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The Arts Voyager, 1-8: John Marin at the Amon Carter FORT WORTH -- With "John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury," the Amon Carter Museum has once again outclassed Gotham in curating and celebrating an artist at the nucleus of the New York modern art movement of the last century. Like his New York contemporary Stuart Davis, the New York modern figure most prized by the Amon Carter, Marin was an abstract artist firmly anchored in the concrete world which inspired his tableaux and gave him matter to re-arrange, whether the natural and nautical world of Cape Split, Maine, at the heart of this exhibition, which focuses on the last 20 years of his life (1933 to 1953) when he summered there, or the geometrical muse of the big city, seen here in Marin's riffs on subjects like the Brooklyn Bridge and Radio City Music Hall. Subscribers click here to read the full Article and see the full Gallery. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
The Arts Voyager, 1-5: Waiting in Limbo PARIS -- As a child growing up on an isolated farm in the Loire Valley on the crest of and impatient for great adventures, Catherine Olivier developed a fertile inner life, an apprenticeship of imagination that served her well when, armed with a diploma from the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts d'Angers, she moved to Paris some 20 years ago to study at the highly selective Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, eventually settling in the hilly northeastern quarter of Belleville, where the colony of artists strives to create work as expansive as the vistas of Paris they look out on from its heights. It's a potpourri of amateur photographers, seasoned lithographers, earnest folk artists and genuinely inventive wunderkinds searching for innovative mediums to artistically articulate the uncertainty of living in the 21st century, in which the nuclear fatalism of an earlier generation has been supplanted by the even more existential doubt impressed by global warming and economic precariousness (or, as the French put it, 'precarité'). Olivier soon found the medium to match her epoch. Subscribers click here to read the full Article and see the full Gallery. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Cross Country / A Memoir of France In Montparnasse with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Amelie I've avoided seeing Woody Allen's "Midnight In Paris" mostly because, based on previous American in Paris fantasias, Woody's Parisian midnight probably doesn't have a lot to do with my daily Paris reality as I lived it from 2000 to 2010. Unlike Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and most American storyteller-adventurers, my Paris flight was solo, meaning I had to actually depend on French people if I was to have a social life and hope to have a love life. (Not for me the sordid midnight Montmartre rambles of Henry Miller.) I had to look to an earlier generation for a role model, and it wasn't promising. When it came to finding love with a French woman, I frequently felt like Lambert Strether in Henry James's "The Ambassadors," meeting a promising mate only to smack into a wall of Jericho that even my American can-do spirit couldn't break through. But I didn't yet know this in the late summer-fall of 2001, when my second Parisian abode, in a '60s-era high-rise next door to the Pasteur Institute (where AIDS, the virus of love in the 20th century, had been discovered), put me within skipping distance of Montparnasse, from which the elixir of Fitz and Papa still wafted over. Click here to read the full 'Cross-Country' Chapter.
Copyright 2010 Alicia Chesser TULSA -- For the past 15 years, Tulsa Ballet artistic director Marcello Angelini has been leading his company to this moment, when it could not only obtain the rights to perform works like William Forsythe's "In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated" and Jiri Kylian's "Sechs Tanze," but actually perform them with the skill, stamina, and artistic maturity they require. Subscribers click here to read the full Review and see more photography. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe now for just $29.95/year, just click the Subscribe button above.)
(In planning a mixed repertory evening of dance or theater, the conventional wisdom is to start with a lighter piece so the audience has time to gather its attention, then hit it with the heavy artillery in the middle or at the end of the program. For Tulsa Ballet's recent mixed repertory program, reviewed here by Alicia Chesser, artistic director Marcello Angelini chose to open with William Forsythe's dense genre-buster "In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated," followed by Jiri Kylian's comic "Sechs Tanze" and Twyla Tharp's frothy "Nine Sinatra Songs." We asked him why. -- PB-I.) It was a calculated risk. First, let me say that our audience is now well-versed on all types of good dance, so even a work like 'In the Middle' is not a stretch for them anymore. Second I felt that, knowing Sinatra and Tharp were somewhere down the road, people with some doubts might have stuck with the program (no pun intended) in order to see that. If the riskier work were at the end, they might have left before the end of it. We did have a couple of people who felt 'In the Middle' was a bit too much for them, but they all stayed. And, by the end, they really enjoyed all three works. "Sechs Tanze" is not a closer. It's too short and doesn't have a very strong ending. Lastly, I always feel an evening of dance is like a dinner. At times I like to start with something light and gentle on the palate, just to whet the appetite of the audience. Then you go into a good main course and then dessert. Other times, like in this last case, I like to start with something like a really strong plate, something that is a hearty main course with a very strong, particular taste. And after that a little dessert, kind of a Creme Brule, followed by Tiramisu and Frangelico. This last program was one of those: One very strong main dish, with a distinctive flavor, and two delicious desserts! The after dinner liquor, the Frangelico, was the music of Frank Sinatra.....
The Arts Voyager, 12-13: Impressionist as Humanist PONTOISE (Val-d'Oise), France -- On a side street off the rue de L'Hermitage in this mundane outlying suburb of Paris sits a cluster of four unremarkable houses. You wouldn't be looking for them at all unless you happened to know that their roofs were memorialized by one Camille Pissarro in his 1877 oil painting "Les Toits Rouges." But this was the genius of Pissarro, to elevate the mundane to the level of the pastoral. To combine eye, the ability to see beauty in the ordinary, with technique, the ability to deploy the tools to bring to the premiere plain, in color and its application, the aspects of a subject, be it a country passage or a family portrait, a group of field laborers harvesting apples or a domestic worker holding with both hands her cup of coffee, that make it memorable. Subscribers click here to read the full Article and see the full Gallery. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
The Arts Voyager, 12-13: Les Anarchistes Halfway through "La Commune," Peter Watkins's 5-hour, 45-minute tour de force which simultaneously resurrects the insurrectional barricades Parisians erected around their city to stave off a new monarchist government and tears down the barricades between documentary and fiction, I had to stop and e-mail a Parisian friend to ask if she'd seen the film. My friend -- an artist denizen of Belleville, one of the quarters evoked by Watkins -- had not even heard of it. This vindicated Watkins as far as the one major reservation I have about "La Commune," that the otherwise educative inter-titles, filling in the basic historical timeline around the events of March - May 1871, sometimes cede to the film-maker's rants about the obstacles to getting his film distributed in France -- even its co-producer the German-French television network Arte screened "La Commune" from 11 at night to 4 in the morning -- and claims the Commune is under-taught in French schools. The media blockade is of course not incidental, indeed validates the film's relevance in presenting a model of a utopian ideal which directly menaces the ruling financial and political elites. (My friend also e-mailed back that she'd just been watching an Arte prime-time program on Al Capone and the Roaring '20s, a subject less likely to rile its audience to revolt in these heady days of the Euro-crisis. Maybe.) Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
LONDON -- To see Akram Khan's "Desh" at Sadler's Wells, October 4, some weeks after Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's "Tezuka" was again to witness a spotlight on Asian identity, in this case a personal reflection on Khan's own experience as second generation British Bengali. Continuously on stage for his 80-minute solo, Khan is supported by an impressive creative team and with their help he delivers an autobiographical work which is one of his most compelling. Jocelyn Pook's score, Tim Yip's designs and Yeast Culture's animation are all as equally enthralling as Khan's unique movement style, characterized by its eye-blurring speed, fluidity, supreme softness, intense muscular control and strength, a style which has been informed by a lifetime's research into both traditional Indian dance and western 'new' dance techniques. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives: $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above.)
NewsFlash, 12-7: Yvonne Rainer to create new work for Martha Graham Dance Company. One of the mothers of post-modern dance will premiere "Lamentable," a variation on the mother of modern dance's classic "Lamentations," for the company's upcoming New York season at the Joyce Theater March 13-18, its veteran publicist Kevin McAarney announced. Also creating a variation will be Lar Lubovitch. The company has not yet announced which works by its founder will be shown.
Flash Review, 12-7: Cheers & Jeers FORT WORTH -- Christmas is a loaded time. The thing that makes it precious also curses it for some of us. It's a time of traditions -- but what happens when those traditions change? Particularly for those of us prodigal children who start the inevitable path away from the hearth at 18, and who count on the annual return home as a bulwark, a rock of stability as our world away from the nest becomes precipitously turbulent? In my own family, on Christmas Eve each person would get a present for each other person, as well as contribute to the stockings. Then, as we sat around the Christmas ficus (did I mention this was in pagan San Francisco?) (on our road trip across the country when we were teenagers, my brother once told a Wisconsin bakery owner who welcomed us with "Welcome to God's Country," "We're from San Francisco. We don't believe in God."), we'd take turns opening presents one by one. For me this was not about ceding to the commercialism of what Stan Freberg famously parodied as a 'Green Christmas.' It was about the joy of finding a gift that really matched the interests of the receiver. When the receiver is a family member, it's a way of showing that you really know that person. (The closer in age of my younger brothers, the one who made the God comment, was always a special challenge.) But as soon as I got out of there, the tradition started to evaporate. I think it was the younger of my younger brothers who didn't like his children giving in to the commercialism. Fine, except I always suspected my brothers, who now had their own families, cheated; they could still have separate satellite gift-exchanging sessions with their wives and kids, while I was still a bachelor and alone. And bereft. First the tradition devolved to everyone just getting one gift for one other person; by the time I came home after a three-year absence in 2000, there was also a $10 limit. That fall I had been in Paris and had made some special finds for several family members (and their wives). I guess I thought, given my prolonged absence, my family would understand that this was a rare chance for me to give to them, and would wave the limit for me. But instead, everyone scowled at, ignored, and otherwise made me feel like I bore the mark of Cain. (Eventually giving to each other was eventually outlawed totally; now everyone pitches in $10 to give a heifer to an African village. Humbug.) This long prelude is by way of thanking Steven Alan McGaw for the exorcism he provided with "Christmas for Grown-ups," the gem of a sketch McGaw penned for himself and Peter Bowden for SceneShop's annual "A Fifth of Christmas," seen Saturday at Arts Fifth Avenue. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Cross Country / A Memoir of France I'm hallucinating! If you really want to experience the authentic Montmartre, the Montmartre of phantoms and not the Montmartre of charlatans, avoid at all cost "La Butte," the tip-top of the village encircling Sacre Coeur which is mined with tourist traps and has about as much to do with art any more as San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf has to do with fish. Start at the Metro Barbes, whose nocturnal closure opened "Les Portes de la Nuit" (the Gates of the Night) to the lanky Yves Montand in Marcel Carne's 1946 semi-surreal fairy tale of post-war Paris, or, if your legs are feeling sturdy, begin at the base of the rue des Martyrs at the Metro Notre Dame de Lorette -- named for the church of the same name before whose doors Van Gogh once stood praying before heading down to the Boulevard Montmartre to sell his paintings at the Galerie Goupil -- and head up-hill. At the top of Martyrs, turn left down the Boulevard Rochechouart - Clichy and continue past the Moulin Rouge, then traverse the bridge over the Montmartre cemetery, tracing the foot-steps of Truffaut's teenaged truant carrying a typewriter stolen from his step-father's office in the 1959 "400 Blows," and remembering to doff your beret to Sacha and the rest of the Guitrys, France's royal family of theater, reposing below in the cemetery. Then head up the winding, chestnut tree-lined rue Caulaincourt, imagining what a struggle the nightly climb from the Moulin Rouge to his studio just off Caulaincourt must have been for the stunted Toulouse-Lautrec. The street broadens out at the Square Constantin Pecqueur, where Isadora once taught her charges, a plaque reminds you, and Steinlin fed and painted his cats in a Hausmanian building towering above the square (their calico offspring still scramble for food left on the high railing bordering Sacre Coeur on the Butte). Buy a thick triangular slice of warmed-up tuna-tomato quiche at the boulangerie near the square and eat it on a bench across from the statue Paul Vannier built in homage to the artist, above a bronze frieze of what could be the 12 apostles dressed as mendicants lined up in a soup kitchen, except that some wag has chalked in libidinous thought balloons for each, hovering over a basin of dead water. Click here to read the full 'Cross-Country' Chapter.
PARIS -- "Pudique Acide" and "Extasis" were created by Mathilde Monnier and Jean-François Duroure in the 1980s, the former piece in 1984 while the pair was on a fellowship to study at the Cunningham Studio and the latter a year later in France. The two had been working with Viola Farber, an erstwhile Cunningham dancer at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, just prior to arriving in New York. The two pieces were revived for the Montpellier Dance Festival last summer and have been touring in France as well as in other European countries and Brazil; I caught them October 25 at the Théâtre de la Cité Internationale as part of the Festival d'Automne. The program is reprised tonight at the Maillon in Strasbourg and November 29 at the Scene des Vosges in Epinal, France. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives: $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above.)
Flash Communique, 11-9: Romeo Castellucci at the Theatre de la Ville - Paris In 10 days of confrontation that made the riotous response to Stravinsky and Nijinsky's "Rite of Spring" of a hundred years ago seem like a Spring picnic, the Theatre de la Ville - Sarah Bernhardt -- Europe's leading theater, situated on the banks of the Seine across from Notre Dame, and where the Divine Sarah was once all that was needed to stir up the public -- faced off against a small but virulent cadre of right-wing Christian fundamentalists, as the theater's director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota courageously called them, determined to stop performances of Romeo Castelluci's play, "On the concept of the face of the Son of God," a dramatic reflection on the relationship between an incontinent father and his son, amplified by their rapport with the visage of Christ, as represented by a giant rendition of the Antonello da Messina painting. From October 20 to 30, the Place Chatelet and the inside of the theater itself, situated not far from what Parisians refer to as Point Zero in front of Notre Dame because all distances in France are measured from it, became Ground Zero in a daily escalating battle pitting freedom of artistic expression against violent religious fanaticism, as right-wing Christian agitators scaled the exterior balcony of the theater to toss eggs and pour draining fluid on would-be spectators; bought entrance tickets so that they could launch stink-balls and tear gas at the audience; stormed the stage; incited young people with lies that the play included excrement being thrown at the portrait of Christ; and, on calmer days, settled with simply disrupting the performance with boos and whistles. On four occasions, the theater had to call in the police. At each and every show, the artists performed the work to its conclusion. What follows is Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota's first-hand account of the events. Owing to the imprecision of translating certain uniquely French terms and expressions, for an authoritative French text readers should visit the web site of the Theatre de la Ville, where they can also sign a petition of support for the theater against fanaticism whose current signatories include the actors Sylvie Testud, Juliette Binoche, and Michel PIccoli, choreographer Sasha Waltz, directors Patrice Chereau and Robert Wilson, and dancer and director of Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal Dominique Mercy. -- Paul Ben-Itzak
The performances of Romeo Castellucci's work, "On the concept of the face of the son of God," at the Theatre de la Ville October 20-30, were systematically disrupted by organized groups claiming to be from Action Francaise and Renouveau Francais. AGRIF (the Association against anti-White and Anti-Christian racism), went to court to try to block the performances, before the Court of Grande Instance October 18, 2011 and the Administrative Court of Paris October 28, 2011, and its request was denied. Click here to read the full Account.
Flash Review, 11-7: Can everything old be new again? NEW YORK -- The immediate challenge facing this reviewer on September 25 at New York Live Arts (formerly Dance Theater Workhop), watching the current Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Dance Company perform seminal pieces that defined the troupe in its early years, was not looking for Zane and Jones in the dances. Because I first experienced this work as performed by the co-choreographers, I had to try to erase the memory of those poignant and particular performances by those distinctive performers and force myself to view the work anew, all the more challenging as I'd worked with Jones/Zane on a number of their projects at Dance Theater Workshop in the 1980s. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal button above.)
Cross Country / A Memoir of France When a white French person tells you a neighborhood is dangerous, often what s/he really means by 'dangerous' is 'There are a lot of French Arabs there.' (Except that the white French person would just call them 'Arabs,' regardless of how many generations their families have been implanted in France.) I hadn't yet realized this false equivalence when I moved to France in the summer of 2001, so that when I found myself, less than a week after my arrival, taking a midnight stroll down what I'd been warned was the most 'dangerous' street in the most 'dangerous' town in France, Montpellier, flanked on both sides of the street by swarthy male citizens whose eyes were riveted on me, I felt like I was running a gauntlet. I nonetheless wore the widest possible grin on my face because in front of me, carrying my DJ equipment between them and holding my life in their hands were the real objects of the local attention, two gorgeous ladies from Spain, Marta (a glittering blonde of 28) y Marta (a lithesome and winsome brunette of 22). Click here to read the full Chapter.
The Arts Voyager, 10-19: Artist as Witness What do a demonstration in Paris, a performance in Fort Worth, a prisoner exchange in Israel and Palestine, and a documentary filmed in Morocco opening tonight in New York have in common? Taken together, they confirm the importance of the artist as witness. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
The Arts Voyager, 10-14: The Art Mavericks FORT WORTH, TX -- A year of trawling for art and art lovers in New York's Chelsea canyon yielded little that was interesting beyond some old favorites such as the Figurative leader CFM Gallery. Uptown, meanwhile, the Met seems mired in the 17th century, except for the Costume Institute, which should long ago have changed its name to the (latest) Fashion Institute. MOMA never writes, it never calls, so, art-wise, there was little to prevent this arts voyager from packing up his notebook and following his congested nose for art out to where the West begins and art is still made and fancied with the passion of a beginner, with the extra touch that after you finish visiting with the cowboys and the Indians of Remington and Russell at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, you can revel at real horses whinnying from the livestock show at the neighboring Will Rogers Memorial Center (don't forget to pay your respects before the statue of Will on his horse on your way out), and even take home some relics from the week-end flea market, be they a double-set of Bob Wills or a genuine Texas nutcracker that doubles as a crustacean crusher. Throw in a Saturday night arts ramble at the Arts Goggle in the not-yet and please-don't-get precious Southside Fairmount National Historic District and a rare chance to view 100 gems of watercolors and drawings -- from Ben Shahn's dramatic ink bust of Martin Luther King just after Selma off the cover of Time magazine to fundamental Stuart Davis to stunning charcoal and graphite drawings of the Golden Gate 82 years before the Bridge went up -- all at the Amon Carter before they go back into light-protected storage for another 10 years, and I'll take self-described Cowtown over the Apple any day. Subscribers click here to read the full article and see more images. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal button above.)
