LaMama Moves/Online
Annabella Lenzu & Kari Hoaas
January 20, 2021
Inauguration Day and the Pandemic both played into the hands of artists at LaMama's annual festival of dance, this year on video instead of downtown in New York. Norwegian choreographer Kari Hoaas and Argentine-American Annabella Lenzu had to adapt work originally meant for LaMama's theater space. And while their creative solutions narrowed the scope of their pieces, they may also have sharpened their focus.
Margaret Jenkins Dance Company
"Breathing at the Boundaries"
December 29, 2020
on YouTube
The last few months, looking at one more piece of choreography on screen made me wonder whether it might not be preferable to wait till the dancers could come back for live audiences. With few exceptions, despite honest efforts, the screen had offered few encouraging examples of vivid imaginations getting a handle
“Suite Donuts,” “The Moor’s Pavane,” “There is a Time”
José Limón Company
Streamed Live at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park
Tivoli, NY
December 19, 2020
As the José Limón Company began “There is a Time,” the final piece in their live- streamed performance at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, the dancers swept into the circle of time that Limón created in this 1956 classic. Based on the biblical wisdom of Ecclesiastes (“for every time, there is a season,”) the twelve dancers swayed,
book review
"Balanchine's Mozartiana - The Making of a Masterpiece"
by Robert Maiorano and Valerie Brooks
Freundlich Books, New York, 1985
Not new, this book about the making of a ballet remains an important item of danced literature. Its principal author, Robert Maiorano, was a dancer with New York City Ballet for 15 years, beginning in 1961. For the company's Tchaikovsky Festival in 1981, Maiorano asked Balanchine's permission to attend rehearsals for his announced new "Mozartiana" that would be premiered at
"Plastic Harvest"
Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance
The Center at West Park, New York
Streamed Live December 15, 2020
In the early 1960s, choreographer Murray Louis took a ride up the escalator at Macy’s, the world’s largest store.
''I looked at rooms and rooms … waves of coats and shirts,'' he told the New York Times. ''I thought, 'Who buys this?' And suddenly I had an image of excess as a theme.
Smuin Contemporary Ballet
2020/2021 Virtual Fall Season
Program Program A, Nov. 18, 2020. 4:30 pm
Program Program B, Nov. 11, 2020. 7.30 pm
Watching dance on screen is not exactly new, but it took a global catastrophe for those of us who cherish live performance to realize that sitting in front of a screen might become the new normal. There may be hundreds of dancers who
book review
“Naked Truth – Viennese Modernism and the Body”
by Alys X. George
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Look carefully at the picture on the cover of this book. It shows a naked woman dancing. Her face is turned away so that only part of her profile appears. Her torso seems somewhat flattened, like that of an ancient Egyptian image. The arms and hands are held lightly away from the body’s center of gravity. The lines of the long legs
“Who Cares?” (excerpts), “to be seen,” “Concerto Six Twenty-Two” (duet), “Lady Swings the Blues”
Fall for Dance Festival – Program 2
New York City Center (Pre-recorded Digital Broadcast)
New York, NY
October 26, 2020
There may not have been many good news for the dance world this year, but the enduring holding of the Fall for Dance Festival, even if in an abbreviated, digital format, was certainly one of them. Admittedly, in these trying times the starved audience would have
book review
"Out Loud, a Memoir"
by Mark Morris and Wesley Stace
Penguin Press, New York, 2019
This book is a cross between an autobiography by dancer, choreographer, dance company director and opera stager Morris and a biography of Morris by novelist and recording artist Stace. I am fairly familiar with Morris's work but had not before encountered any of Stace's. The writing took place when Morris (born 29 August 1956) was 62 years old - mature but, presumably, not at career's
Lori Belilove and the Isadora Duncan Dance Company
Lori Belilove, Artistic Director
Hayley Rose, Emily D'Angelo, Faith Kimberling, Caroline Yamada
Untermyer Gardens, Yonkers NY
September 26, 2020
A flock of Monarch butterflies –- stopping for the night in the Hudson Valley on their way to Mexico – greeted early arrivals Saturday in Untermyer Park and Gardens, high above the river in Yonkers. Their visit was unscheduled, but no more an accident than the gust of wind which
"Ave Maria"
dance solo choreographed in 1914 by Michio Ito
to music composed in 1825 by Franz Schubert
performed by Christin Arthur
set by Dana Tai Soon Burgess
dedicated to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the USA's Supreme Court
It is a slow dance, mostly for the upper body. Watching it, one is ever more aware of independent motions that belong to the head and face, to
"Marius Petipa - The Emperor's Ballet Master"
by Nadine Meisner
Oxford University Press, 2019
Our concept of classical ballet stems mostly from the work of Marius Petipa (1818 - 1910), a French choreographer resident principally in Russia at the end of the Czarist era. Until the publication of Meisner's biography, personal information in English about Petipa was somewhat scarce. As a reader of German, I relied on Eberhard Rebling's "Marius Petipa, Master of Classical Ballet", printed 1975 in what