Dance
Wheeldon and Dealin’: New York City Ballet returns with Balanchine and Wheeldon works
Following a brief winter hibernation after its five-week Nutcracker onslaught, New York City Ballet returns to its primary business this coming Tuesday, Jan. 17, when it opens its six-week winter repertory season. While the company’s repertory has been opened up to an increasing variety of choreographers in recent decades, the vast archive of George Balanchine’s...
Heaven Sent Flamenca: Noche Flamenca’s profound singing/dancing
Thank God for Noche Flamenca. Or rather thank Martin Santangelo, Noche’s artistic director, and Soledad Barrio, the company’s leading lady, who have been conferring a yearly miracle on New York since 1998: an exceptional flamenco ensemble that blends traditional material with a contemporary gestalt and profound mastery of the form. The company’s six-day run at...
Oh, Those Dancing Feet: The best of dance in 2011
Yes, there were plenty of lowlights, but a look back at the year in dance provides a good number of wonderful memories—performances that thrilled, inspired or surprised, that resonated long after one left the theater. Here, in no particular order, are those that stood out. Festival Dance by Mark Morris The initial delight in March...
Air Kisses at the Armory: Elizabeth Streb brings large-scale choreographic feats to the Park Avenue Armory
Forget that notorious comic-book Broadway musical; if you want to see truly amazing and daring—not to mention outrageously creative—performers defy gravity and travel at speeds you may not want to contemplate, make your way to the Park Avenue Armory. For the second of that adventurous institution’s December dance presentations, Elizabeth Streb is transforming the Armory’s...
Dancing in Character: Pina Recalled, Gelsey Returns
In Pina Bausch’s choreo-stagings, outside and indoors trade places; in Wim Wenders’ new 3-D documentary, Pina, we see in the crispest of photographic detail her deep-pile stage floors, where dancers are forced to rise in relevé in the loam. Her troupe braved elements that were punishing, even if simulated. We watch them get soiled in...
Of ‘Home’ and ‘Revelations’: the Alvin Ailey company return to City Center
Moving in both new and familiar ways, but always with its own distinctive élan and communicative energy—the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre is back for their annual five-week City Center season. While there hasn’t been anything resembling a major shake-up, the company is under new artistic direction, with Robert Battle having succeeded Judith Jamison following...
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...
Mind and Body Math
The Cunninghams carry on You wouldn’t know it from watching him on stage, but Merce Cunningham dancer John Hinrichs “would describe [himself] more as a math guy than as a dancer,” he recently informed me by email sent while on the company’s “Legacy Tour,” its final circuit around the world. The company will be at...
Shaker, Rattle and Dance: The Shakers get their chance to shine in ‘Angel Reapers’
Martha Clarke has long seemed especially at home in European milieus when creating her evocative dance-theater works. Although she’s a quintessentially American artist, her works have been primarily inspired by European visual art (Hieronymus Bosch, Toulouse-Lautrec), literature (Chekhov, Kafka), music (Scriabin) and film, which was the impetus for her dark, earthy Kaos, seen at New...
Supernatural Talent: A trio of artists conjure ‘Supernatural Wife’ at BAM
Founded 20 years ago by Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, Big Dance Theater has displayed a masterful originality in its productions, which incorporate unexpected, imaginative juxtapositions in a unique and persuasive style very much their own. Parson, a director-choreographer, and Lazar, a director-actor who often appears in plays and films, have explored a wide array...
Paul Taylor Goes Buggy
Paul Taylor’s fascination with—and affection for—insects is well-known, and has manifested itself in his choreography. His 1988 Counterswarm set two fiercely combative hordes of insect-like creatures against each other to thrilling effect, and in 1961 he created Insects and Heroes, in which the dancers moved in and out of stylized cages. Both of these were...
Ballet Next Premieres Nov. 21 at The Joyce
He retired from New York City Ballet last month with considerable fanfare. She slipped away from American Ballet Theatre earlier this year so unexpectedly that even dance insiders had no idea she’d given her final performance. Now these former principal dancers, Charles Askegard and Michele Wiles, are ready for their next move: a new venture...
Pulling the Strings: The marionettes of ‘Golem’ at La MaMa will do anything
These dancers truly come in all shapes and sizes. The moving figures in Golem, a production of the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre, range from miniature wooden marionettes (some of them made a century ago) to the lumbering, ominous title figure—a giant created out of clay—portrayed by Steven Ryan. Everyone and everything dances in this returning production,...
Robbins’ Road to Hollywood
The ultimately disappointing journey of Jerome Robbins from Broadway to soundstage Jerome Robbins, director and choreographer as well as primary conceptualist behind Broadway’s West Side Story in 1957, knew that filming it in 1960 was going to be problematic. He was more than aware of how easily his brainchild could devolve into cinematic cliché. The...
Dance as Narrative (and More)
Jerome Robbins’ moving synthesis Jerome Robbins was fired halfway through shooting West Side Story, but he still won two Academy Awards for his work on the film—one for directing, which he shared with Robert Wise, and an honorary award “for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film.” Robbins (like many others) thought...
The One-Night-Only Return of Nina Ananiashvili
Nina Ananiashvili may have retired in a flower-strewn farewell performance from American Ballet Theatre last year, but the seemingly ageless ballerina is still dancing with the State Ballet of Georgia, the company she has directed since 2004 in her native land. That’s Georgia as in the former Soviet Republic—and the birthplace of George Balanchine. And...
Stompers and Bomb Squads: ABT revives Twyla Tharp’s ‘In the Upper Room’
How many dances created in the past quarter-century are likely to endure? One might think of several Paul Taylor works (Company B, Promethean Fire), and certainly such landmark Mark Morris dances as Grand Duo and L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed il Moderato have already becomes classics of their time. Jerome Robbins, during his final decade, created...
On the Scene at The Bessies
Monday’s Bessie Awards—much altered in format and relocated to the Apollo Theater—provided quite a fascinating evening on many counts. It was great to see throngs of Downtown dance luminaries and presenters lining up to go inside that legendary, way-uptown venue, and to observe the likes of ballet’s Wendy Whelan, Marcelo Gomes and Christopher Wheeldon in...
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,...
Coming Attractions: A Look at What’s to Come in Dance
“I was thinking The Mists of Avalon, but there was a couple necking in my sightlines and a speedboat and I was like, no, this isn’t The Mists of Avalon!” So said a dancer overheard at Wave Hill, which overlooks the Hudson River in Riverdale, on a July night a decade ago, when I attended...
Fall for the Restored City Center
After an extensive overhaul, City Center is back open in time for Fall for Dance For the dance world, there can be no better news than the return to action of a newly renovated City Center, for many decades a welcoming home to dance companies. From providing New York City Ballet with its first home...