Flash History, 10-7: Merce During the summer of 1952, I discovered Merce Cunningham's class in a loft on W. 8th Street, not far from New York University, where I was taking a summer course. It was not so much a conscious decision to transfer from the Martha Graham School and technique to the Cunningham classes, but a matter of chance. Modern dance was extremely passionate about such allegiances at that time. And when I introduced myself before the first class, I told Merce, in a confessional tone, that my previous training had been at the Martha Graham School. He reacted to my admission with an amused smile, but said nothing. Then one day, after I had been studying with him for a while, he surprised me by remarking, "You're more lyrical than most of those who've studied with Martha." Referring to the first names of our teachers was part of the early modern dance heritage, and I thought of Merce's comment as a compliment. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
The Arts Voyager, 10-7: French Press Review Occupy Apple Alone among all the journalists I've read this week, American and French, only Nicolas Demorand, the former turbo-charged host of the morning drive program on Radio France's middle-brow France Inter network, manages to implicitly connect the two biggest stories of the past several days, the death of Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs and the growing Occupy Wall Street movement (which the French group into the larger global movement of "Les indignes," those indignant about the financial exclusion of the majority to the benefit of the minority). Writing about Jobs in today's edition of the French national newspaper Liberation (or Libé, as locals refer to it), Demorand makes sure to touch all the bases of what you've read elsewhere, giving 'nuff respect to Jobs for the succession of game-changing devices introduced or exploited by Apple, concluding, "The point in common of these products: The maniacal attention to simplicity of utilization and to elegance, the Apple logo having assured the renown of the brand among the moneyed creative class as well as the masses." Click here to read the full Article.
Cross Country / A Memoir of France 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky At the risk of hovering too long in the land of the dead -- Paris is, after all, to paraphrase Malcolm McLaren, a city of ghosts and shadows -- I think it's time to introduce my feline co-stars, the ones who made it possible for me to make all these traverses, from Alaska to San Francisco, San Francisco to New York, New York to Paris, Paris to Les Eyzies in the country's southwestern Dordogne region, Les Eyzies to Montpellier and Perigueux, and to Paris and back again twice: Sonia, Mesha, and Hopey, my compagnons de route for two decades of adventures and escapades. Click here to read the full 'Cross-Country' Chapter.
Flash Review, 9-30: 'Echoes from Home' NEW YORK -- Elissaveta Iordanova's "Echoes from Home," performed by her Elea Gorana Dance Collective August 14 at the Fourth St, Theatre as part of the 15th International Fringe Festival, started with an arresting choreographic situation: Two dancers, Susan Thomason and Dawn DiPasquale, standing, at equidistant points on the stage, taut, expectant, poised to spring into an action that was not immediately manifest. This set the tone for the entire performance, comprised of two pieces, which, even though they had strong, eminently comprehensible, and at times eloquent narrative strands, also retained a sense of mystery -- indeed, something more difficult: a sense of both mystery and delicacy. It is hard to maintain nuance and spirituality at the same time -- I recalled a couple of other performances in this same theater that failed this test -- but "Echoes form Home" succeeded splendidly. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Whether intentionally or not -- the publicity seems to indicate the former -- Ariane Michel's 2006 digital video to 35mm "Les Hommes," screening tonight and tomorrow night at Anthology Film Archives in New York, is a sort of anti-travelogue that follows an expedition of scientists and naturalists to Greenland, revealing their, and by implication contemporary Man's, disassociation with nature even as the film-maker tracks her human subjects' probing of the arctic landscape and its animal and floral inhabitants. The alienation starts almost immediately, with an all too typical contemporary French monotonal sonic landscape that clashes dramatically with the natural one approaching as the arctic explorer ship Tara approaches land, the camera spanning a sea dotted with ice floats and the occasional glacier. I was tempted to turn the sound down during the first 15 minutes of the film that this annoying drone droned on, so that I could just take in the vast ocean, greenish mountains, and gray-green stony beaches in the purity in which the explorers must have encountered them. Click here to read the full Review.
The Buzz, 9-28: Tear down a parking lot, put up a park Among locals, my hometown of San Francisco is as famous for its lack of parks as its lack of parking. Considering an eventual return to my city by the Bay, but hesitating because it's less green than just about any other place I've lived, I was thus heartened to read, in the San Francisco Chronicle, that the city was considering (in a proposal approved Monday by its board of supervisors) purchasing a parking lot at 17th and Folsom, in the Green-desolate area of the Mission District also housing the ODC Theater of the ODC dance company and school, and turning it into... a park. I was consequently perturbed that the article seemed to imply that the company, whose director Brenda Way has created ballets championing the environment and railing against the global warming provoked by automobile emissions, seemed more concerned by the loss of parking than thrilled that the Velveteen Rabbit (the hero ODC co-director KT Nelson's signature holiday dance) might have a new place to play. "But restricting cars may be bad for business, said Kimi Okada, school director of ODC," reported the Chronicle's Stephanie Lee. Contacted by the DI yesterday, Okada was happy to clarify. "We are not opposed to the park at all," she explained. "We support all efforts to make our neighborhood and community better. We are however very concerned with access to our organization -- for adult and youth students, theater goers, our healthy dancers' clinic, and the many artists we support. Our livelihood depends on public access to our campus. While many from our constituency take public transportation, bike, and walk, a large percentage drive to our facility (parents of young children, theater goers from outside environs, for example). We are working with the Municipal Transit Authority, Park & Rec, and the park planners to explore all the possibilities for more efficient street parking options..., and to make the streets safer for walking from BART (the Bay Area subway) and Muni (bus)."
Cross Country / A Memoir of France With Taglioni & Truffaut in the land of the living dead The five films of Francois Truffaut's Antoine Doinel cycle begin in 1959 with the troubled teenager of "The 400 Blows" and end two decades later with the 30-something Antoine (in all the films, Jean-Pierre Leaud) of "Love on the Run" finally finding his true love Sabine, his former amours come to the rescue to make sure the affair isn't derailed by the another of the faux pas that have dogged Antoine all his life, especially his complicated romantic life, complicated further by his complex relationship with his mother. Close watchers of the five films will note that the Montmartre Cemetery figures in three. Click here to read the full 'Cross-Country' Chapter.
The Buzz, 9-23: Cry the Barbaric Country "The judge said guilty in a make-believe trial -- Bobby Russell, "The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia" '"The EU opposes the use of capital punishment in all circumstances -- Catherine Ashton, High Representative for Foreign Affairs, European Union Wednesday night, blood-thirsty American justice killed Troy Davis. Subscribers click here to read the full Column. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
LONDON -- "Gardenia," Alain Platel and Ballets C de la B's collaboration with director Frank Van Laecke and transvestite actress Vanessa Van Durme, seen this summer at Sadler's Wells Theatre, is a dignified cabaret which reunites a group of retired cross-dressing and transsexual performers in their swan song. Under the vampy Van Durme's leadership the cabaret artists, most of whom are between the ages of 50 and 70, meander sedately through erotic postures, sing nostalgic songs, tell lewd jokes and offer tasty, autobiographical anecdotes. However faded they might seem physically, they more than make up for it in spirit, inhabiting the stage with as much ease as they would their own sitting room. "Gardenia" is both moving and serene in its smudging of the boundaries between male and female. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives: $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above.)
The Johnston Letter, Volume 1, Number 3 (On the first anniversary of the death of Jill Johnston, friends, family, and colleagues will gather Sunday, September 18 from 4 to 9 p.m. at the Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South in New York, for an afternoon and evening of readings from the legendary columnist, journalist, activist, writer, and critic, followed by a reception. This Letter was first published on the Dance Insider on September 7, 2005. The Mark Morris Dance Group performs the choreographer's "Dido and Aeneas" tonight through Sunday at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, with Morris making his San Francisco Bay Area conducting debut.) Dear Paul, Thanks for those tickets to the Mostly Mozart festival at Lincoln Center to see Mark Morris. Before taxiing uptown I was sitting with Ingrid outside our house, dressed to go, a large colorful woven bag slung over my shoulder, saying I didn't think I could make it. She talked me into it by saying that if when we got there I didn't want to go, we could turn around and come home. I'm not agoraphobic exactly, but really when I go anyplace besides the neighborhood it's to get in our car and drive out of the city. I go uptown once in a while for some appointment or other. Driving out is not always wonderful. Last week at the height of our torrid humid summer, imagining we would beat the heat at 9 a.m., we drove to IKEA near Newark just for the treat of their cafeteria-served Swedish shrimp over egg mayo on lightly toasted bread. That was my goal anyway. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
The Arts Voyager, 9-16: GenMex Travelogues are easy: Just plop the camera before some magnificent vistas and start to shoot. Take it into a cafe or two and a fishing pier for some human local color and voila!, National Geographic on celluloid. Interior journeys are less easy to convey. With his 2009 "El Calambre" (The Cramp), playing tonight and Monday at New York's Anthology FIlm Archives as part of its series "GenMex: Recent Films from Mexico," Matias Meyer places a short story by Chinese writer Gao Xingian on the Pacific Coast of Mexico around the fishing village of Chacahua. This is where late 20-something French clown Julian (Julien Cottereau) parks his skiff one misty night in a "spiritual search." Or so we're told by the program notes. In the visage of the film itself, as well as Cottereau's, it's hard to divine exactly what's troubling him; he projects little more than a generalized angst, with lots of gazes out into the vast expanse of the ocean but little verbal expansion -- the film's dialogue is spare -- on what ails him. He sleeps, he swims underwater (the lens fills with bubbles appropriately), he vomits, he tastes freshly caught oysters doused with lemon juice and hot sauce by local fisherman Pablo (Pablo Lopez) ("very little," Julien pleads fruitlessly -- the French are not big on spicy -- having to settle for wiping the hot sauce off the oyster with his sunscreen-doused fingers). He finally hires Lopez to chauffeur him around by boat; there's even a cathartic scene in which the Frenchman follows the Mexican's lead in getting out of the boat and covering himself in mud, presumably in a cleansing ritual. In the end -- and in the movie's most riveting and potentially moving scene of cultural exchange -- he performs his clown-show for the villagers. Not that we're allowed to see much of it; Meyer chooses to focus more on the spectators' reaction than the spectacle, echoing the general tenor of the film, which leaves us to fill in the emotional blanks from Julien's generally emotionally smudgy visage. The film ends with the comedian breaking out in a cold sweat in his tent after the show, as well as a smile of relief; the catharsis has apparently transpired --- we're just not sure what's been expelled.
NEW YORK -- For 24 hours after the Mariinsky Ballet opened its week-long visit to the Metropolitan Opera House with Alexei Ratmansky's 2010 production of "Anna Karenina" this summer, its reputation as one of the world's great companies was seriously in doubt. The production was so dispiriting it left the impression that Ratmansky and most particularly veteran composer Rodion Shchedrin had decided their fellow Russians were so familiar with the novel that its incidents and characters could be merely sketched in. Throughout the evening, the stage seemed to be thronged with dancers, the great Diana Vishneva among them, who had been asked to give less than 100%. There was little that was "festive" about the Mariinsky's contribution to Lincoln Center Festival 2011. Subscribers click here to access the full Letter. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal button above.)
Flash Flashback, 9-11: Bessie at the Barricades (Editor's Note: Rather than add to the general pandemonium of calendar-induced coverage of the events of September 11, 2001 this month, we've decided to highlight one particularly prescient and almost uniquely brave piece published in these pages on September 18, 2001. Subscribers who wish to revisit the entirety of our coverage, including dispatches from Ground Zero and around the world, plus my own perspective as a New Yorker recently transplanted to Paris, are invited to check our 2001 archives, under September. -- PB-I) This is the second introduction written for the 2001 New York Dance and Performance Awards, otherwise known as the BESSIES which will be held as scheduled at the Joyce Theater on September 21, 2001 at 7 p.m. The first, proofed and formatted, replete with ironic references to the retirement of Jesse Helms and a reflection upon the culture wars of the 1990s, was blown away on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Of course, it was not blown away like the souls at the World Trade Center, in five rings of the Pentagon, or in a field outside Pittsburgh. The BESSIES are about a certain kind of survival: There was in the original text an allusion to the independent artist as a "survivor" of a true-life cultural reality show. No more. On Tuesday, the notion of "reality show" took on a whole new meaning, in New York and around the world. When two people grasp hands and jump from the shattered windows of a molten tower, lit up by a hijacked jetliner, live and in color, all realities, not just cultural reality, are forever changed. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
The Arts Voyager, 9-7: Send in the Clowns NEW YORK -- Where is the line between documentary and fiction? In film, even documentaries involve story-telling. And fiction should have at least a kernel of truth in order to resonate. Two films by the same directors on view this week at Anthology Film Archives, the New York theatrical premiere of Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel's fictional "La Pivellina (Little Girl)," showing through tonight (with the film-makers presenting it), and their documentary "Babooska," running through Sunday (ditto), offer the unique opportunity to examine the question through the lens of directors whose fiction looks and feels like a documentary and whose documentary could just as well be cinema verite. Both offer the opportunity to run away with the circus and tour rural, coastal, and suburban Italy as seen through the lives of nomadic performers living on the edge, their grip on financial survival as tenuous as a tight-rope walker's on terra firma. Click here to read the full Article.
The Arts Voyager, 9-2: What is America to Me? FORT WORTH, Texas -- In the 10 years since the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001, Uncle Sam's shoulders have often seemed to slump from the weight of a revenge which has exacted a million innocent lives for 3,000, an economy which has footed the bill at the expense of American children, cities, and the poor, and a Bill of Rights which both Republican and Democratic presidents have laid siege to. One might well ask -- well, anyway, your humble correspondent might -- What exactly is there to celebrate about America in 2011?, and be less than enthusiastic about a mini-festival called Celebrate America. Yet this would be a gross misread of the event as planned and executed last weekend by the Fort Worth Symphony, as lead by music director and conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya and, for Saturday's performance at Bass Hall, hoisted upon the sturdy shoulders of one of the country's most celebrated bearers of non-military victories in international relations of the 20th century, no less than Van Cliburn, perfectly cast as Lincoln in Aaron Copland's "Lincoln Portrait." Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
NEW YORK -- This year American Ballet Theatre's annual visit to the Metropolitan Opera House (May 16-July 9) began with an opening night gala that can only be described as "historic." Artistic director Kevin McKenzie, executive director Rachel Moore and honorary board chairman Caroline Kennedy appeared before the curtain as usual to deliver the obligatory thanks due an audience that had paid greatly inflated ticket prices, but this evening no one spoke any longer than a mere three minutes apiece. McKenzie also spurned another opportunity to generate tedium by avoiding the ritualistic naming of every key donor and committee chairman who had "made this occasion possible." Their names are all listed in the Playbill, he told the insatiably curious among us, and he stepped behind the curtain so the dancing could begin. I had left my stopwatch at home, worse luck, but I suspect this occasion had set a welcome new low in wasted time. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives: $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above.)
The Arts Voyager, 8-16: Tales of the Texas Rangers FORT WORTH -- When I recently told a Parisian friend I was thinking of settling here, she replied with shock: "But, Texas -- it's the land of Bush and 'Dallas,' n'est pas?" On a week-end when the Lone Star State stood poised to propose another Bible-pounding, Constitution-disdaining, fact-distorting, Koch-fueled climate warming denying president -- Governor Rick Perry having announced his candidacy -- the SceneShop theater collective Saturday offered up a needed reminder of the larger and legendary place that Texas, like New Orleans, California, and a New York State of Mind, has long occupied in the American landscape. All but one of the seven plays, presented by and at Arts Fifth Avenue in Fort Worth's historic Fairmount District, not only feted and played with notions of Texas and notions of theater, but even notions of the monologue, the program's title, Lone Star Voices, having a double meaning. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
The Arts Voyager, 8-2: 'Summertime' & the Curating is Stunning By Paul Ben-Itzak NEW YORK -- In the universe of New York art galleries, circa 2011 -- where just about anybody with a bit of money and a circle of cool-looking friends seems to be able to pitch a tent in Chelsea Canyon and call themselves a curator -- Robin Rice stands alone, packing a universe of perspectives into her relatively compact storefront gallery space at 325 W. 11th Street in the far west reaches of Greenwich Village. The gallery's current exhibition Summertime, running through September 11, is no exception, compressing an astounding variety of universes -- and printing processes -- into the seemingly limited space. Don't be deceived; if the title "Summertime" suggests an obvious theme, Rice's selection, deriving from a far-reaching curatorial outlook, is anything but. Click here to read more and see more images.
NEW YORK -- The Royal Danish Ballet's return to Lincoln Center for a week (June 14-19) in what many New Yorkers persist in calling "the State Theater" was an occasion for expectation laced with dread. The company's new artistic director, RDB-schooled Nikolaj Hubbe, who returned to his alma mater in 2008 after some 15 years as a much-beloved principal with New York City Ballet, had reportedly lost no time in giving the company what he called a "strong contemporary artistic profile." Was this lofty phrase a euphemism for Eurotrash, the foisting of updated irrelevance on the staging of the performing arts which has reached epidemic proportions abroad and here? Was the Danes' precious heritage of August Bournonville ballets now threatened? Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives: $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above.)
