“Paramodernities”
NettaYerushalmy
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival
Jacob’s Pillow, MA
August 11, 2018

Netta Yerushalmy’s “Paramodernities,” presented at Jacob’s Pillow on Saturday,  is a hugely ambitious work, a three-and-a-half-hour marathon of what the Pillow billed as a deconstruction and re-examination of works by six major modernist choreographers: Vaslav Nijinsky, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey, Bob Fosse, and George Balanchine. Taking on any one of these artists would be challenging, dealing

Mark Morris Dance Group
“Love Song Waltzes, “I Don’t Want to Love,” “The Trout”
Mostly Mozart Festival
Rose Theater, Lincoln Center
New York, New York
August 9, 2018 

Two of the three works being offered this weekend by the Mark Morris Dance Group for the Mostly Mozart Festival have to do with love: “Love Song Waltzes” from 1989 and “I Don’t Want to Love” from 1996. The third work, “The Trout” a world premiere set to Schubert’

"Snake Telegram"
Heart Stück Bernie
Dance Place
Washington, DC
July 22, 2018

When it comes down to performing about feminism, it is tough to get it right. Performances with this heated topic at the forefront can come across as malicious and accusatory, lacking a level of civility that can easily grow uncomfortable in a theatrical setting. Usually, the wants and whims of the spectators are the main concern of a choreographer. Nonetheless, if an artist wishes to successfully tackle the

San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival
War Memorial Opera House
San Francisco, CA
July 14, 2018

Celebrating its 40^th anniversary, the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival performed at the City’s prestigious War Memorial Opera House for the second time. It was a wildly acclaimed occasion with excellent performances from a dozen companies from Mexico to Bolivia, Spain to India and Cuba to the Philippines. The program’s last page announced that next year’s Festival would again take

“Four Quartets” 
Pam Tanowitz
The Fisher Center at Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
July 7, 2018 

What comes first, the words or the movement? In a powerful tribute to the skills of choreographer Pam Tanowitz and her troupe, their dance to T.S.Eliot’s masterwork “Four Quartets” feels like a true partnership. In its world premiere at Bard College’s Fisher Center, her dancers interpreted “Four Quartets” Eliot’s elegiac meditation on time, to the poem

"Lacunae" "Shutter" "Unlocking/Elpis"
Amy Seiwert's Imagery
ODC Theater
San Francisco, CA
June 28, 2018

Amy Seiwert, until recently Choreo- grapher in Residence with Smuin Contemporary Ballet and founder of her own Imagery company, started a summer program she called Sketches eight years ago. She has explained the project as a way to allow her the kind the risk taking for which commissions are not always the best vehicle. More than anything, she feared falling into established, even successful,

Royal Danish Ballet
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival
Beckett, MA
June 20, 2018
by Gay Morris

The Royal Danish Ballet, founded in 1748, calls itself the third oldest ballet company, but its August Bournonville repertory gives it something like eternal youth. Bournonville’s village girls and boys breathe a freshness that exists nowhere else. Fortunately for audiences, a good deal of Bournonville choreography was included in the program a group of dancers from the Danish company offered for the opening