been inspired by the music of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Horace Silver and Thelonious Monk. But the brilliant R&B and soul artist more than fulfilled its criteria for a composer who produces...
Seeking Susan: Sontag reborn on stage
Few American intellectuals of the last 50 years won more renown than Susan Sontag (1933-2004). Brilliant, beautiful, provocative and indefatigable, she spent her life analyzing and celebrating culture in essays, novels, plays and works of nonfiction, notably Against Interpretation, On Photography and Illness as Metaphor. She directed plays in the United States and Europe, and...
Making Theater That Matters: Ayckbourn highlights Brits series
Alan Ayckbourn’s Neighbourhood Watch, running through Jan. 1 as part of the Brits Off Broadway series at 59E59 Theaters, opens with Hilda, a repressed, middle-aged Englishwoman giving a speech to mark the official opening of a park dedicated to her brother, Martin, who died violently. She describes their fondness for one another, her devotion to...
Machiel Botman’s Mysteries: Depth and Beauty in Monochrome
The Dutch photographer Machiel Botman has a distinctly personal vision, choosing subjects for his exquisite black-and-white photographs that touch him emotionally. Superficially, it’s impossible to discern a unifying theme or figure out what drew him to the scenes or people he commemorates. Each image resembles a self-contained theatrical event, with its own distinctive drama and...
Think Pink
A Ferocious Graffiti Evolution Who said women couldn’t create rambunctious graffiti art? Certainly not anyone who has seen Lady Pink’s exotic, brilliantly colored outpourings on view in “Evolution” at Woodward Gallery. Active since she was a 15-year-old student at New York’s High School of Art and Design, Ecuadorian-born Sandra Fabara, aka Lady Pink, first gained...
Personas in Motion
Kyle Abraham’s dance biography In the Vimeo trailer shot by visual artist Carrie Schneider for choreographer Kyle Abraham’s new work, Live! The Realest MC, a young boy hurries along a lonely city street, interrupted by images of cracked pavement and barbed wire. The camera stutters, stops and starts, switching quickly from his face to boys...
Clergue Captures Cocteau
Lavish photo testaments to an era Jean Cocteau only directed six films, spending far more energy on his poetry, painting, sculpture and novels. But from The Blood of a Poet (1930) to the great Beauty and the Beast (1946) and his final Testament of Orpheus (1959), he brought poetry, ideas and fantasy into his film...
Between Lines and Drips: Pollock family secrets in letters
For the sidebar, please click here. With his much publicized personal life and groundbreaking technique, Jackson Pollock could be dubbed the Vincent van Gogh of 20th century art. Charismatic and tormented, he seized the public’s imagination as the embodiment of the tortured artist. But while his reputation might have been well earned, he also had...
Kissing the Air: Elizabeth Streb’s Action Faction
Elizabeth Streb’s dancers jump, bounce, climb, spin and fly, making downhill racing, hang-gliding and Himalayan mountain climbing look like child’s play. Over the past 25 years, the choreographer has often presented her dazzling works in conventional theaters, but they’ve always shone brightest in big spaces and out of doors. Now she brings several new gripping,...
Texture as Sculpture
Artschwager weaves media with feeling When artists enjoy long lives, their fans reap tremendous advantages. This thought came to mind when looking over Richard Artschwager’s new works at David Nolan Gallery. Born in 1923, he has never fit into any category for very long, passing through styles that superficially resembled pop, minimal and conceptual, all...
Wrestling with History
Ouramdane dances our times A dancer spins round and round on the shadowy stage, first with her arms held tight against her body and then with them spread wide. Another dancer stands straight and tall then falls to the stage, then stands, falls again, stands. They move in extreme and unnatural ways, only stopping when...
Paris Blues Gets Improvised
Rescuing Bearden from Hollywood In 1961, jazz lovers couldn’t wait for the release of photographer Sam Shaw’s movie Paris Blues. With a score by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn and co-starring Louis Armstrong, it sounded like a brilliant idea; a glorious celebration of the City of Lights’ devotion to jazz. Well, yes—until Hollywood got hold...
Harlem Stage Keeps Dancing
Sundiata’s spirit lives among Da Peoples Poet and educator Sekou Sundiata masterfully combined entertainment and political activism. Only a year before his death in 2007, he introduced the hugely popular WeDaPeoples Cabaret to Harlem Stage, dubbing it a “dance to the revolution.” The show was a natural outgrowth of his brilliant America Project, conceived after...
YouTube Song of Love
Artist Dara Birnbaum examines Clara Schumann via online videos Acclaimed video pioneer Dara Birnbaum presents the exhilarating, probing multichannel video installation Arabesque at the Marian Goodman Gallery this summer, in one of the first solo exhibitions of her work in New York since 2001. Helpfully, it is exhibited with several of her channel pieces from...
All the Right Moves
Struan Leslie helps actors walk, touch and fight in verse “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” begins one of the most memorable speeches in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. “They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.”
Chamberlain at Pace
America’s greatest living sculptor, John Chamberlain never stops rewarding viewers with vital and engrossing work. A cross between an Abstract Expressionist and a Pop artist, and of course, entirely his own man, he creates complex, polychromatic collages out of stainless steel, scrap metal, cans, foam, paper bags, car bumpers and assorted other materials, bending and...
David Salle: New Paintings
David Salle’s new paintings are like short stories, featuring women and their changing relationships with boats and water. Since the 1980s, Salle has juxtaposed random images, and the technique works just as well now as it did then to heighten his paintings’ emotionally disturbing expressiveness. Taking as his inspiration 19th-century river scenes by George Caleb...