Flash Festival Preview, 7-15: '70s Film Groove One summer in 1975, I remember walking down to the Grand Theater (which, need it be said, no longer was) on San Francisco's Mission Street for a marathon of all five "Planet of the Apes" films. While the theaters on 42nd Street may have been similarly grungy, and the atmosphere chaotic, with kids playing and throwing popcorn at each other, the fare often had higher stakes: In my one foray into this sacred terrain, Paul Schrader's paene to unions "Blue Collar," starring Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel, was the sinuous offering. So when Anthology Film Archives says it is revisiting that epoch tonight through July 25, don't be deceived; the 10 films curated by auteur William Lustig may be humbler in their scope than the Hollywood blockbusters that often crowd more interesting films off the circuit these days, but they are also more nuanced and complex in their themes and their tricky resolutions, if the six films I previewed over the last two weeks, in my own mini-marathon, are any hint. Click here to read the full Article.
Decisive Decade: 10 years of dance in France (From 2000 through 2010, the Dance Insider was the leading source for English language reviews of and news about the French dance scene. 'Decisive Decade' revisits that coverage and a critical period in the European dance scene. This article, first published on October 3, 2002, includes a review of "L'Arlesienne," by Roland Petit, the most important creator of theatrical ballets in the 20th century. Petit passed away Sunday in Geneva. For more on Petit on the Dance Insider, see also our Flash Reviews of "Notre-Dame de Paris" and "Clavigo," both as performed by the Paris Opera Ballet.) PARIS -- With one pointed foot and a pair of eloquent arms, propelled by one powerful heart, guest Paris Opera etoile Isabel Guerin delivered a rousing reminder last night at the Garnier that Ballet is never dead; all it requires to live is a dancer as able to display her fragility as her agility and as compassionate as she is fierce. A week after William Forsythe foisted his own brand of anti-ballet pretension on the city where so much of the foundation of ballet was laid, Guerin, returning to the stage where she has touched so many hearts for 25 years, brought ballet back home to that foundation: It's the pointe, with a little help from the arms and a major investment from the soul. The foundation for last night's refresher course from Guerin was the mixed (in both senses of the word) Roland Petit/Jerome Robbins program with which the Paris Opera Ballet has opened its season at the Garnier. If I could Flash only a single moment from the evening, it would be when Guerin's Vivette, in Petit's "L'Arlesienne," enters to discover her fiance Frederi (Nicolas Le Riche) crumpled in a tight fetal position, and immediately rises on pointe, her toes shooting a heart-rending quiver through her whole body, and our bodies too. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Decisive Decade: 10 years of dance in France (From 2000 through 2010, the Dance Insider was the leading source for English language reviews of and news about the French dance scene. 'Decisive Decade' revisits that coverage and a critical period in the European dance scene. This article was first published on November 24, 2003.) PARIS -- Watching two recent performances here, from Vera Mantero and Joao Fiadeiro, I was reminded of the New York Times's ludicrous statement last summer that "the proscenium stage is passe." (The writer obviously hadn't read Brecht.) How could anyone be so unaware that the most crucial theater of operation for the choreographer is not the location in which the spectacle takes place, but the spaces of the body and the mind and where they meet in the vast landscapes of the spectator's imagination? Like Dance Theater Workshop, whose new theater was the subject of Gia Kourlas's irresponsibly ignorant argument, the Theatre de la Bastille (whose curatorial niche in France is similar to that of DTW, PS 122, and Danspace Project in New York) has also been renovated, at a cost of about $900,000. But with all due respect to the costs involved, and my own personal comfort in watching the second program of "Complicites portugaises" this past Saturday (the program concludes tonight) from the comfort of a re-upholstered seat, it was the many spaces that Vera Mantero probed in her 1999 "Olympia" that made this 20-minute show. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
MONTPELLIER, France -- The title of "Brilliant Corners," Emanuel Gat's latest work, was inspired by a Thelonius Monk Album from 1966, three years before Gat was born in Israel. Although Gat said at his press conference, prior to the work's French premiere July 2 at the Montpellier Danse Festival, that he had spent hours with the music (and that he also really liked thinking about the idea of "brilliant corners"), he himself composed the score to the piece. The dance opens with the ten performers (six men, four women), dressed in everyday clothes, standing in a clump, most of them with their backs to the audience. An atonal soundscape accompanies the opening sections and fades away after a time, almost without being noticed. A rectangular "playing field" is defined by down lighting from on high in the gorgeous outdoor theater of l'Agora (the former Cour des Ursulines, renovated and renamed last year as part of the Cité internationale de la Danse that also includes studios and artist apartments for both Montpellier Danse and the National Choreographic Center of Montpellier). A black drop upstage both limits the space and hides the arches of the former convent. It could be a playground, a parking lot, or some sort of streetscape where this gang has met up. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives: $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above.)
Cross Country / A Memoir of France Chez moi chez Baudelaire & Yeats If I wasn't already set on moving to France, seeing the five films of Truffaut's Antoine Doinel cycle (beginning with "The 400 Blows") all in one weekend at New York's Anthology FIlm Archives in 2000 did it. As if right on cue, then, the girl in the light green dress who greeted me and my three cats, Sonia, Mesha, and Hopey at 33 rue Lamartine -- one-time demeure of Baudelaire, which I'd be subletting while the girl was off to produce in the Off festival at Avignon -- on July 2, 2001 had the same name as the heroine of "L'amour en fuite" (Love on the Run), the last chapter of the cycle, in which Antoine, finally, maybe, finds his true love: Sabine. Movies are clearer than life, though (with the casting sometimes adding other layers; 'my' Sabine would later inform me that the the Sabine of my dreams, Truffaut's, was played by the lady of a whole generation of French kids' nightmares, Dorothee, better known to them as the insipid host of the kids' show that dominated the after-school air-waves in the 1980s); our story, that of Sabine and I, would rarely be simple over the next decade. Sometimes I think I never loved anyone as much as I loved Sabine. More than that, I loved who I was with her -- not the moments, too frequent, where I had to lean on her, which must have made her feel less like a woman and more like a mother -- but the moments where we would fall into a comic interplay, often each playing roles, for Sabine was a clown, by profession, and my saving grace, not availed of as often as it could be, was to be one by vocation. Click here to read the full 'Cross-Country' Chapter.
NEW YORK -- Donna Scro's New Jersey-based Freespace Dance took a provocative step in its self-produced program last week-end at St. Mark's Church, part of Danspace Project's Dance Access, by opening with a strictly musical performance. The force of the two introspective and melancholic, alternately soaring and brooding pieces, Amanda Harberg's "Eagles; Flight" and "The Storm," as performed by Harberg on piano and Brett Deubner on viola, was heightened by the sense of sacred space present in the performance, the seating and performance space being roughly the same as it is for St. Mark's Church services. Having attended many performances in this space over the years, I have seen the audience and performers positioned in virtually very conceivable configuration, but there was something simple and beautiful about the spectators facing the altar, as it were, which was heightened by the austere, uncloying, yet very intense and, with a very small 'r,' romantic music. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives, is $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above.)
Flash Preview, 7-1: The Greatest, brought down to Earth NEW YORK -- Raw and with the languorous appearance of being uncut, Anton Perich's "Muhammad Ali, the Long-lost Movie," screening tonight only at 7:30 at Anthology Film Archives, is a stunning, singularly American document of a singular bell-weather of the American trans-cultural scene in the early 1970s, a cinema verite portrait of a man in all his elements, as elementally American as he is elementally African-American and American Muslim, earnest and down to earth, nowhere demonstrated more movingly and simply then in the long middle section of the black and white video, set in a real camp Ali built up top a mountain in Deerlake, Pennsylvania in 1973, on a plateau surrounded by granite rocks he had painted with the names of his history, Johnson, Dempsey, Louis, Leonard, Marciano, Graziano.... After excerpts were shown on Manhattan Cable Public Access in 1973, the footage was "lost in my archives," Perich says, until he edited this new version last year. The result is a document -- perhaps the first -- which sheds and even explains, in Ali's own words, the public showman's veneer that, as much as his boxing, catapulted Ali to the fulcrum of the cultural zeitgeist in the cross-fertilized era that was the 1970s. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives, is $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above.)
Decisive Decade: 10 years of dance in France (From 2000 through 2010, the Dance Insider was the leading source for English language reviews of and news about the French dance scene. 'Decisive Decade' revisits that coverage and a critical period in the European dance scene. This article was first published on July 11, 2001. Emmanuelle Huynh now directs the Centre national de danse contemporaine in Angers, where her predecessors include Alwin Nikolais. Paul Ben-Itzak has since learned that Montpellier is not the most dangerous place in France. The current edition of the Montpellier Danse Festival continues through July 7.) MONTPELLIER, France -- So, dance insider, it's midnight Monday, and I'm strolling down the most dangerous street in the most dangerous town in France, with the widest grin on my face. I'm smiling because ahead of me walk my protectors, the two most beautiful women in Montpellier this summer, swinging my DJ gear between them and leading our return expedition to La Chapelle. Marta y Marta -- two ladies from Spain -- caught my DJ act Sunday night. It was just a small part of the "happening" at La Chapelle's After-Shave salon, the unofficial after-party of the Montpellier Danse festival. The encounter was enough to remember each other when we met again Monday afternoon at the old Dominican Church off Espace Charles de Gaulle, where Compagnie MC2 Luc Maubon performed "Languages Oublies," also not an official part of the festival but a beneficiary of the "all-dance, all-the-time" spirit that intoxicates this Southern city every year. I asked my new friends to the performance of Catherine Diverres, one of seven formal or informal spectacles I saw this week. I also caught Emmanuelle Huynh's prop-impelled, land of the unrestrained duet-grapple dance, an all-Jiri Kylian evening from the Netherlands Dance Theater, and planned and impromptu dance and dance and music performances at La Chapelle that amplified the official events, as well as solidified for me that this town, at this time, is very much like what NYC must have been in the 1960s, when ballet boomed and Judson birthed. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
NEW YORK -- Because off-Broadway theater has long proved essential to this city's artistic life, "off-Broadway dance" should not be considered a patronizing term for what is offered away from City Center and the gilded confines of Lincoln Center when major companies are between seasons. One reason I would hesitate to apply the term to recent spring offerings of the Juilliard School's Dance Division, however, is that this institution's renovated home, the Irene Diamond Building, is not only on Broadway but a stunning steel and glass addition to the neighborhood. Another is that the program "Juilliard Dances Repertory" (March 23-27), by including Bronislava Nijinska's rarely seen but historically essential 1923 setting of the Stravinsky powerhouse "Les Noces," made a stunning contribution to our artistic life out of all proportion to its occasionally raw, unflaggingly dedicated performance by 34 students. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives, is $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above.)
The Arts Voyager, 6-24: Auberge Espagnol By Paul Ben-Itzak PARIS -- If France has long placed comics art, or what the French call 'bande dessine' or even, more fancily, 'graphisme,' on the same level as the rest of the fine arts, the Galerie Martel, nestled into a side street off the rue de Paradis (once best known for its crystal and Limoges porcelain boutiques; years ago, one might have scored a piece of porcelain decorated by a young Renoir) in the cosmopolitan 10th arrondissement of Paris, may be the country's first gallery to both devote itself exclusively to the art and expand its definition. Its goal, the gallery says in its mission statement, is to lift the profile of 'graphisme' by exhibiting artists of the highest order whose point in common is exploring new territories and knocking down the barriers that often separate illustration, painting, comics, and animation. The gallery is also unique in its singular lack of chauvinism, demonstrating no particular proclivity for featuring French comics artists in disproportion with their actual importance. (As opposed to, say, Parisian cheese shops or dance theaters, where the French varietal dominates.) Thus, in its three-year existence, the Galerie Martel has already featured comics -- or, more properly, comix -- pioneers like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman, as well as Jose Munoz, Lorenzo Mattotti, Milton Glaser, Charles Burns, and Thomas Ott. With its latest exhibition, devoted to Spanish-born and Barcelona-heeled (you can see it in his pastel yellows and Mediterranean blues) Javier Mariscal, the Galerie Martel has outdone itself and extended both its vision and the horizons of its visitors when it comes to imagining the possibilities of and demolishing the barriers between 'comics' and the supposed finer arts. Subscribers click here to access the full Gallery and read the full article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal button above.)
The Arts Voyager, 6-21: Amen, Amon FORT WORTH -- A French pal recently expressed surprise when I told her I was considering moving to Texas; "C'est trés conservative, n'est pas?" Mais, non! If the opposite of 'conservative' is 'open,' then the Fort Worth area is hardly conservative when it comes to art. The Amon Carter Museum, which may have the most wide-ranging collection of 20th century American art in the U.S., is free 24/7. And if this isn't enough to encourage attendance, every Wednesday through July 27 the museum offers Storytime, aimed to engage children with its collection -- this Wednesday's program, "Yee-Haw!," will no doubt tap into Amon Carter's extensive trove of Charles Russell and Frederic Remington. In founding the museum by leaving it his Russell and Remington collection, Carter explained in his will, "As a youth, I was denied the advantages which go with the possession of money. I am endeavoring to give to those who have not had such advantages, but who aspire to the higher and finer attributes of life, those opportunities which were denied to me." The museum's offerings aren't just for kids; Will Barnett: Relationships, Intimate and Abstract, 1935-1965, running until December 31, marks the pioneering artist and and educator's 100th birthday with 50 works running the gamut from realism to abstraction. For an international angle, "Paris calls to us," a special program Thursday night, looks at American artists who studied in Paris, then puts you there by screening Stanley Donen's 1951 "An American in Paris." If Gene and Leslie make you feel like dancing, on Saturday Arts Fifth Avenue proposes "Tango on the Avenue," in the city's Historic Fairmount District. Subscribers click here to read more about Arts Fifth Avenue. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.) Also check out Fort Worth's Leonards Department Store Museum.
The Arts Voyager, 6-18: Pieces of a Dream NEW YORK -- Wednesday night, 8 o'clock. Our evening starts at the Old Heidelberg, dining with Martha Graham's complice and rightful heir Ron Protas, an accident that wasn't an accident, because the setting, unplanned, will set the tone. Once upon a time in New York there were critics of mettle who applied real writerly chops to art by artists who were more than clever, for whom technique was just a means and not an end, and who needed critics with chops to interpret the new art they were creating. This critic, John Leonard, started out as a novelist, beginning with "The Naked Martini," whose hero, Brian Kelly -- another writer with New York City dreams created by a writer with New York City dreams -- would wrap up a day of toil in the advertising houses of "the Lexington Avenue foothills" with a mug of dark beer, a kielbasa, and a proposal of marriage to the Old Heidelberg barmaid inevitably called Helga, swigging the cheap beer (as it was then) from his corner window table looking out at (in the book) York Avenue, somewhere around 86th. (Our waiter tells us the Heidelberg has been at its current location, 2nd just before 86th, since 1963; before that it was somewhere on or around 86th; Leonard's book was published in 1965.) So when the 'large' pitcher-sized mug of dark beer comes, I propose a toast to John Leonard, his ghost still sitting in the corner, but it might as well be a lament, a dirge for a city of ghosts, where art by dead artists is usually more interesting than the artists who can afford to live in Michael Bloomberg's New York Version 2.011, where we are told not to worry that the rent stabilization laws just expired, the last barrier to the complete Bobo-ization of New York crumbling with little sounding of the alarm. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
LONDON -- Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui has a strong intuitive sense about working with choreographers with whom he can create fertile collaborations. He pairs himself up successfully again and again with dance artists who on the surface may seem totally different from him in terms of style and genre, but whose intellectual approach and investigative physicality are very similar to his. He establishes another such collaboration in "Dunas" with modern flamenco goddess Maria Pages. .Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Flash Flashback, 6-15: Dance in the Age of Cholera (The Dance Insider has been revisiting its Flash Archives. This Flash was first posted on March 27, 2003.) GENT, Belgium -- The locals in Belgium refer to him as "Larbi," just Larbi. It's an important name. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, a young Belgian Morrocan choreographer already a cult figure here in Europe, makes dense, chaotic pieces about big topics -- war, race, culture, belief systems, individual identity, everything short of the kitchen sink. A quirky artist of the European post-Pina generation, he goes where many have gone before, recycling more than a few agitprop dance theater conventions, but adding twists that make his vision as big as the sky and wild as Vegas. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Decisive Decade: 10 years of dance in France (From 2000 through 2010, the Dance Insider was the leading source for English language reviews of and news about the French dance scene. In 'Decisive Decade,' we'll be revisiting that coverage and a critical period in the European dance scene. This article was first published on March 11, 2005.) PARIS -- Maria Pages is a modernizer. Maria Pages is a reactionary. She brings both sides to the Theatre National de Chaillot through tonight in a spectacle that, seen Wednesday, collates flamenco to music as disparate as Astor Piazzolla and Tom Waits and celebrates this high art form as articulated in the male feet and the female torso, shoulder blades, arms, head, and visage. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
CHARLESTON, South Carolina -- There's a song by Simon & Garfunkel called "The Only Living Boy in New York." A cover version of the song by Everything but the Girl came into my iPod shuffle while I was waiting in the Atlanta airport for my connecting flight from NYC to Charleston on May 28, and these lyrics seemed perfect in my feverish, sleep-deprived state: "Half of the time we're gone but we don't know where; we don't know when. Here I am...." Seemed perfect because there I certainly without a doubt was. I'd like to say more about Khmeropedies and Corella Ballet and something about Shen Wei, these being the three big dance companies I saw at the Spoleto Festival. Specifically about the experiment I believe choreographers Emmanuele Phuon and Christopher Wheeldon are working out on their respective companies, Khmeropedies and Corella Ballet, with varying degrees of finesse, versus Shen Wei's seemingly effortless creation of an individual movement vocabulary. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
The Belles of Charleston CHARLESTON, South Carolina -- The first thing you notice here is that everyone in South Carolina is very moist. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Flash Review, 6-2: 'Everything' and the Boys LONDON -- "The Most Incredible Thing," seen in its premiere earlier this Spring at Sadler's Wells, was a big event in the city's dance calendar, attracting more anticipatory press coverage than any other dance happening since the local screening of "The Black Swan." Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
The Arts Voyager, 6-1: Liberté et Fraternité If there are four things the French adore, they are: anniversaries, anarchists, comics, and Georges Brassens. The new exhibition at the Cite de la Musique at the parc La Villette in the north of Paris, co-curated by comics giant Joann Sfar (author of "The Rabbi's Cat" comics series and director of the film "Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life") testifies to all these amours in a giant way, commemorating the 90th anniversary of the birth and 30th of the death of Brassens, France's signature poet-troubador, in an creatively curated exhibition that uses comics to help revive the anarchist the veneer of nostalgia has obscured. Subscribers click here to read the full Article and see more Images. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
The Arts Voyager, 5-28: Charleston Diary NEW YORK -- In a few hours I leave for Charleston. Preparing my body-mind-heart to write again. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
In Memorium, 5-26: Stephen De Staebler I guard an image from the mid-1960s of Stephen De Staebler in an old, paint-splattered grey sweatshirt, sleeves bunched up on the elbows, jeans, white sneakers, glasses slightly ajar, a memory accompanied by the powdery scent of wet clay and dry ceramic dust, his studio nestled among the trees in the Berkeley Hills full of works in progress and slabs of dry, moist, and drying clay arrayed haphazardly on tables. If early encounters with art are critical in determining lifelong interest -- I was a kid and used to roughhouse with Stephen's son, Jordan -- this one did it for me, seeing sculpture first in process and not as dead matter in a stuffy museum. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)-->
The Johnston Letter, Volume 5, Number 5 (The Jill Johnston Literary Archive needs your support to preserve Johnston's distinguished legacy, including original manuscripts for her Village Voice reviews and columns, and for her 10 books and reviews and articles for the NY Times and Art in America; research material; a photo collection; correspondence; and over 270 journals which need to be preserved digitally before they decay. For more info, click here.) December 11, 2009 Your Royal Highness, You are more difficult to meet than the Pope, and I can't stand behind a rope any more to try to shake your hand. Anyway to shake your hand on the street would not accomplish my purpose. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Cross Country / A Memoir of France Chercher la femme "Girls who travel the metro -- Malcolm McLaren, "Paris." Hand in hand with melancholy as the two dominant French moods is 'joie de vivre,' often associated with food. I've stalled trying to get into this subject because on first glance it doesn't seem so profound as the rest of the subjects I hope to treat in this memoir. But in fact, in France the food thing is not just a foodie thing -- as it has become, say, in my hometown of San Francisco, a temple for worship of cuisine. Food in France is not just about sustenance, nor is it about hedonist enjoyment or making food paramount above all other things, as sometimes seems the case in San Francisco. Rather it's about appreciation and savoring -- savoring not just the savories but every moment, every function, ritualizing eating to elevate it from routine, so that it's not just about putting fuel in the body, but injecting art into everyday living. Click here to read the full 'Cross-Country' Chapter.
