Tom Phillips - danceviewtimes

Mama Anabella

Distance / decay / by Pioneers Go East Collective
Anabella Lenzu, choreographer/performance artist
Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, director & filmmaker
LaMama Experimental Theatre Club
New York, New York
May 8, 2026

In the unlikely event that women ever achieve equal rights in America, someone should put up a statue of Anabella Lenzu. In her new solo, she dances the full scope of humanity in female form.

Distance /decay / begins in captivity. To a sound track of solitary, sad poetry by

Masculine Feminine Vangeline

Directed, choreographed, and performed by Vangeline
Costumes by Machine Dazzle
Music by Ray Barragan Sweeten
Lighting by Ayumu "Poe" Saegusa
LaMama Moves! Festival at LaMama Experimental Theater, New York
April 18, 2026

Butoh artiste Vangeline continues to amaze. Last year she was synching brain waves with a male Japanese dancer in a piece (which I didn’t see) called Man/Woman. This year she has dispensed with punctuation and partner, and become a complete being —male and female, animal, vegetable

Air Boxing in Brooklyn

"Shadowboxing in Blue"
Danse Theater Surreality
Directed by Lauren Hlubny and Kyra Hauck
Haven Boxing, Brooklyn
October 4, 2025

No one who has watched a championship boxing match, and seen the fighters fall into each other's arms at the final bell, can doubt the emotional range and depth of boxing. No sport is a better metaphor for life, in all its glory and humiliation.

Shadowboxing is something else. It's punching the air, the only target

book review

Jill Johnston's Theatre of Life

The Essential Jill Johnston Reader
Edited by Clare Croft
Duke University Press, 2024

Everyone knows that post-modern dance began at Judson Memorial Church in the early 1960s, but few people today remember what actually happened there. Luckily, the Village Voice was on the story, and sent its most daring critic to cover it. Jill Johnston’s columns of the 1960s and 70s have now been collected in a book, an invaluable chronicle of dance in the context of a

interview

Vangeline's Story

Butoh began in the ruins of post-war Japan as the "dance of utter darkness." Today it is performed and taught all over the world, and increasingly influential in other techniques and styles. No one is more responsible for this than Vangeline, founder and director of the New York Butoh Institute, which marks its 20th anniversary in 2023. After many years on the margins of the dance world, this year she is flooded in fellowships – including a grant from

interview

Isadora in the 21st Century: Interview with Lori Belilove

Isadora Duncan was and is an outlier – 100 years ago, a rebel against the academic dance establishment, and now, a pure classicist in a free-wheeling, eclectic dance environment. Today, no one embodies Isadora’s life and work more than Lori Belilove, director of the Isadora Duncan Dance Company and Foundation. Working out of a loft-studio in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, she has spent decades as a dancer, teacher, and choreographer, re-inventing Duncan Dance for

Something Out of Nothing

"For a Dance Never Choreographed"
A film by Luca Veggetti
Text from notes by Martha Graham
Voice: Chen-Wei Lee
Cinematography: Stefano Croci
Music: Paolo Aralla

For artists and introverts, the Pandemic of 2020-22 was a window of opportunity – a chance to observe the world in the absence of normal human activity. During lockdown and quarantine periods, walking deserted streets or sitting in empty public spaces, we could suddenly see form without function — the structure of civilization without

Womanspreading: Re-defining Butoh

"Eternity 123"
Vangeline
Triskelion Arts, Brooklyn
October 30, 2021

Butoh queen Vangeline describes her solo "Eternity 123" as a "symbolic journey of women's liberation across time." I tossed the program note aside and watched the show with an open mind, with which the artist proceeded to play.

The piece begins with nothing but a dress – a full-length, frilly see-through chiffon – draped over a slip, revolving in the air. In time the dancer

Resurrection Time

Denishawn
Dances by Ruth St. Denis & Ted Shawn
The Theatre at St. Jean's, New York
October 2, 2021

Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis are known as the "mother and father of American Modern Dance," but the works they choreographed and performed have been lost for years. All that remained were dusty photographs and flickering, black-and-white films. It was a case study in the ephemeral nature of dance--- until it

Edge of the Universe

Kyle Marshall Choreography
"Stellar"
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York
June 7-21, 2021 (online)

Which comes first, music or dance? In Kyle Marshall's choreography, it's neither. Music and dance are two sides of one art form, improvising against each other. Friction, ignition, liftoff, jazz. Marshall's new "Stellar" knits together city streets with the loneliness of deep space, and grounds them in the earth of Mother Africa. All in

Pleasure and the Pandemic: LaMama Moves! Outdoors

Shared Program: LaMama Moves! Dance Festival 2021
Jasmine Hearn/ Songs from Pleasure Memory
Sugar Vendil/ Test Sites
Outdoors at Downtown Art/Alpha Omega, New York City
May 23, 2021

Sixty years after the Sixties, The East Village can still feel like the most sensuous part of New York. Like their spiritual forebears, people in this low-rise, low-rent district live for pleasure – erotic, psychedelic and aesthetic. So it felt right that a graffiti-scarred vacant

Pits of the Pandemic

Kolonial
Stefanie Batten Bland, choreographer
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York (online)
May 3-17, 2021

America is starting to emerge from 14 months of viral living, but like all traumas, this pandemic year will live on in mind and body. Reams of research and acres of art will record how we lived and died with the coronavirus, and how it changed us. Ahead of the game, the Baryshnikov Arts Center of New York is already out

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