Decisive Decade: 10 years of dance in France (From 2000 through 2010, the Dance Insider was the leading source for English language reviews of and news about the French dance scene. In 'Decisive Decade,' we'll be revisiting that coverage and a critical period in the European dance scene. This article was first published on April 9, 2002.) PARIS -- Last night I saw what must be the ultimate in site-specific work: Just yards from where Marie-("Let them eat cake") Antoinette was imprisoned before she was beheaded, an orange-shirted dancer rattled off a litany of French pastries, from apple tart to quiche Lorraine, while behind her three others perpetrated a revolution on the set, toppling tables that had been meticulously crafted into two malleable stages at the beginning of the evening. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
NEW YORK -- One evening back in the 1990s, my friend the choreographer and dancer Rebecca Stenn and I were sitting in a tapas bar in the Village, where a Scandinavian presenter was telling us about Sasha Waltz, already the rage in Europe. In the intervening years, Waltz would go on to be given her own building in Berlin and enough additional means, from Germany and leading theaters throughout Europe, to basically work with whatever and as many artists as she wanted to in multiple genres and, most of all, the luxury of time to create new work. She never had to put her own work aside to take a teaching job so she could pay the rent and raise a family, thus risking the loss of creative momentum that might come with that. She was also given the means to hire a full-time dramaturge to make sure the work was disciplined. If Rebecca Stenn and Maura Nguyen Donohue (like Rebecca, a former longtime Dance Insider contributor) had been working in Europe, this is the kind of support they would have received. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter.. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives, is $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above.)
Cross Country / A Memoir of France Menaced by Melancholy "And I'm walking with Erik Satie." -- Malcolm McLaren, "Paris." In the fall of 2000, the Lyon Dance Festival was supposed to bring me to France to cover the event. I was to spend three weeks in Lyon, and I'd set up an apartment exchange with an English teacher in Paris for a fourth week, my W. 8th Street, NY apartment for hers on the Square Albin Cachot in the 13th arrondisement, not far from the 5th arr., home to the Latin Quarter. When the dance festival's press office botched the airline tickets, I first threw a fit, then decided that I'd be damned if I was going to let some French bureaucrats ruin my plans and douse my French dream; I arranged with the Parisian teacher to extend the exchange to a whole month. It was my first voyage outside of the United States in 20 years, since an ill-fated attempt when I was 19 to immigrate to an Israel which turned out to be not what it promised, but my Francophilia by this point was so intense that it over-ruled my fear of flying. Click here to read the full 'Cross-Country' Chapter.
The Buzz, 5-13: Trespassers
Flash Review, 5-13: Seance NEW YORK -- Stephen Schwartz, the musical theater wunderkind best known for his work on the Broadway hits "Godspell," "Pippin," and "Wicked," has ventured into the rarified world of opera. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
The Buzz, 5-11: Deaths & Entrances
The Arts Voyager, 5-9: Love, Art, & Death in the Time of Cholera NEW YORK -- "These are markers," Bill T. Jones was telling me. We were at last Wednesday's opening for the Gladstone Gallery's mammoth exhibition of the three mammoth works Keith Haring painted in real-time during a series of performances by the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Company in 1982, as well as two long display cases packed with drawings taken from Haring's notebooks, including a couple of dozen sketches of penises, most poignantly several under which the artist has written, "Drawing penises in front of Tiffany's." Subscribers click here to read the full Article and see the Haring sketchbook. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Cross Country / A Memoir of France A Story for Mimi Mimi is dancing, spinning in a circle, arms up, in her green dress with tiny pink flowers. Her dark brown hair is half again as long as a helmet, straight, her complexion darker than her Japanese-American origins might imply. The floor of her Liberty Street parlor in San Francisco is a shiny mahogany. I recall her as six, but my mother will later tell me she was three and a half when she died. I recall croup; my mom says it was sudden infant death syndrome. She just rolled over on her side and died. My mom tells me she was fond of "Madeline," a fairy tale of Paris written by a man, Ludwig Bemelmans, who had supposedly not spent much time there and had made his colorful illustrations after photos. "In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines
Flash Flashback 1, 5-2: Rinse, Lather, Repeat (The Dance Insider has been revisiting its Flash Archives. This Flash was first posted on March 29, 2002. In 2007, Pina Bausch set "Kontakthof" on high school students from Wuppertal. Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffman's 2010 documentary of that experience, "Dancing Dreams: Teenagers Dance Pina Bausch's 'Kontacthof'" will be projected at the Museum of Modern Art tonight at 6 p.m., as part of MOMA's New Cinema from Germany festival.) ANTWERP -- "In the beginning I had dancers who were busy with the way they looked and were afraid of losing something onstage," Pina Bausch told the New York Times in 1985. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Flash Film Review, 5-2: Dancing Elders (First posted June 18, 2004. The latest documentary on a making of Pina Bausch's "Kontacthof," this time the 2007 staging on high school students, Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffman's 2010 "Dancing Dreams: Teenagers Dance Pina Bausch's 'Kontacthof'," will be projected at the Museum of Modern Art tonight at 6 p.m., as part of MOMA's New Cinema from Germany festival.) PHILADELPHIA -- A love letter to human personality and how it intensifies with age, "Damen und Herren ab 65" (Ladies and Gentlemen Over 65) is that special work of art that provides a clear window into human nature. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Decisive Decade: 10 years of dance in France (From 2000 through 2010, the Dance Insider was the leading source for English language reviews of and news about the French dance scene. In 'Decisive Decade,' we'll be revisiting that coverage and a critical period in the European dance scene. This article was first published on June 4, 2004.) PARIS -- "What is the source of your imagination?" The question comes at the end of Pina Bausch's Wednesday press conference at the Theatre de la Ville - Sarah Bernhardt, which tonight sees the French premiere of "Nefes" (Turkish for "Breath"), Bausch's latest site-created work for the Tanztheater Wuppertal, this one developed in Istanbul, where it premiered last year. Bausch, seemingly forever clad in black, leans her chin on one palm, her eyes rolling upwards -- not in exasperation, but as if searching her head for the words -- as long tendrils of smoke spiral from the long cigarette held in her long fingers. (Only Pina Bausch can imbue cigarette smoke with drama; one could swear the smoke is lit with its own follow spot.) Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
The Arts Voyager, 4-27: Return to Innocence NEW YORK -- One of the pleasures of returning to New York after 10 years in France is that if the Chelsea gallery scene has become conflated -- an explosion of galleries has only meant more chaff to sort through to find the rare wheat -- the death of the Soho gallery scene that was the other distinctive feature of the late '90s has been countered by a flowering of gallery niches in new pockets of the city, notably the Lower East Side but also elsewhere in Gotham. So it was that a few weeks ago I found myself back in my old neighborhood, Greenwich Village, on one of its signature streets, W. 3rd, entering a nondescript building that seemed more likely to house doctors' offices than art galleries, and wandering into the Esopus Space (at 64 W. 3rd, #210) for an exhibition that, as far as the subject of the works (childhood) and medium (collage) go, might well have been created by a child at the prompting of a probing psychologist, but in fact had a far more sophisticated intelligence and developed aesthetic behind it. Click here to read more and see more images.
Cross Country / A Memoir of France My first memory ever -- I was two and a half years old, and it was 1963 -- is of my mom crying at the sink in our San Francisco home, with me looking up from the black speckled yellow linoleum kitchen floor and asking, "Mommy, what's wrong?" and her explaining, through the tears, "President Kennedy has been assassinated." The only memory I have of my parents together before they split up when I was 12 is my mom passionately embracing my dad when he returned after several hours outside during a violent electrical storm when we were living in rural Northern California in the late 1960s -- I was eight -- and my dad had to traverse a narrow, steep, rough mountain road between our house and the Pomo reservation to get home. My next and only other memory is of them hiking on a mountain above the Tomales Bay ranch where Hans and Dina Angress, both survivors of the Holocaust, had their annual herring festival for the dozens of children they'd adopted and their extended clan. He in his big brown cowboy hat was intensely talking to her; they would separate soon after. It was 1973. I have no memories of my parents happily together. Click here to read the full Chapter.
Letter from London, 4-26: Merging lanes LONDON -- "Held" opens with a crowd of school-boys, positioned in strict military lines, enacting a drill, while four of their peers beat out rousing rhythms on the drums. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Flash Review, 4-25: The Big Blink NEW YORK -- In Lostwax Productions' "Blinking," seen Friday at the Merce Cunningham Studio, collaborators Jamie Jewett and R. Luke DuBois explore what happens, physically and psychologically, when we blink. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Flash Flashback, 4-22: Grave Matters "'The (Court) pronounced a judgment in favor of the divorce prayed for, on the grounds of the refusal of the Count to admit Madame to the domicile conjugal.'" -- Edgar Allen Poe, recounting the divorce proceedings pitting Marie Taglioni against Gilbert des Voisins in the November 2, 1844 Evening Mirror. 50 years after her death, Taglioni's remains were relocated from Marseille to Paris and the tomb of the estranged husband who turned her away because she would not stop dancing. PARIS -- Officials at the Montmartre Cemetery this morning agreed to take Marie (also known as Maria) Taglioni's name off cemetery maps after an Italian Institute-Dance Insider conference revealed that the mother of pointe is not buried in the cemetery tomb which bears her name, but in the Pere Lachaise cemetery under the name of the ex-husband she divorced after he turned her away from their home because she wouldn't stop dancing. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Flash Flashback, 4-21: Going to the Chapel (The DI has been revisiting its Archives, full access to which is available to subscribers for $29.95/year. This Flash first appeared on November 30, 2004. Wim Wenders's new "Pina (3D)" will be previewed tonight at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin, in collaboration with the Dublin Dance Festival and the Goethe-Institut, with guests Barbara Kaufmann, rehearsal director of Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal, and company alumna Finola Cronin. And from April 27 to April 29 at the Centre National de la Danse in Pantin outside Paris, Foofwa d'Imobilité performs "Pina Jackson in Mercemoriam," a triple homage to Pina Bausch, Michael Jackson, and Merce Cunningham, in whose company d'Imobilité danced. Read recent work by Chris Dohse here.) NEW YORK -- Going to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to see Pina Bausch has become some weird kind of New York City ritual. Like if the Intellectual Elite were a Boy Scout troupe, there would be a merit badge for it. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.) The Arts Voyager, 4-19: Happy Journey Artifacts and artisans in Maryland; poet-artists in New Jersey; poets and artists in Pennsylvania
By Paul Ben-Itzak PERRYVILLE, MD -- When the Metropolitan Museum is presenting a bunch of black sheets as art -- the culprit here is Richard Serra, who used 'paintsticks' if you want to get technical about it -- it's time for the art voyager to get out of town. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives: $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Flash Review, 4-13: Exits and Entrances NEW YORK -- A line of ticket-buyers queued in the cold outside the Joyce Theater March 25, hoping for cancellations to see the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's legacy tour in the final weeklong season in Manhattan for the company. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Decisive Decade: 10 years of dance in France (From 2000 through 2010, the Dance Insider was the leading source for English language reviews of the French dance scene. In 'Decisive Decade,' we'll be revisiting those reviews and a critical period in the European dance scene. This article was first published on October 23, 2000.) PARIS -- For about seven years, or as long as I've been covering dance intensely, I've been hearing what a brilliant dude this guy Balanchine was. So much so that he doesn't even require a first name on first reference -- kinda like, well, "God." So I've not really broadcast the fact that, er, many of his ballets leave me cold. But I had a nagging sense -- mostly from seeing the work performed by Dance Theatre of Harlem and Suzanne Farrell's companies -- that it didn't need to be so. Well, Saturday night at the Palais Garnier, courtesy of Paris Opera Ballet dancers Jean-Guillaume Bart, Agnes Letestu, Delphine Moussin, Karin Averty, Beatrice Martel, Aurore Cordellier, and Dorothee Gilbert, I was re-educated: It definitely ain't necessarily so. Balanchine does not have to be coldly rendered. The abstract, architectural beauty of his ballets can be given, well, life, in a way that, er, gives it life. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
NEW YORK -- The Paul Taylor Dance Company's winter season crammed several novelties into its two weeks at City Center (February 22-March 6). Along with the usual pair of local premieres, programs also featured five revivals. The season's only performance of "Oh, You Kid!" (1999), danced to the accompaniment of Rick Benjamin's Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, was the first time the company had danced to live music since the November 6 and 7, 2009 performances of "Brief Encounters" at its Syracuse University premiere. For the March 1 performance featuring the 2001 "Black Tuesday," a work set to popular songs of the Great Depression, the top ticket price was -- wait for it -- $19.29. Other company news was not so wry: Annmaria Mazzini, whose dancing this season was resplendent as ever, is retiring after some 16 years in Taylor's service. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives, is $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above.)
NEW YORK -- Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong era. Oh to have been around -- in Paris, in New York, even in San Francisco -- to absorb the art, cinema, theater, dance and music being produced in the 20 years preceding and two decades following World War II. While the dance, particularly at New York City Ballet and the Martha Graham Dance Company, has not always been so carefully preserved, fortunately there still exist in New York enclaves where you can experience some of the art that emerged in this epoch. In the last week alone I've seen rare art by the American originals Stuart Davis and Romare Bearden (at DC Moore) and Raoul Walsh's rarely screened re-casting of his 1941 classic Humphrey Bogart gangster pic "High Sierra" as a 1949 Joel McCrea Western, "Colorado Territory," both being shown as part of Anthology Film Archives' Auto-Remake series. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal button above.))
The Buzz, 3-25: Philistines in the Temple NEW YORK -- Severe words, those in the headlines above, but by her outrageously idiotic, anti-intellectual, and blasphemous words in the lamentable Village Voice, Deborah Jowitt, once a vaunted dance critic of that once vaunted journal, asked for it. Here's what Jowitt wrote, in this week's edition of that once noble newspaper: "Ever since (Martha) Graham died in 1991, her company, now directed by Janet Eilber, has had to commission new works that complement hers; it also strives to make her towering works user-friendly through devices like pre-performance speeches." "Has had to"? This is like saying the Royal Shakespeare Company has had to commission new works that complement Shakespeare's; it is like saying Thornton Wilder or Eugene O'Neill's elemental and elementally American dramas are not inherently 'user-friendly.' How on Earth could Martha Graham, who traffics in such elemental human emotions and experiences, not be 'user-friendly'? Shame on you, Deborah Jowitt. Shame on you for your ignorance, for your anti-intellectualism, and for abetting the dumbing down of dance's most inherently universal art-maker by Janet Eilber and the rest of those who are currently decimating Martha's legacy.
Decisive Decade: 10 years of dance in France (From 2000 through 2010, the Dance Insider was the leading source for English language reviews of the French dance scene. In 'Decisive Decade,' we'll be revisiting those reviews and a critical period in the European dance scene. This article was first published on October 20, 2000.) PARIS -- It isn't hard to understand why Rudolf Nureyev would want to totally denude Petipa's Orientalist ballet "Raymonda" of most of the Russian mime elements. As detailed in Diane Solway's recent biography, Nureyev was in his dancing prime and wanted a ballet that would showcase dancing, for him, his partner Margot Fonteyn, and the corps. And it isn't hard to understand why the Paris Opera Ballet should treasure this first evening-length work by its late director. But in an age where, in North America at least, even leading ballet directors and arts presenters are aware that ballet has lost its relevance to many, a ballet so archaic in its representation of women and non-white cultures is left, devoid of the museum value its mime might have provided, and danced unconvincingly (technically or dramatically) by two of its three leads as it was last night at the Palais Garnier on the Paris Opera Ballet, with little justification for being presented in the year 2000. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $3.)
TULSA -- Classic tutu ballets like "Swan Lake" and "The Sleeping Beauty" are often thought of as the ultimate yardstick for measuring the maturity of a company. But other kinds of ballets can measure qualities every bit as important as the technical prowess the classics put to the test. John Cranko's 1969 "The Taming of the Shrew," which Tulsa Ballet performed last month at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center, is one of those other kinds, a work that tests skills such as theatrical range, character acting, and the ability to sustain narrative continuity. Subscribers click here to read the full Review.. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives, is $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above. )
The Arts Voyager, 3-17: Take Two
By Paul Ben-Itzak NEW YORK -- Why would the art voyager want to spend any part of an excursion inside a darkened room watching movies? Because the films in question can't be seen anywhere else. What's unique about Anthology Film Archives -- even as big-city cinematheques go, including its European counterparts -- is that since its founding more than 40 years ago by internationally renowned avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, the very curatorial focus and encadring of the programming has provided an outlet for films rarely seen anywhere else, 'old' and new, an eclectic sampling all of which usually have at least one thing to offer for every ardent cinephile. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives: $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above.)>
The Johnston Letter, Volume 5, Number 4 well i went to england and i didn't see any feminists nor too much of anybody else and i was neurotically famished and rationally cold and determinedly homesick and righteously paranoid but in nine or ten days i figured out the country and that was what i went for so it was an awful and worthwhile trip. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Decisive Decade: 10 years of dance in France (From 2000 through 2010, the Dance Insider was the leading source for English language reviews of the French dance scene. In 'Decisive Decade,' we'll be revisiting those reviews and a critical period in the European dance scene. This article was first published on April 24, 2003. VA Wolfl's latest work for Neuer Tanz receives its French premiere March 24 at the Theatre de la Ville in Paris.) BOBIGNY, Seine-Saint-Denis, France -- Sure, I kept re-inserting noise-muffling bits of wetted toilet tissue in my ears to save my hearing. Sure, the constant quick black-outs and lights back up were giving me an eye-ache. Sure, the repetitions were at times exasperating, and sure, I was watching the clock. But by the end of "Greenspans Aktentasche," VA Wolfl's 2001 tour-de-force not-about-Alan Greenspan's briefcase dance on the astonishingly and specifically virtuosic Neuer Tanz to open the Rencontres Choregraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis last night, the only reason I was watching the clock was to be sure I made the Last Metro, for I had been transported into Wonderland. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Flash Festival Reviews, 3-13: Rearview Mirror NEW YORK -- Walk by a school in Paris, and you're likely to spot a plaque over the entrance commemorating the hundreds of children from that school rounded up and "deported by the Vichy government, in the name of France," under the Occupation. The signs started going up in about 2000, the 60-year gap ending only after president Jacques Chirac, in one of his first speeches in 1995, said it was time for France to take responsibility for the deportations. Yet today, children from many of those same schools are still being picked up by the police and deported. Director Romain Goupil, who treats this subject in "Hand's up" (Les mains dans l'air) -- screening tonight at the Walter Reade during the Rendez-vous with French Cinema being presented there by the Film Society of Lincoln Center -- was careful to say, in a Q&A after Friday's screening, that one can't compare the two situations because no children are being sent to death camps. But the fact that it took France 60 years to officially acknowledge those wrongs of Vichy is one reason he begins his story in 2067, as the 68-year-old Milena looks back on what happened to her and a group of fellow 10-year-olds living in the lower-middle-class neighborhood behind Montmartre in 2009. "I wanted to show how ridiculous this (the expulsions of children) will look to us in 60 years." Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Flash Festival Review, 3-9: Repartir a Zero NEW YORK -- J'etait bouleversé par le film "Serie Noire" d'Alain Corneau, surtout le performance de Patrick Dewaere. I begin in French because the word 'bouleverse' is hard to translate in English, but seems the 'juste mot' to apply to how devastated one is after viewing this classic 1979 Franco-American film noir -- Corneau worked from noir progenitor Jim Thompson's novel -- as I was last night at the Walter Reade Theater, where it struck just one of the spectrum of moods evoked by the Film Society of Lincoln Center's contribution to the city-wide Rendez-vous with French Cinema, playing at the Walter Reade through March 13. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. )
NEW YORK -- Christopher Williams's choreography, seen in performance February 27, marked the second week of the 92nd Street Y's Harkness Dance Festival at Buttenwieser Hall. Subscribers click here to read the full Review.. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives, is $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above.)
By Paul Ben-Itzak NEW YORK --"In the course of my work," says Raghu Rai, receiving his first major solo exhibition in New York through March 20 at the Aicon Gallery at 35 Great Jones, "I find that I have been moving to focus on the changing equations of our times, trying to record the deeper universal human responses." A giant of photography who was nominated for the legendary Magnum Photos agency in 1977 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Rai has been published by the New Yorker, Life, Time, and others, and has always prized a certain fidelity to the reality of his subjects. "'When I slice out a space, a moment," he explains, "it should be done with such simplicity and faithfulness that when I give it back to life, life starts moving and flowing around it without a stutter." The panoply of his work on view at Aicon -- much of it for the first time in the U.S. -- includes black and white and color, photo-montage, human and nature. In its sum, in addition to serving as a testament to the photographer's craft and eye, it represents a vivid portrait of India as captured by its premiere visual chronicler. Subscribers click here to read the full article and see more images. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal button above.)
Newsflash, 3-1: WASHINGTON -- Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, the longest-running dance festival in the United States, established in 1933, will receive the National Medal of the Arts from U.S. president Barack Obama tomorrow at the White House, a Pillow spokesperson announced. Also receiving the award are theater critic Robert Brustein, pianist Van Cliburn, sculptor Mark di Suvero, poet Donald Hall, musician and music producer Quincy Jones, author Harper Lee, jazz musician Sonny Rollins, actress Meryl Streep, and singer and songwriter James Taylor.
The Buzz, 2-28: Say it ain't so, Paul Early last year, Paul McCartney compared those who don't believe in global warming to Holocaust deniers. So why is he now composing a ballet for a theater named after David Koch, head of the largest privately owned oil company in the world, major funder of the phony science which makes it possible for some to deny global warming, and one of the chief financers of a defeated California ballot measure which would have erected hurdles to that state's efforts to contain global warming? Subscribers click here to read the full Column. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives, is $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above.)
NEW YORK -- Seeing Edwin Denby frolic as a lusty billionaire in Rudy Burckhardt's restored 1968 experimental film classic "Money," preserved by Anthology Film Archives and presented at its theater at 2nd Avenue and 2nd Street again Saturday and Sunday night at 7:30 (I caught it Friday), one gets the sense that this is the performance the greatest American dance critic of all time has been waiting to give his whole life, after a lifetime of watching and reviewing others. Subscribers click here to read the full Review.. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives, is $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above. )J
For Sonia, absent companion still present. NEW YORK -- There have been many Flamenco flashes in the pan in recent years, legends in their own minds who seem so sure of their own prowess that they seem out of touch, and certainly not in touch with their audience. And then there are the grown-ups like Angel Munoz, quietly assured and confident, from the masterfully precise stamping of his feet through his eloquently poised trunk, poetically reaching arms and pivoting head, seeming to regard each person in the audience with twinkling eyes and a knowing familiarity. Subscribers click here to read the full Review.. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives, is $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
NEW YORK -- The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival's opening program Litup, seen Sunday, ignites the moment one enters the usually predictable space of Buttenwieser Hall. Subscribers click here to read the full Review.. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives, is $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Flash Review, 2-17: Flamenco Fizzes NEW YORK -- While it offers at least one stand-out dancer, Patricia Guerrero, stellar musical direction and playing from pianist Chano Dominguez and four haunting and tempestuous singers -- Alba Carmona, Blas Cordoba, Israel, and Rubio de Pruna -- Carlos Saura's "Flamenco Hoy," which had its U.S. premiere Wednesday night at City Center under the aegis of the World Music Institute, smells an awful light like flamenco for ignorant tourists (some of whom were evidently in the audience; who else would shush others for shouting "Ole!"?), a spectacle with little that is spectacular or innovative, at least as concerns the dance. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
The Art Voyager, 2-16: Rhapsody in cardboard, sheet metal, newspaper, paint.... NEW YORK -- The French art critic and compagnon de route of French artists such as Rousseau, Picasso, and Laurencin Andre Salmon recounts how a visitor to Picasso's Paris studio, seeing his "Guitar," made from cardboard, paper, wire, glue, and string in 1912, is said to have asked: "What is it? Does it rest on a pedestal? Does it hang on a wall? What is it, a painting or a sculpture?," to which Picasso replied, "It's nothing, it's a guitar." Making the rounds in Chelsea on a recent Thursday night, I stumbled upon an exhibition entitled, "Bacon's not the only thing that is cured by hanging from a string," featuring a roomfull of collages of a sort made from illuminated colored light-bulbs, hang-man's posts, and, in just about every case, photographs of people. 100 years after Picasso made collage legitimate, collage as an art form, at least when practiced by some professional artists, has become perverted and corrupted by concept. Click here to read the full Article and see more images.
School Audition Ad: The School at Jacob's Pillow, one of the most prestigious dance training centers in the U.S., will hold auditions in NYC on February 19 & 20 for two of its 2011 professional advancement programs: Jazz/Musical Theatre Dance and Contemporary. Led by acclaimed dance artists (Brad Musgrove & Milton Myers), auditions are structured as Master Classes and provide an excellent opportunity to take a professional class and gain audition experience. For more information, click here.
Media Watch, 2-14: Patrons of the Arts Dept. (Editor's note: David Koch, the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre patron who donated $100 million to refurbish City Ballet's home at the New York State Theater, subsequently renamed the David H. Koch Theater, was featured in Bob Herbert's Saturday column in the New York Times, "When Democracy Weakens."An excerpt follows; for the full article, click here. -- Paul Ben-Itzak.) "When the game is rigged in your favor, you win. So despite the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the big corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, the stock markets are up and all is well among the plutocrats. The endlessly egregious Koch brothers, David and Charles, are worth an estimated $35 billion. Yet they seem to feel as though society has treated them unfairly.... As Jane Mayer pointed out in her celebrated New Yorker article, 'The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry -- especially environmental regulation.' (A good hard look at their air-pollution record would make you sick.).... It's a perversion of democracy, indeed, when individuals like the Kochs have so much clout while the many millions of ordinary Americans have so little. What the Kochs want is coming to pass. Extend the tax cuts for the rich? No problem. Cut services to the poor, the sick, the young and the disabled? Check. Can we get you anything else, gentlemen?"
Flash Review, 2-14: 'Swan' dives NEW YORK -- Before Friday's opening of this season's run of Peter Martins's New York CIty Ballet production of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" (after Petipa, Ivanov, and Balanchine), I took advantage of the new copy of Edwin Denby's collected "Dance Writings" that I'd scored Wednesday at a book sale at the Amsterdam branch of the NY Public Library to get a little guidance into what I should be looking for. Reviewing Ballet Theatre's performance of the same ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House in the October 30, 1942 edition of the NY Herald Tribune, the greatest American dance critic of them all wrote, "This ballet makes little enough sense when done as a production number. It makes the best of sense if the three central figures can convey that the Swan Queen is really enchanted, the Prince really in love with her, and his Friend really his Friend." Unfortunately, while Sara Mearns acquitted herself well in the performance I saw -- even if her struggling swan seemed more like a Tweety Bird when it flapped its wings, she was entrancingly enchanted -- the other two principal characters concerned in Friday's cast were unable to get themselves even to the point where one could consider their virtues as Denby suggests. Jared Angle's Prince handled Mearns as if her Swan Queen had cooties. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
NEW YORK -- The first post-"Nutcracker" week of City Ballet repertory included an all-day salute to Balanchine on Saturday, January 22, his 107th birthday. Two all-Balanchine programs were performed, separated by a 6 p.m. class for scores of advanced SAB students, conducted onstage with authority and flourish by ballet master in chief Peter Martins. He seemed to know every student by his or her name as he called upon the best to demonstrate, say, the Balanchine way to open up one's arms or perform a tendu or take a bow, a demonstration as eye-opening as it was charming. Before the matinee performance, principal dancers Amar Ramasar, Robert Fairchld and Sterling Hyltin appeared in front of the curtain to ad lib comments about the ballets they were about to perform. Hyltin, who suffered a slip of the tongue, immediately won her audience back by confessing she was more nervous talking about "Duo Concertante" than she's ever been about dancing it. Her subsequent performance with its abundant subtleties of line, timing, continuity and charm proved she had no need to worry about any comparison with Kay Mazzo, who created the part. Fairchild, however, looked slightly flustered, up against the standard for deftly darting movement I saw Martins, Mr. Cool himself, set at the 'Duo' world premiere in 1972. (Fairchild is in good company; of all the great NYCB artists of the past, Martins is the one I miss the most.) Subscribers click here to read the full Letter. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives, is $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
The Art Voyager, 2-12: Gallery Hop-o-thermia NEW YORK -- Only a true art-fanatic with a death wish would walk 50 blocks to the Chelsea Art Valley on a polar night in Manhattan, when the towering buildings on the seemingly interminable blocks between 10th and 11th Avenue make the art voyager seem particularly naked in the Naked City. So there I was -- oui, moi -- with a scribbled list of a dozen galleries hosting openings Thursday night, in search of high middle-brow art 'arrosed' by red, red, wine. What I found was middle-concept middling art watered down by tepid white wine (doesn't stain like red), only one artist worth remarking among the 12, this defeated art voyager treading wearily home in his Fort Worth Mexican flea market tan cowboy boots, only to be saved by Joel McCrea riding out of the high country with Randollph Scott riding herd. Click here to read the full Column.
Flash Review, 2-10: Dance, ballerina, dance NEW YORK -- One of the under-rated factors which makes a ballerina is her direct relationship with her audience -- think of her as a kind of host. Perhaps this was not so important in classical ballet's real hey-day in the mid-19th century, when the style of what was going on onstage fit into the broader artistic discourse and cultural and social modes, but these days, when girls in tutus and men in tights can seem so removed from the gritty reality of, say, girls and boys marching for their rights in Cairo at the peril of their lives, it helps when ballet dancers can go that extra distance and reach beyond the footlights to make the spectators feel at home. While New York City Ballet certainly has a range of ballerinas and ballerinos, in the classical realm anyway it's truest ballerina in both ability and amiability may well be Ashley Bouder, who proved her case again Tuesday night at City Ballet dancing Balanchine's "The Source." Meanwhile, making their debuts as the leads in Balanchine's "Prodigal Son," Sara Mearns proved too short and Sean Suozzi's hair too long, and both truncated some of the ballet's crucial moments. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
NEW YORK -- Forget what you may have read elsewhere: With Susan Stroman's semi-new "For the Love of Duke," New York City Ballet has a run-away hit, that rare jazz ballet which makes ballet dancers look great even as the ballet dancers enhance the phenomenal music, in this case by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Those who complain about cliches in the work, as some critics have done, miss the point, and probably missed Stroman's transformational Broadway hit "Contact": The woman knows how to make choreography that connects to this quintessentially American musical form and that, putting it simply, dances jazz -- and, in this piece, shows that she knows how to bring out the jazz dancer in classically trained performers, who add a rare quickness, deftness, and dexterity to the mix that jazz dancers don't always have. Add a textbook lesson in how to interpret an archetypal contemporary ballet role -- that of the Siren in Balanchine's transformational 1929 "Prodigal Son" -- such as Maria Kowroski delivered in the ballet which followed the Stroman at City Ballet's matinee Saturday, and a flawless delivery of the Robbins-Glass urban ballet "Glass Pieces," and you have stunning proof of a new versatility in this troupe, which well-serves the choreography, when the dancers are well-served by the choreographers (which was not entirely the case in the Saturday evening performance). Subscribers click here to read the full Letter. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50. ) Letter from New York, 2-2: Battle of the Nuts New colors from ABT & Ratmansky, but City Ballet's Mr. B still sets standard
By Harris Green NEW YORK -- American Ballet Theatre's $5 million production of Alexei Ratmansky's "The Nutcracker," which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on December 23, promises to become that rarest of Christmas perennials, a "Nutcracker" that challenges New York City Ballet's version on its own spectacular terms. George Balanchine's staging has dominated the local market since it burst upon the scene in 1954. (It went nationwide on CBS television in 1957 and '58.) Willem Christensen's 1944 "Nutcracker" for San Francisco Ballet had been the first to be staged by a U.S. company. ABT has produced short-lived efforts by Mikhail Baryshnikov (1976) and Kevin McKenzie (1993), but neither went head to head with Balanchine's during the holidays. Only dance schools or troupes with a captive audience of relatives have regularly offered an alternative "Nutcracker" in New York around Christmas; now ABT, which has signed a five-year lease on BAM for December, has fielded a full-fledged contender. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives, is $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
NEW YORK -- After a temporary blip in my bludgeoning, er, burgeoning French theatrical career Friday night -- Sam Bernhardt, c'est moi -- I was glad to be back in the cultural thick of things Saturday, finding myself sitting next to Meredith Monk at Judson Church on Washington Square for the afternoon's Gathering in Tribute to Jill Johnston, a real gathering of the tribes, and School of American Ballet legend Suki Schorer Saturday night for an impeccable "Dances at a Gathering." Add a Lower East Side interlude at the Woodward Gallery on Eldridge Street, where artist Jo Ellen Van Ouwerkerk not only made the scene but made her own frames, and there was once more reason to believe that New York is still a many-splendored art capital, with a rich past and cause to be confident in its future. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50. )
Flash Review, 1-28: All in the family NEW YORK -- To give the performers their due, let's get the Flash out of the way first: If he's neither as physically accomplished as Damian Woetzel nor dramatically powerful as Peter Boal, Daniel Ulbricht brings to the title role in Balanchine and Kochno's 1929 "Prodigal Son" a unique innocence and vulnerability which adds credence to the story, especially when playing opposite Ask la Cour's Father; forget the usual over-the-hill critical buzzards ready to feed on the carcasses of ballerinas as soon as they approach 40, Wendy Whelan is as silken and lyrical and freely joyous in her musical expression as she's been at any point in her 25-year career; the School of American Ballet has at least four solid future candidates for the New York City Ballet, all of whom did school and company proud dancing with Whelan and Tyler Angle in Balanchine's 1981 "Mozartiana" last night, especially when it came to those eloquent Balanchine arms their elders seem to forget so often these days: Leah Chen, Katherine Finch, Lilia Hamdy, and Callie Reiff; and the NYCB orchestra under director Faycal Karoui would be worth paying to see even without the dancers, judging by its rendering of Tchaikovsky's Suite No. 4, Op. 61 for the same piece. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
NYC Ballet week 2: 'Symphony' in 2D; Ringer makes Robbins never lovelier NEW YORK -- As I tap danced my way along Broadway last night in my best Fred Astaire imitation -- not easy on a 'floor' of slush and ice -- following Thursday evening's performance by New York City Ballet of Balanchine's "Symphony in Three Movements," Christopher Wheeldon's "Polyphonia," and Jerome Robbins's homage to Fred and Rita "I'm Old-Fashioned," three indisputable facts could not be obscured even by the driving snow beating at my eyes: the women's corps at City Ballet, and its ability to do justice to Balanchine's magisterial musicality, is in trouble; Jenifer Ringer is not only the purest interpreter of Robbins's choreography I've seen in two decades on two continents and three great companies (San Francisco and Paris Opera Ballet, plus NYCB), but of his intentions; and Alastair Macaulay is the greatest waste of critical space ever to disgrace the pages of the NY Times. The opening of "Symphony in Three Movements" should be as driving as the Stravinsky music to which it is set. Last night, the women charged with this task looked like they would have been more at home in an aerobics class, except that they were behind the music. Things didn't pick up until Abi Stafford and Sebastien Marcovici cleared the stage for a duet that pushed and pulled, although a colleague pointed out that it was not enough; it might have been the under-impression left by what preceded them that left me over-impressed. The piece -- the pace, really -- picked up after that but it was yet another demonstration of how erratic this company has apparently become. Stand-out performances seem to be the exception rather than the rule, the result more of individual dancers' dedication and/or native talent than a steady hand at the wheel enforcing corps discipline and choreographic fidelity. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50. )
"Often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others." -- Albert Camus, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1957, Banquet Speech.. © 1957 the Nobel Foundation.
The Johnston Letter, Volume 5, Number 3 (The life and work of Jill Johnston, who passed away in September, will be celebrated Saturday, January 29 at 1 p.m. at Judson Memorial Church in New York, 55 Washingtown Square South.) I've read somewhere that women transform themselves, or set themselves on some path of achievement, only after an awakening. I don't know if this is so true anymore. I'm sure it was generally true before the early 1970s. Before then I had two awakenings myself, both of them pertaining to the vocation of writing. Quite inconveniently, my first coincided with marriage and motherhood, causing a conflict of interest and a burden of responsibility that was simply untenable at the time without extraordinary support. This was in 1957-58. My "calling" was to nothing more romantic than writing criticism. It was a powerful summons nonetheless, and I was undeterred in its pursuit for seven years (plying my trade in the Village Voice and Art News). In the end my awakening helped to cost me my new family. Read this story for free today only by clicking here.
Flash Review, 1-23: Not 'Phase' away NEW YORK -- Seeing Anne Terese De Keersmaeker dance her seminal 1982 "Violin Phase" yesterday at the Museum of Modern Art -- you can catch her at MOMA again today at 2 and 4 p.m. -- made it clearer than ever that this piece, performed by this dancer, should be required viewing in every modern dance class around the world. Which is not to say that it is just a *modern* dance masterpiece (perfectly at home among the other modern masterpieces at MOMA, where these performances are connected with the exhibition Online, Drawing Through the 20th Century), but that, craft aside -- because there's plenty of that too -- De Keersmaeker does what fewer and fewer modern dancers and choreographers seem interested in doing these days, and that is reaching out to and engaging the audience. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Flash Flashback, 1-23: Critics Cornered (The Dance Insider has been revisiting its Archives, 12 years of the best in dance from around the world available to all subscribers for just $29.95/year. This review, first published in the Winter 1998-99 print issue of the Dance Insider, explains the pivotal role of Anne Terese De Keersmaeker's "Phase" in the DI's decision to offer dance reviews.) I have always been leery about reviewing. Reviews can wield clout -- from influencing you about whether to see a show to closing one. While I am convinced about dances that have uplifted me or enraged me, most of what I see is in the middle. I can formulate opinions on these works, but I can't be sure you'd agree. I don't care for Trisha Brown, but many feel otherwise. The beautiful dancers of Ballet Hispanico make me feel weak in the knees, but if you want subtlety you might be wasting your money. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Flash Review, 1-20: 'Gathering' moss; 'Export' mess NEW YORK -- Jerome Robbins's "Dances at a Gathering" is one of those works you either love or you hate. I usually love it, but last night at New York City Ballet, in its first outing of the company's Winter season, I could see why people hate it. Individual performances within the 50-minute or so dance merited singling out -- Sara Mearns could be the second coming of Monique Meunier and, more important, Jenifer Ringer may just be Robbins's greatest active exponent -- but the spell this quiet rhapsody usually casts on me was absent. I even toyed with slugging this review "'Dances' deadly," as in boring. What its opponents damn the work for -- nothing ever happens -- is usually what I love it for, because the 'nothing' here is like that nothing of a leaf you press into your scrapbook and that years later recalls an ordinary day that, in memory, becomes precious. But for "Dances at a Gathering" to convey this, the dancers gathering have to have an underlying sense of how extraordinary their ordinary gathering is. Absent this awaremess, the work becomes just an assemblage of dances, gathered at random. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
For Joe Mazo. NEW YORK -- Winds raged across the city yesterday, and to see her arms in luxuriant action in Balanchine's "Valse-Fantaisie" for the opening of New York City Ballet's Winter season last night at Lincoln Center, one might have thought that principal Ashley Bouder had been out practicing in them, captured them and brought them back to the theater to play with. What I love about the Ballet is just when you think it has nothing new to show you, a dancer comes along and does something you've never seen before. Last night it started with Bouder's arms, riding currents of air and sound that only she could see and feel, standing apart from the hustle-bustle of life in New York City and our harried country and 120 bpm world in 2011, slowing down time itself if only for a fleeting 20 minutes, in an evening of performances as wild in their inconsistency as the opener, Balanchine's 1980 "Walpurgisnacht Ballet," used to be in its furious "bunhead's unbunned" finish, tamely rendered last night. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives, is $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Flash Announcement, 1-17: Double vision NEW YORK -- The Dance Insider Online, the leading magazine for dance professionals, teachers, and serious students, will double its coverage of New York City Ballet this season, adding overnight coverage of performances starting this week by editor Paul Ben-Itzak to ongoing analysis by veteran critic Harris Green. "With Harris Green covering ballet in New York and the phenomenal Alicia Chesser covering ballet from Tulsa, we already offer the most in-depth, authoritative, and colorful coverage around," said Ben-Itzak. "This season we'll be adding an element of immediacy to our coverage, because dancers shouldn't have to wait to read about their favorite performers and companies, and dance news should be just as urgent as any other news. "While the DI is elated to be able to provide the most complete coverage anywhere of New York City Ballet, it should be said that this is not just about New York City Ballet. In different ways, whether we're covering New York City Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, or Tulsa Ballet, what Harris, Alicia and I have in common is that we are never just discussing the company in question, but larger issues affecting ballet and dance, which is why our increased coverage of New York City Ballet will increase our national and international readership. "We anticipate that this will drive even more readers to our site on a daily basis to read our reviews -- and see our advertisers' messages. Harris Green has been watching dance for more than 50 years, and written about dance and dancers for the New York Times, Dance Magazine, Playbill, and other publications. Paul Ben-Itzak has written about the arts for Reuters, the New York Times, Newsday, the Anchorage Daily News and many others for more than 30 years. He co-founded the Dance Insider in 1998 with a group of leading journalists and professional dancers, opening the magazine's Paris bureau in 2000, and also covering dance from Paris from 2000 to 2010. Alicia Chesser has been reviewing dance for the Dance Insider for 10 years, from New York as well as Tulsa, and has also written for the Village Voice and Pointe magazine. Flash Festival Review, 1-14: Witness From Belarus, a tribute to Harold Pinter, a debt to the victims, and an adieu to Ellen Stewart
By Paul Ben-Itzak NEW YORK -- In his 2005 work "Puur," which I caught in Paris that year, the Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus promised "an act of resistance in the face of the violence of the world." In fact he did little more than replicate it -- including acts of barbarism against children -- on film, as live dancers writhed about on stage. The film was simply repulsive, the dancers simply not believable; what did they know about torture? And where was the resistance, let alone the tools for resistance, or even proposed mechanisms for coping with such violence? If I'd known the work then, I might have thought of what Devlin says in Harold Pinter's two-person play "Ashes to Ashes": "What authority do you think you yourself possess which would give you the right to discuss such an atrocity?" In the same play, the character Rebecca responds: "I have no such authority. Nothing has ever happened to me. Nothing has ever happened to any of my friends. I have never suffered. Nor have my friends." By contrast, the members of the Belarus Free Theatre, who last night performed "Being Harold Pinter" at La MaMa, where it continues through Sunday with an added show Monday at the Public Theater, have authority, authenticity, and even Harold Pinter, a melange of whose plays, notably "Ashes to Ashes" -- as well as his 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance lecture -- they mash up with real testimony from survivors of repression in Belarus, one of the last remaining Soviet-style dictatorships in the former Soviet Union. The work is also a testament to Pinter's authenticity in that sometimes it's difficult to tell which sections and text come from his plays and which come from the reality of the country the performers had to literally escape from just to get to New York and present the piece, part of the Under the Radar festival. That they knew they had a venue which would attract an audience which would make their escape worth it is also a tribute to Ellen Stewart, who founded La MaMa 50 years ago and whose demise the night before, at the age of 91, was announced on stage last night prior to the performance. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives, is $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Flash Flashback, 1-13: The Queen of Concept (The Dance Insider has been revisiting its Archives, 12 years of the best in dance from around the world available to all subscribers for just $29.95/year. This review was first published on June 28, 2005. Sarah Michelson's new work "Devotion" opens tonight at the Kitchen.) NEW YORK -- For her new "Daylight," Sarah Michelson radically reconfigured PS 122's second-floor theater, effectively dropping a new performance space in the midst of the old one. If you've performed in or observed performances at this space, you know the stage is bisected by two permanent columns; Michelson plopped the seating -- three custom-seating risers -- adjacent to and in between these fixtures. Then she painted everything -- including the walls -- white. The only exception to this snowy landscape was Claude Wampler's four large portraits of the dancers, delineated, etch-a-sketch style, in a continuous thin black line on an all-white canvas. A phalanx of upright chrome theatrical lights confronted the audience at the lip of the stage, mounted on poles like speared heads. A gentle haze thinly filled the air and the theater was bathed in natural blue-sky light pouring through a large exposed window on the south side of the auditorium. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
The Buzz, 1-13: Say it ain't so, (La) MaMa (The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of other DI staffers nor the magazine's advertisers.) NEW YORK -- Earlier this week, La MaMa, one of the most revered counter-cultural theatrical institutions in the world, presented a work, "Show Your Face," part of the Under the Radar festival, in which the performers, after depicting a demonstration in which the demonstrators were mowed down by securitiy forces, ranted at the audience for turning a blind eye to torture, repression, and war crimes, terminating with the accusatory refrain, directed at the spectators, "And you do nothing!" Perhaps they should have been directing their outrage at the theater's co-director, Mia Yoo. On January 31, La MaMa will collaborate with the Israeli government by hosting a gala to raise money for an 'Israeli Dance Week' at the East Viillage theater this spring whose net effect will be to help whitewash Israel's ongoing Apartheid policies, destruction of Palestinian homes and olive orchards, theft of Palestinian land, failure to take responsibility for what a UN investigation deemed war crimes in its invasion of the Gaza Strip in which it killed 1400 people, the majority civlians, lethal attack on the Turkish flotilla attempting to break Israel's illegal Gaza blockade of vital goods, denying Palestinians married to Israelis the right to enter the country, new restrictions on Israeli peace groups and, most recently, killing a Palestinian woman who was simply watching a demonstration against Israel's illegal Apartheid wall with American-manufactured tear gas. Subscribers click here to read the full Column. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Flash Flashback, 1-12: Asphalt Dance/Opera (The Dance Insider has been revisiting its Archives, 12 years of the best in dance from around the world available to all subscribers for just $29.95/year. This review was first published on July 13, 2000. Jane Comfort's latest work premieres this summer at Jacob's Pillow. The Ohio Theater shuttered its Soho doors in August when it was evicted by its landlord.) NEW YORK -- "You're a New Yorker now," a childhood friend from out-of-town said to me a few days ago. I thought about the quiet, peaceful, rural nature of Western Massachusetts where she and I grew up, and then the yearning we experienced when her mother brought us to "The City," where we walked up and down Broadway tirelessly, drinking in the overwhelming sights, sound, and movement. Her comment resurfaced in my mind last night as I sat down in the Ohio Theater, a loft space in Soho, for a performance of Jane Comfort and Company's dance/opera "Asphalt." The loading dock doors were open, letting in the street and the remaining summer daylight. People mingled, drinking beers and sodas, and Manchild, who plays the character Racine, DJ'd while guests danced in the stage space. It felt like one of the New Yorks that I know and love -- a summer evening spent not too far from the sidewalk and its sights, and music and sounds always with a beat, a beat that is entirely urban when it crosses my mind and enters my body. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
NEW YORK -- The best advice I can give you if you have a chance to see "Show Your Face," the Slovenian / Latvian collaboration between Betontanc & Umka.LV which opened last night and closes this night at La MaMa as part of the Public Theater's Under the Radar festival curated by Mark Russell, is to keep your eyes on the puppet and off the program notes. The latter talk grandly about particle physics and Freudian psychology and conclude by promising that "this performance will be the final judgment for us all, because we allowed ourselves to forget." The former is embodied, so to speak, by a faceless toddler-sized snowsuit, brought to life by three puppeteer/actors with such nuance and detail that it seems not only to have a face but a visage capable of displaying the most poignant emotions. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Flash Flashback, 1-7: Triplets (The Dance Insider has been revisiting its Archives, 12 years of the best in dance from around the world available to all subscribers for just $29.95/year. This review was first published on April 2, 2009. "Eonnagata," a collaboration between Sylvie Guillem, Russell Maliphant and Robert Lepage, comes to Cal Performances' Zellerbach Hall February 9. ) LONDON -- Audiences here flocked to Sadler's Wells February 26 to see "Eonnagata," conceived, created, and performed by a popular line-up of theater and dance professionals: Sylvie Guillem, Russell Maliphant and Robert Lepage. If these three mega-stars weren't enough to entice people to the theater, the costumes, designed by the inventive Alexander McQueen, added further pulling power. The subject matter of this collaboration was promising too: the sexually ambiguous existence of the 18th-century French noble Charles de Beaumont, Chevalier d'Eon, who as a spy and soldier spent much of a career dressed as a woman. As recounted in the program notes, this enigmatic character, whose actual sex remains a mystery to this day, had fascinated experimental theater director Lepage for many years, as had the world of the "onnagata," male Kabuki actors who train exclusively to perform female roles. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
The Artful Voyager, 1-7: Slaves of New York NEW YORK -- I'll say it: Dance seems to be calcified in New York, the same fossils that were here 10 years ago -- when I left for Paris -- even more entrenched. Indeed, the wilderness is so sallow that the New York Times even felt the need to send its chief dance critic abroad to review 27 "Nutcracker"s, as if even 27 "Nutcracker"s would have to be more interesting than one more New York dance concert, so desperately desolate has the local landscape apparently become. Subscribers click here to read the full Column. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Flash Interview, 1-5: Ballet's World
Traveler (First published in the Fall 2001 issue of the esteemed publicaiton Ballet Review. Ethan Stiefel, a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre and dean of the School of Dance at North Carolina School of the Arts, was recently named artistic director of the Royal New Zealand Ballet. To subscribe to Ballet Review, click here.) Ballet Review: You are a world traveler now, you go everywhere. What does the world look like to you? Ethan Stiefel: I must say I never have enough time to explore the various places. Basically I'm seeing the world through theaters or ballet studios. Actually, it's rather like a soap opera sometimes because every place reveals another side of humanity. There are characters and heroes. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Flash Reprise, 1-4: Dancing in Place & beyond (The Dance Insider has been revisiting its Archives, 12 years of the best in dance from around the world available to all subscribers for just $29.95/year. This review was first published on January 4, 2010. "Correspondances" opens at New York's Public Theater Friday, as part of the city-wide Under the Radar festival, curated by Mark Russell. More info here ) LONDON -- South African-born Nelisiwe Xaba and Malian Kettly Noel's dynamic duet "Correspondances," seen October 19 at the Place as part of Dance Umbrella's African Crossroads season, explores a relationship between two women through spoken dialogue, fashion and movement. Both performers exuded charisma and individuality which made them captivating to watch as they gave us a multi-colored portrait of both womanhood and friendship. Noel greets us first onstage, a diva obsessed with her appearance, wearing a mini- skirt and killer heels. While performing segmented ballet steps which exaggerate her long limbs, she chats to us about her likes and dislikes. She envisions her world in black or white, but certainly not gray. As if waiting to indulge her, a row of chic little outfits line the back wall, shoes and accessories scattered about in girly heaven. She's sassy, super confident and not someone whom I would like to run up against. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Flash Flashback, 1-4: Mr. Khan, Meet Mr. Larbi (The Dance Insider has been revisiting its Archives, 12 years of the best in dance from around the world available to all subscribers for just $29.95/year. This review was first published on October 12, 2005.) PARIS -- This morning, after taking my thermos coffee and croissant by a fountain in the Tuileries Garden, under a brilliant partially cloudy sky, I thought I'd walk home by way of the courtyard of the Louvre. Easier said than done; both the Tuileries and, across the street, the Louvre are now barricaded, with only narrow, security-guard manned entrances. How did we get from curiosity to fear? It's the same question that looms over "Zero Degrees," the new collaboration between European super-stars Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui which received its French premiere last night at the Theatre de la Ville - Sarah Bernhardt, danced by the choreographers. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year and receive full access to 12 years of archived reviews, commentary, and more, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Flash Review, 1-3: From sandbox to coffin (Originally published last summer by ExploreDance.com. Israel Galvan's seminal 2005 "The Golden Age" is reprised tonight through Saturday at the Theatre de la Ville - Sarah Bernhardt in Paris.) PARIS -- In his 2008 "El final de este estad de cosas, redux," which received its Paris premiere May 31 at the Theatre de la Ville - Sarah Bernhardt, where it continues through June 5, nouveau flamenco sensation Israel Galvan takes on nothing less than the Apocalypse, setting himself in a musical, set, and props kaleidescope that terminates in a stark and virtuoso fashion with the star trying to stomp his way out of an upright coffin as the life ebbs out of him. With Galvan, the line between clever gimmick and task-oriented flamenco -- in which the prop actually produces a new dance dynamic -- is sometimes thin. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
The Arts Voyager, 1-3: "The Naked Martini" NEW YORK -- Long before the Bolivian soldiers marched through Jay McInerney's 1984 coke-infused "Bright Lights, Big City," the demi-Bohemians of John Leonard's gin-addled "The Naked Martini" stood on the precipice that was 1964, straddling the wall between the space-age bachelor-pad early '60s and the mind-blowing latter part of the decade, hovering between semi-conciousness and heightened consciousness, the strictures of the '50s and the freedom of the late '60s. Which drug might be more dangerous or more enlightening is open to debate -- pick your poison -- but there's no question which is the higher literary achievement. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
The Artful Voyager, 12-27: Winter Wonderland NEW YORK -- Anyone who still thinks New Yorkers are hard, rude, complaining, obnoxious, sour, argumentative, difficult, depressed, combative, angry or just plain terminally unhappy has obviously never been in New York during a snowstorm, when hard exteriors melt into general bonhomie, doing a sort of Frosty in reverse. Subscribers click here to read the full Story. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year and receive full access to 12 years of archived reviews and more, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Flash Review, 12-24: Plum roles NEW YORK -- New York City Ballet's "The Nutcracker" has finally been challenged on its home turf by a major company during the Christmas season. Alexei Ratmansky's production of the Tchaikovsky ballet for American Ballet Theatre, which premiered last night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, reportedly cost $5 million and looks it. It differs from George Balanchine's in almost every way but not every new idea is going to wear as well as it did opening night before a roaring audience. Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg set new standards in partnerships. No, they were not the Sugar Plum Fairy and Her Cavalier. Ratmansky's Sugar Plum Fairy doesn't dance a step. (More to come.)
Flash Film
Reviews, 12-24: Hack Swans & Swains NEW YORK -- Among the assorted frustrations visited upon us during 2010, the most tantalizing for balletgoers was having two dance movies released in the same year. Instead of doubling one's pleasure, "Mao's Last Dancer," an Australian biopic, and "Black Swan," an unintentionally hilarious American horror film, failed to add up to even one movie that did justice to choreography and filmmaking, dancers and actors. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
The Buzz, 12-19: Jill, encore Jill Johnston was my hero. She gave me as a writer liberty -- and helped give many more as people liberty. And she was one of the sanest people I've ever encountered. Those of us that were fortunate enough to share her universe and understand her learned from her. Subscribers click here to read the full Column. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
The Buzz, 12-14: Felasco It's no wonder that the powers that be at New York's Dance Theater Workshop and the Bill T. Jones company got their story out first through a friendly non-specialist reporter at the NY Times before they bothered to tell the dance press that they'd merged. This thing is ill-considered. Dance Theater Workshop -- the actual presenting and (theoretically) dance service institution in the deal -- sacrifices a known brand, consecrating its name and the four+ decades of history behind it to the dustbin of history. Bill T. Jones gets an institution with its own building and only has to perform there once every two years for a couple of weeks. Little attention appears to have been given to the impact the absorption of DTW by Jones's organization will have on the community of dancers, let alone the wider community. For some perspective: A prototype actually exists for combining an established choreographer with a presenting organization. It's called the centre choregraphique, and there are 20 of them spread across France. The difference is that there, the 'home' company, usually that of a renowned international choreographer, also maintains a significant presence at home, with a mission that includes real outreach to the non-dancer community, in stark contrast to the inbred way that Dance Theater Workshop has always defined what it means by 'community.' Subscribers click here to read the full Column. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
The Artful Voyager, 12-10: Last Angels in Paris My last two months in Paris had not gone as expected. The first surprise was that I did not experience the exhilaration I'd expected when I'd stepped out of the Gare Montparnasse. Montparnasse! How could anyone, above all an American who had always felt the thread going back to Fitzgerald and Hemingway, not be moved? (My second place in Paris, just two months into my stay, was next to the Pasteur Institute in the 15th arrondisement -- where the AIDS or SIDA virus had been identified -- and thus not too far away from Montparnasse; I'd tried to find the bar on the rue Delambre where Fitzgerald and Hemingway had met, but it had changed hands so many times it was hard to distinguish. I'd settled with "Smoke," on the other side of the street -- not where Scott and Ernest met but, with its pony-tailed Chinese bartender who looked like Wayne Wang, a fitting faux dive to smoke my first Cuban, a fact I'd announced to the bartender before correctly guessing that the blues on the juke was "Albert King!") Subscribers click here to read the full Story. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
NEW YORK -- On my way last night to what used to be called -- because taxpayers financed it -- the New York State Theater, I stepped on a dead rat. Unfortunately, it was neither the first nor the most offensive rodent I would encounter. The next confronted me when I arrived at the theater -- my first time back in eight years -- and was reminded by the new lettering on its facade that it is now named after David Koch. If I liken Koch to a rat, it's not just because he's one of the main funders of the scary right-wing retrograde Luddite so-called "Tea Party." Nor is it just because his company, Koch Industries, has been responsible for environmental disasters, at least one deadly. No, it's because through his funding of phony science and, most recently, a statewide initiative in California which would have rolled back its efforts to slow down global warming, Koch -- who is also the main funder of American Ballet Theatre's new "Nutcracker" -- does not stand with the ballet's composer Tchaikovsky and its choreographer George Balanchine on the side of those who would foster children's dreams, but on the side of their worse nightmares, those in which an over-heated planet deprives them of their birthright. And why does dance, once again, stick its head in the sand and let itself be used as a shill? As for its "Nutcracker," unfortunately, last night at Lincoln Center, New York City Ballet chief Peter Martins did not need any help in quashing the dreams this dance play is supposed to exalt. To put it bluntly, I was horrified by what I saw, particularly in the first act, which is more or less given over to children. As written by Balanchine, their choreography is supposed to sing. It is vivid. It is choreography that actually treats children as capable of patterned movement and of finely-etched pantomime. But last night, the operative word was fudge -- not for the candy awaiting the kids in the land of the sweets, but for the way the choreography was smudged and raced over by everyone from the kids playing brethren Marie and Fritz to the rest of the corps of children. I'm not naming them because it's not their fault -- who let these children get onstage with such sloppy and rote moving and acting? Who told them it was enough just to be cute? Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
The Buzz, 12-6: Philistines at the temple NEW YORK -- In a feeble attempt to counter his being called out by myself and others over his latest cat-calling masquerading as criticism, in which he snipped that New York City Ballet's Jenifer Ringer and Jared Angle, seen in "The Nutcracker," must be eating too many sugar-plums, Alastair Macaulay has now made it clearer than ever how unqualified he is to be a critic. How long is his shameless employer the New York Times going to continue embarrassing itself and denigrating the high arts of dance and criticism by setting loose this superficial intellectual feather-weight on a major high art? Subscribers click here to read the full Column. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
The Artful Voyager, 12-6: Central Park in the Dark NEW YORK -- Sometimes a lot happens on a day when nothing seems to be happening. Friday was one of those days. It came at the end of a week that had been more than a bit grueling. Three weeks ago, on a rare late night bus trip uptown -- waaaaaaay uptown, to Yonkers -- at about 204th Street and Broadway I spotted the orange-red marquee of the House of Mofungo. I resisted the temptation to get off right there, but returned during the day later in the week, ending up at another more humble place up the street, where the classic Puerto Rican dish was exquisite -- a perfectly shaped mold of mashed plantains and pork, with delectable meat sauce poured over it and a salad on the side, all for $8, with the frosted Presidente beer a total of $11. Cumbia was playing of course. Subscribers click here to read the full Column. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)-->
The Buzz, 12-1: Critics Cornered NEW YORK -- Years ago at the War Memorial Opera House, watching a performance in San Francisco Ballet's United We Dance festival, I happened to be seated next to a critic for a well-known British dance magazine. Whenever a corps dancer with a well-rounded body appeared on stage, out came the binoculars. Well, the NY Times's Alastair Macaulay must have studied in the same school of aesthetics, which confounds the shape of the body with how it shapes the dance. For there it was again Monday, in Macaulay's review of the opening of New York City Ballet's production of Balanchine's version of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" where, according to Macaulay, "Jenifer Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, looked as if she'd eaten one sugar plum too many," and "Jared Angle, as the Cavalier, seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm." This is not dance criticism. This is cat-calling. It is unworthy of a critical column. And as far as fairness, it would be like me evaluating Macaulay not on his critical merits but on the puffiness of his cheeks in this photo of him. Macaulay's looks are as irrelevant to his job as Ringer and Angle's are to theirs. Otherwise, why don't we just put rail-thin models with no artistic ability up on stage and re-cast Alastair Macaulay with Hugh Grant and be done with it? Subscribers click here to read the full Column. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)-->
The Buzz, 11-24: Deja vu all over again NEW YORK -- I'm all for nostalgia. The other day I walked out of the upper east side digs in which I'm staying and felt like I was walking into a Woody Allen picture, circa 1979. Monday late afternoon, heading towards Central Park, I felt intoxicated, the very air evoking late afternoon promenades of springs past. (We've been having warm weather here in Manhattan.) However, if such emotional memory evocations can actually be good in life, infusing some of that youthful optimism in a present too often burdened by bitter experience, art should be more than just a classical repository. Even if 'classical' doesn't need to mean calcified -- the best classical art addresses eternal values, and so can continue to rejuvenate -- art needs new ideas and artists who push new boundaries, and even beyond those boundaries. On this return to New York after an absence of eight years, when I turn to the arts pages, be it of the Times, the New Yorker, or the sad pathetic shadow of what used to be the Village Voice, in dance this season I see mostly the tired ghosts of seasons past. In New York City alone, there are no less than four "Nutcracker" productions careening down on us. I am actually a "Nutcracker" fan, I try to cleave to its over-riding message -- extraordinary things are there for those with eyes to see -- but when some of New York City's main dance venues (usually over-concerned about not stepping on each other's toes) are serving up no less than four "Nutcrackers," at least two of them very old chestnuts that at this point may be overdone, it seems to once and for all answer the question of whether NY is the dance capital of the world, in the affirmative negative. Even the non-"Nutcracker" fare has little allure: The Alvin Ailey Company will no doubt continue careening down the 'athleticism' highway, leaving its soul in its wake. Oh look, Ballet Hispanico is performing at the Joyce Theater, a self-described 'home for modern dance' which seems not to understand what the word 'modern' means. And "Complexions," judging by Alastair Macaulay's recent review in the Times, seems to still think reaching for new heights means simply reaching up those legs. Where are the artists who are actually reaching for new movement ideas? Where is the kinetic curiosity and intellect? Where is the curatorial daring and risk?
Akram Khan's New 'Vertical Road' loses direction LONDON -- There is generally a high degree of metaphysical contemplation in Akram Khan's work, but his new endeavor "Vertical Road" is completely focused on it. In fact "Vertical Road" is about nothing less than a quest for spirituality. Seen at Sadler's Wells on October 9, Khan's new piece is a reaction to the fast and furious technological age that we live in, with its horizontal current that unrelentingly propels us forward, a world in which there is barely enough time to breathe let alone meditate. Khan writes in the program book that he is attracted to the idea of a vertical path which, in contrast to the horizontal one, allows us to both slow down and connect to our spirituality. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50. )
The Buzz, 11-22: Gangster's Paradise NEW YORK -- It's a helluva town but it can also be a helluva cold and hard place without an anchor. The good news is that your fellow New Yorkers know this too, and are usually looking for opportunities to create windows of humanity in the grey landscape. On an early passage one sweltering June in the 1980s, loaded down with luggage on my way back to San Francisco, I was rescued by a smartly coifed woman who worked at Lord and Taylor, and who not only hauled my big suitcase up the subway stairs for me, but answered my request for directions to the JFK Express by taking me there, on the way offering me her clean white tee-shirt to wipe the sweat off my face. Returning to New York City in earnest this week after nine years in France and a Greyhound and Amtrak tour of the country this summer and early fall, with prolonged stays in Fort Worth, Great Falls, and San Francisco, I found that old dread of being alone in this grand place returning. Subscribers click here to read the full Column. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
The Artful Voyager, 11-18: Hearts of the West "But first a few rules," said the first of six drivers from Greyhound and affiliates who would take me from my hometown of San Francisco to Great Falls, Montana, an itinerary which would take us through Truckee and across to Reno, then large casino-brightened stretches of Nevada, barren Utah landscapes, more green Idaho and finally terrain that went from flat seemingly endless highways to breathtaking mountain vistas stretching into eternity in Montana. I had initially dreaded being on a bus for some 32 hours -- we'd depart at 1 p.m. Tuesday, arrive in GF at 9:30 p.m. Wednesday -- but friends had re-assured me that this was not the same Greyhound I remembered from 1997 and an ill-fated trip from NYC to Ocean City, Maryland to see a dancer with whom my relationship was already drowning; the buses were all new and comfortable. "You really feel like you're on a train, the ride is so smooth," one had told me. Well, she was right that Bus #6144 did not remind me of 1997; it was definitely from the '70s and were it a 1/4-sized model would fit right in with my collection of '70s memorabilia. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above.)
Flash Diatribe, 11-17: The definition of Art Let's begin with an unassailable definition. Art is Communication. The artist wishes to communicate something to the viewer and the viewer wants to understand what that message is. It is this writer's opinion that this definition strips the question, "What is Art?" to its essence. For obvious reasons the academics like to put everything into categories. It is easier to study assigned groupings then to recognize and address differences. Fortunately, however, artists come in all shapes and sizes as well as engender art in all shapes and sizes. They, by definition, can't be categorized. Many years ago, in my youth, a new denizen of "New York City" (!), I paid my hard-earned $2.50 and entered, for the only time in my life, the vaunted Whitney Museum. The first thing that greeted me was a 12' x 12' room, painted all white; walls, floor and ceiling. In the far corner I spied six bricks in a row. Curiosity being my driving force, I went over and looked at the tag. "6 Bricks in a Row."!!! I turned around, walked out and have never again given them any of my money -- or respect. Click here to read the full Column.
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Flashback, 11-8: Instances of climax (Tomorrow through Saturday at the Theatre de la Ville - Sarah Bernhardt in Paris, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company renews its ongoing love affair with France for one of the last times, with the revival of the evening-length 1983 "Roaratorio," set with John Cage's music and never before seen in Paris. The following Flash of the city's celebration of the company's 50th anniversary was first published on August 13, 2002.) PARIS -- Is it possible for one choreographer to exhilarate and exasperate you -- er, me -- in the course of two days? If the choreographer is Merce Cunningham, aided and abetted by John Cage, David Tudor, and Takehisa Kosugi, absolutely! In celebration of the Merce Cunningham Company's 50th anniversary, the Paris Quartier d'Ete festival Saturday co-presented, with the Cinematheque de la Danse and the Institut National de l'Audiovisual, an evening of vintage Cunningham and Cage film and video at the Palais de Chaillot. The festivities moved last night to the Palais Royal, where they'll continue through Wednesday with the revival of "How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run," previously reviewed here by Chris Dohse, and "Event for the Palais Royal," experienced by moi last night. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Early returns on NYCB's early fall season: Mixed NEW YORK -- City Ballet broke with several traditions by beginning its new season with four weeks of early fall performances (September 14 - October 10). The traditional opening-night gala was delayed until the middle of the fourth week so seats that first evening could go for the special introductory prices of $50 and $25. Repertory included such novelties as the New York premiere of Benjamin Millepied's recent "Plainspoken" on October 7 and revivals of Peter Martins's rarely performed "Grazioso" (2007) and "The Magic Flute" (1982). Also out of the ordinary was an aggressive merchandising campaign built around a posh 9-by-12-inch booklet filled with studio portraits of principal dancers which was available for the taking in the theater lobby. Photographer Henry Leutwyler filmed everyone in casual poses and garb a la People Magazine. Most of the men are sporting the scraggly beards the guys insist upon growing between seasons. Daniel Ulbricht, however, is not only clean shaven, but the one dancer whom Leutwyler captured performing an actual step: a soaring 180-degree split leap, with ballerinas Teresa Reichlen, Sterling Hyltin and Sara Mearns seated on the floor behind him. (Yes, seated.) Letters to the editor and postings online promptly deplored the devastation such informality wreaked upon the dancers' images as golden, gifted beings, so unlike us folks out front. Frankly the only dancers' images that matter to me are those they create onstage. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter and see more photography. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
The Johnston Letter, Volume 5, Number 2 (Editor's note: The Judson Memorial Church celebrates "Judson Memorial Church and the Avant-Garde, 1954-1977," Oct. 29 & 30 with performances of work by Yvonne Rainer, Remy Charlip, Aileen Passloff, and others. Just as many Judson alumni went on to broader things beyond dance, so did its premiere chronicler, Jill Johnston, who graduated from being the Village Voice's first dance critic (as important as that was) to becoming one of the pioneers of the new journalism. Johnston passed away September 18, but the legacy of her writing is eternal, and we celebrate it today. The afterward by Ingrid Nyeboe celebrates a life and a life together.) I November 15 the evening news networks carried obituary film clips of Margaret Mead's life. At the end of the collage on each network she was shown in her cape waving good-bye to somebody, possibly Samoan children or friends in New York. The film was repeated on the late news, and I flipped the channels back and forth to catch the same segments over and over again, especially the last one showing her waving goodbye. Then I went to the phone and called a friend to say Margaret Mead had died and I felt very sad but I wasn't sure why since Margaret Mead never meant that much to me. I never read her books and someone gave me her autobiography but I only read ten pages of it. A year ago I sent her autobiography to my daughter but I don't think she read it either. The next day, November 16, at 11 a.m., the friend I called the night before called to tell me she had some "very bad news" for me, that my mother had died yesterday November 15 at 1:15 p.m. My mother was born in 1901 and so was Margaret Mead, so the only difference between them was that Margaret Mead was known to the world and my mother only to her family and friends. Click here to read the full Letter.
Flash Link, 10-29: Jill Johnston When the sorority of culture mavens got word of Jill Johnston's death in Sharon, Conn., we were shocked. We couldn't believe she was 81. She'd always been our lodestar and somehow our contemporary. Forty years or so ago, I was a bewildered young wife living in Halifax and teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. My primary link with New York, from which I'd recently emigrated, was my subscription to The Village Voice, where I read Johnston, who had been writing there since 1959. Click here to read the full story on Obit-Mag.com...
Job opening: Cirque du Soleil is seeking a strong professional contemporary female dancer who is also skilled in Indian dance styles such as Kathak, Bharatanatyam and/or Bollywood for its current shows and upcoming creations. For more information about this position and its requirements, please click here. Apply before December 17, 2010. www.cirquedusoleil.com/jobs.
The Arts Voyager, 10-28: Department store art FORT WORTH, TX -- It's hard to imagine that in a mid-America where the shopping mall has wiped out much of the landscape, a museum that celebrates a department store would prove one of the city's most fascinating cultural destinations, but then Leonards, celebrated with a cornucopia of artifacts by the Leonards Department Store Museum on Carroll Street off White Settlement Road, was no ordinary department store. And the community-minded mentality of its founders, Obie and Marvin Leonard, has little in common with today's generic cookie-cutter mall stores, often owned by faceless out-of-town corporations. It took up six city blocks and, when the crowds became so large they created a downtown parking problem, Leonards didn't stop at building a parking lot; in 1963 it introduced its own free subway system to get customers from the lot on the Trinity River to the store, the first of its kind in the nation. Such was Leonards' investment in the local community that when President Roosevelt declared a banking holiday in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression, Leonards responded by issuing its own store scrip, cashing paychecks for a combination of money and scrip -- which other area shops decided to honor. Click here to read the full Article. The Arts Voyager, 10-23: From tango to teaching Gracey Tune taps an art vein in Texas
By Paul Ben-Itzak (This article was commissioned by and will also be published on ExploreDance.com.) FORT WORTH, TX -- When some who have not experienced it directly think 'home schooling,' they conjure images of children kept at home being taught all day by their parents, and not meeting other kids. Others might think of it as being largely faith-based, motivated by parents' desires to raise their children in their own belief systems, free from outside influences. In fact, parents who choose what they call the HS option often turn to outside resources. Sometimes this can involve pooling resources with other parents also home schooling their kids, but it can also mean turning to professionals for some subjects. It was in response to such a need that in 2006 Arts Fifth Avenue (A5A), an all-purpose cultural center offering a full gamut of arts performance and participation options to the historically rich and demographically diverse Fairmount district (the largest historical landmark neighborhood in the southwestern US), whose streets are lined with ante-bellum houses and teeming with cats, decided to add home schooling in the arts to its rich palette. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? Yearly subscription, including full access to archives: $29.95. To subscribe, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Performance Ad: "The Lecture," a solo dance for Daniel Gwirtzman, explores the intersection of words and movement, of representation and abstraction. Set to a score of pre-recorded lectures, the piece blends the serious with the comic, the existential with the everyday. See the performer the DanceBreak Foundation named one of "the next generation of great Broadway choreographers." "The Lecture" premieres at the Ailey Citigroup Theater Tuesday, Nov. 2 at 7 p.m. Tickets: $20 General Admission; $10 Students and Seniors (ID required). Click here for tickets and more information.
Copyright 2010 Alicia Chesser TULSA -- For a medium-sized ballet company, putting on "Swan Lake" is daunting in itself. Putting on "Swan Lake" after losing 11 dancers from your company of 28 and hiring 12 new ones who arrive two months before work starts from all over the world, and furthermore casting as Odette/Odile a young woman who has never done the part before and has spent the past year recovering from a devastating injury -- this sounds like the sort of effort that would make even the most confident artistic director invite the board to send him on a brief vacation. But Marcello Angelini has chosen to relish this very challenge, and his Tulsa Ballet performed a "Swan Lake" (seen September 24 and 25 at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center) that was technically sure and emotionally charged. Subscribers click here to read the full Review and see more photography. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe now for just $29.95/year, just click the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
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Review, 10-12: Balancing acts BERKELEY -- Seen Sunday at Zellerbach Hall in the last performance of its current touring untitled show, Circuz Oz delivered a spectacle that veered wildly from the embarassing (white lady rap rifs that were old 20 years ago) to the refreshing (a take-off on the nouveau cirque trapeze duet which splits the man's pants asunder and busts the routine's conventions wide open). Perhaps I'm too jaded, but the basic tumbling, juggling, and shoulder-balancing feats which constituted the bulk of the first act were nothing to move you to the edge of your seat, and the humor delivered by MC Sarah Ward veered from simply unoriginal to wince-inducing (the rap riff). An exception was a balancing act in which the performer (unspecified in the program) maintained an escalating number of cigar boxes between two hands, then neatly disassembled them by flipping them one by one to a colleague who tossed them in a cart, maintaining the dwindling number of boxes between his hands until they were all gone. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
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Flashback, 10-7: Going with the Tide (First posted on May 19, 2006. Sasha Waltz & Guests performs Sasha Waltz's "Gezeiten" beginning November 3 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.) PARIS -- Speaking of would-be choreographer-healers, as Chappelle Chambers does today in her Flash of Heidi Latsky, personal illness isn't the only malady dance makers would treat these days. If I had a Euro for every press release I receive that promises a response to the all the disaster, death, and destruction, I'd be writing you right now from my own private island (buttressed by Bechtel, bien sur). Unfortunately, like Wim Vandekeybus's recent torture fest, in the end most of these efforts that I've seen simply replicate the dark deeds without offering any kind of real response, invariably leaving me asking, "You're dancers; what do you know about suffering?" I'm not saying artists need to solve or cure our troubles; but where they have promised a response to them, I think it's fair to expect that they're going to use the tools available to them to shed some light. For her new "Gezeiten" (Tides), receiving its French premiere through tomorrow night at the Theatre de la Ville - Sarah Bernhardt, Sasha Waltz wanted to use her skills "to give an account" of how our constant exposure to natural and man-made disasters -- in this age of information globalization -- affects us individually and as a society. She also wanted, she says in the program notes, to exploit that the theater setting would not allow us to simply switch the channel but assign "more active participation" to the spectators. Like Ernest Borgnine on the Poseidon, we'd be trapped. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Jeanne Mordoj, Kataline Patkai, Isabelle Esposito & Marie Chouinard -- Reflections on forms of beauty "Elle va entrer vivante dans un pays etranger." -- Jeanne Mordoj PARIS -- Sure, dance has aesthetic, musical, geometrical, and narrative rewards, but the sexual or if you prefer purely aesthetic appeal of the body as one of the art's major attractions -- to dance fans and critics alike -- is not to be denied. And yet does the body have to be perfect in its depiction to compel us? Can a body that doesn't conform to typical beauty standards nonetheless tell a beautiful story that beautifully communicates to the audience? Can beautiful bodies fail to communicate? Three shows seen here offer an opportunity for reflection. Subscribers click here to read the full Journal. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Flash Review, 9-27: Shoes, don't fail me now LONDON -- "Shoes" tells the history of Western society's obsession with shoes. It is an extravagant, glossy production which brings together the most unlikely personalities of the contemporary dance and musical theater worlds, in the most atypical setting --- not the West End, London's home of musicals, but Sadler's Wells Theater, where I saw it September 7. Written and composed by Richard Thomas (of "Jerry Springer, the Opera" fame) with overall direction and choreography by Stephen Mear, it also contains input from guest choreographers Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Aletta Collins, Kate Prince and Mark Smith. Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Flash View, 9-21: An Open Letter to Batsheva Dance Company (Editor's note: Alternate points of view are welcome in these pages.) Dear Batsheva, We are a group of New York-based human rights activists and artists calling for a boycott of your performances at the Joyce Theater in New York City (Sept. 21 - Oct. 3) due to your collaboration with the Israeli state and its Brand Israel campaign. Launched in 2005, Brand Israel is a government public relations initiative which uses cultural productions to distract from Israel's daily human rights violations. In 2009 Arye Mekel of Israel's foreign ministry stated, "We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theater companies, exhibits.... This way you show Israel's prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war." While efforts to promote a positive image of Israel abroad persist, Palestinians continue to suffer from Israeli state policies. Click here to read the full Letter..
Flash Book Review, 9-20: Avril in Paris PARIS -- If it's relatively easy to find reasonably priced biographies of French artists in the bookstalls that line the Seine, it's harder to find chronicles as interested in the artistic legacies of their subjects as they are in artfully recreating the more superficial aspects of their personal lives. A biography I found of Suzanne Valadon, the one-time Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir model who became a painter in her own right, developing a uniquely personal and natural style, turned out to be less a serious study of her life and work and their originality than a fanciful re-imagining of the colorful conversations she must have had with her son, the painter Maurice Utrillo, and her companion/his friend Felix Utter. Another on Marie Laurencin -- a member of the pre-WWI circle of Picasso, Apollinaire, and Rousseau, and a sometimes designer for dance, notably Nijinska's "Les Biches" -- spent more time on Laurencin's relations with the author's mother than analyzing the creative force behind her willowy, dreamy portraits. Jane Avril, by contrast -- you know her as the svelte dancer immortalized by Toulouse Lautrec -- lucked out in landing Francois Caradec, a giant of the French literary scene and the author of "Jane Avril," to pen her story. (Published by Fayard in 2001 with the price of 18.75 Euros; Caradec passed away in 2008.) Subscribers click here to read the full Review. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the Subscribe button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Flash News, 9-18: Bon Voyage, Jilly HARTFORD, CT -- Jill Johnston, a giant in American Letters who ushered in a new age in dance before going on to help usher in a new age in journalism, and a columnist and chroniclist for the Dance Insider since 2005, died Saturday at Hartford Hospital at the age of 81, her spouse and companion of 30 years, Ingrid Nyeboe, announced, after suffering a stroke September 9, nine days after undergoing minimally invasive open heart surgery to treat atrial fibrillation.
"As Jill was a pioneer not just in dance criticism but in 20th century journalism and literature, dance analogies might be too limiting," said Dance Insider publisher Paul Ben-Itzak. "That said, as a dance critic she was our Merce Cunningham. Just as dance lost the last of its pioneering giants when Cunningham passed away last year, dance criticism has now lost the last of its giants." Click here to read the full Article.
Copyright 2010 Harris Green NEW YORK -- The final five weeks of City Ballet's spring - summer season were particularly newsworthy. Along with premieres of the four remaining works commissioned for the "Architecture of Dance -- New Choreography and Music Festival," the company offered farewell performances by principal conductor Maurice Kaplow and four principal dancers. I passed up the opportunity to bid goodbye to Kaplow and Yvonne Borree but the salutes to the departing Philip Neal (June 13), Albert Evans (June 20), and Darci Kistler (June 27) could not be missed. There's a crescendo of appreciation at these farewells that never fails to move me: Much of the audience gets to its feet during the final curtain call for the cast. Everyone else rises when the curtain opens on the honoree alone onstage. Female principals enter one by one bearing bouquets for their colleague. Male principals bearing a single rose come on single file. In some cases, spouses, relatives and offspring join in. Finally, ballet master in chief Peter Martins makes grand, commanding gestures to the wings and scores of dancers, the rest of the roster of New York City Ballet, stream onstage, applauding as they enter as everyone in the theater has been doing and will continue doing for some time as confetti and glitter strips swirl down. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter and see more photos. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe now for just $29.95/year, just click the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Flash Flashback, 9-9: Comes the Rain (First published June 21, 2007. Pina Bausch's "Vollmond" opens at the Brooklyn Academy of Music September 29.) PARIS -- Audience assault seems to be the tactic du jour for seasoned choreographers who have run out of new kinetic ideas. First there was Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who in two successive programs here last month from her company Rosas managed to attack, respectively (or rather disrespectfully) the eardrums and the lungs of the audience at the Theatre de la Ville - Sarah Bernhardt. Now Pina Bausch, whose last four creations rely mostly on the native talents of her performers and regurgitating old dramatic and scenic schtick, has chosen to conclude her new "Vollmond," which opened Saturday at the Theatre de la Ville, with over-amped, eardrum-splitting generic rock 'n' roll. After I mounted the aisle and pushed open the exit doors when I couldn't take it any more, I paused at the threshold of Bernhardt's dressing room long enough to say "Sorry Sarah," that the dramatic bombast with which the Divine One made this theater's name had been replaced this night by pure bombast. Subscribers click here to read the full Article. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
The Buzz, 9-8: Dancing on their graves (The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of other DI writers, staffers, or advertisers. Alternate opinions are welcome in these pages.) The Joyce Theater in New York, which hosts the Batsheva Dance Company beginning Sept. 21, along with its defenders, will no doubt argue that Israel's national dance company -- that's how the Joyce's website describes it -- should be exempted from the growing and hugely successful (and peaceful) Palestinian-led BDS (boycott, divestiture, sanction) movement because 'art' should be separate from 'politics.' Subscribers click here to read the full Column. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, click on the 'Subscribe' button above.)
Of Birmingham, Balanchine, the Bolshoi, Balanchine, and Balanchine and notation LONDON -- Like many urbanites residing in one of the world's great capitals of culture, I get so absorbed in the events and activities of London that I sometimes forget there might be high quality dance elsewhere in the regions. One Friday earlier this summer I sought to rectify this oversight, and took the train to Birmingham, England's second largest city, to watch Birmingham Royal Ballet's "On Their Toes!," a mixed bill comprising George Balanchine's masterpiece of abstract imperial classicism "Theme and Variations," Hans Van Manen's erotically modernist "Grosse Fuge," and "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue," which shows Balanchine's gift for comedy, theatricality, and vaudevillian japes. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter and see more photography. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Spring Met season: From eternity to here NEW YORK -- American Ballet Theatre celebrated its 70th anniversary by offering few novelties during its spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House (May 17-July 10). Its opening-night gala would have benefited no end from, say, a sneak preview of the pas de deux from Alexei Ratmansky's forthcoming "Nutcracker" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Instead, ABT used the evening mostly for fond backward looks at its repertory and superstars. Glamorous ballerinas Lupe Serrano, Martine Van Hamel, Natalia Makarova, Alessandra Ferri and Nina Ananiashvili, all smashingly gowned, followed by the markedly less glamorous Mikhail Baryshnikov and Frederic Franklin, were summoned from the wings to waves of applause. Notable by their absence: Cynthia Gregory and Susan Jaffe. Alicia Alonso would receive a tumultuous 90th birthday tribute of her own weeks later -- but I'm getting ahead of myself. Subscribers click here to read the full Letter and see more photography. (Not yet a subscriber? To subscribe today for just $29.95/year, just click on the PayPal 'Subscribe' button above. Just want to read this story? E-mail us to buy it for just $2.50.)
Culture and Cowboys: It's easy to access and to create access for culture in places like New York City. But some, be they artists, curators, or philanthropists, prefer to make art and make art accessible where they've found themselves. While Fort Worth, Texas prides itself on its cowboy heritage -- a weekly 'cattle run' even trots out 20 tired-looking longhorns daily to promenade for tourists in the city's historic stockyards -- it's also been a place where individuals can carve out cultural niches to lure the wider public. These include noted tap dancer Gracey Tune (Tommy's sister), who 20 years ago founded Arts Fifth Avenue, which offers everything from tap for kids to Argentine tango milongas for adults to "Shakespeare in the parking lot"; and Amon G. Carter, a newspaper man whose biggest legacy today is the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, which is both a repository for Carter's substantial collection of chroniclers of the West Frederick Remington (bottom image above) and Charles M. Russell and a leading national exhibitor of modern art, with a rich permanent collection of photo | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
