danceviewtimes

Edge of the Universe

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

-- By Tom Phillips
Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips  

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 little more than twenty minutes.  

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

-- By Tom Phillips 
Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

Jasmine Hearn Photo by Steven Pisano

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 lot on East 3^rd Street was the scene for a revival of live experimental theater in the dying days of the pandemic. 

Pits of the Pandemic

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

by Tom Phillips
copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips  

Photo by Maria Baranova

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 with the first fruits of an ugly season --- a piece created and performed during the pandemic, under medically-prescribed COVID health and safety protocols. 

Catching Up with Adam Sklute, Artistic Director, Ballet West

April 2021
Salt Lake City, Utah 
by Marianne Adams

As most ballet companies around the world are slowly getting back to what once was normal, Ballet West has clocked in not one, but two live seasons since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. How they did it and what lies ahead were among the topics I was excited to explore in my conversation with Adam Sklute, the company’s Artistic Director.

Thank you to George Jackson, a Mainstay of this Site

April 29, 2021
Washington, DC
by Alexandra Tomalonis

When I posted George Jackson's most recent review, I noticed how many pieces he has written for DVT — not to mention its predecessors, Washington DanceView and DanceView. (He also has written regularly for the Washington Post, Dance Magazine, Dance Now, the German magazine  Ballett, and other publications.) 365 reviews -- 365!! just for this site! -- of ballet, modern dance, ethnic dance, and book reviews as well. I was going to wait for a big birthday to write a piece like this, but then thought it might encourage others to write, and be active in dance durilng this horrible time, if they could read about how much this remarkable man has accomplished. He’s probably writing at this very moment.

Anticipation

Book: Francis Cunningham 
5 Continents Editions ($55)
March 18, 2021

reviewed by George Jackson

copyright 2021 by George Jackson

 

A magic moment sometimes at a performance is when the curtains have parted but nothing yet has happened. One's awareness is acutely that of the stage space. The dancers, if already present, are about to be in motion - which differs  from standing still.  Many of Francis Cunningham's paintings and drawings give me the feeling that what is depicted is a theater's stage when things are about to happen. There will be motion. Cunningham's space is pregnant and birth will occur, so be alert.

 

Plastic Fantastic Planet

"Plastic Harvest" Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance
"healing/trying" jillsigman/thinkdance
"Wake up and Smell the Coffee" Vangeline Theater 
Earth Day, New York City 
April 24, 2021

by Tom Phillips 
copyright © 2021 by Tom Phillips 

 

One problem in dealing with the world’s environ- mental crisis is that it’s composed of so many separate problems, most of them difficult to picture. Science does a lousy job of dramatizing climate change – so by the time people are forced to recognize it, their homes may be gone and their lives in danger.  So it falls to the arts to show us what business-as-usual is doing to us.  And Earth Day is an annual opportunity to seize the outdoor stage.   

Reading and ReReading

Balanchine Variations, by Nancy Goldner

University Press of Florida, 2008 & 2021 
April 22, 2021

 

by George Jackson 

copyright George Jackson © 2021

 

Books are selling in this era of the coronavirus quarantine, and University Press of Florida has republished critic Nancy Goldner's 2008 "Balanchine Variations" in which she admires, analyzes and annotates 20 ballets by George Balanchine (1904 - 1983), a  colossus among choreographers. Included in the works discussed are two of Balanchine's earliest surviving ones and also some of his last.

Back On Stage: If Cautiously, Relentlessly

Precious Gems: Precious Jewels Variations from “Alladin,” “Aria,” “Tarantella,” Solo from “Lambarena,” “Variations for Four,” Sicilienne from “Emeralds,” Duet from “Concerto Six Twenty-Two,” “Paquita”
Capitol Theatre
Salt Lake City, UT
April 15, 2021

by Marianne Adams
copyright © 2021 by Marianne Adams

What would ballet look like on a theater stage, when it returns, has been a question plaguing most ballet lovers and insiders alike, and as one of the first companies in the world, and certainly in the United States, to bring its dancers back in front of a live audience, Ballet West confidently answered it with “resilient.”  The company’s spring 2021 season was its second time performing live since the Covid-19 pandemic began, following a brief season in November 2020, and the mixed bill program of mostly classically dance was a welcome reassurance that when it comes to dance, the pandemic shouldn’t rob us of much more than actual time lost.

Photo of Jordan Veit in "Aria." Photo © Beau Pearson.

Three for the Price of One

Jewels 
San Francisco Ballet
April 6, 2021
Streamed   

by Rita Felciano
copyright Rita Felciano © 2021                 

I only vaguely remember my first encounter with Jewels, Balanchine’s 1967 masterful triptych, supposedly influenced by the respective precious stones. Karinska’s costumes, most certainly, glittered and shimmered, almost excessively. I wish I could credit the company-it was not SFB that I saw it on. I recall being puzzled by “Emeralds”, almost laughing in delight at “Rubies” and taken aback by “Diamonds.” All were beautifully danced, but I kept wondering how those three “acts” related to each, other except for being Balanchine’s work.

A Trio to Treasure--For Different Reasons

Symphony #9, Wooden Dimes, Swimmer
San Francisco Ballet
Streaming      
March10, 2021 

by Rita Felciano 
copyright © Rita Felciano 2021

For anybody with doubts about Ballet being a contemporary art form, this was the show to see. Alexander Ratmansky’s “Symphony #9” and Yuri Possokhov’s “Swimmer” bracketed Danielle Rowe’s world premiere of “Wooden Dimes.” They made for an intelligent satisfying evening of 21^st century dance. There was barely a false note among them. 

Co-commissioned by American Ballet Theater, “Symphony #9” was seen in a taped 2019 SFB version; it showcased the company in enviable shape. Even streamed Ramansky’s take on the Shostakovich (conducted by Martin West) looked superb. Quickly shifting groups of multiples billowed and contracted with quasi militaristic discipline. The ominous undertones of uncertainty and fear -- first signaled in the score -- often contradicted the sense of surface “community.” Again and againd discordant harmonies in the brasses or woodwinds called up choreography that was as crystalline as it was mercurial.

Queering Ballet

#QueertheBallet
Adriana Pierce, choreographer
Bridge Street Theatre, Catskill, New York
February 25, 2021
Streaming on Youtube, February 25-March 11

by Tom Phillips 
Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

The art form of ballet is overdue for a queering – i.e. expanding its repertoire of meaning beyond the traditional binary codes of gender and sex.  Adriana Pierce, an alumna of George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet and Miami City Ballet, went into a recent residency with a clear goal in mind: “to create a duet for two women which honors their movement styles, physique, emotionality, and connection in a way that is not harnessed by ballet’s traditional technical ideals.  I also feel it’s imperative that audiences get to see genuine and thoughtful queer stories and relationships.”  By the end of the residency she was well begun, maybe halfway done.  But next comes the hard part. 

 L. to R. Sierra Armstrong, Remy Young 

 

All’s Well That Ends Well

“Midsummer Night’s Dream”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      San Francisco Ballet                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 January 28, 2021                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Streamed 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     by Rita Felciano
copyright © Rita Felciano 2021

If you have to watch streamed full-length ballets, you probably could do not much better than San Francisco’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (available until February 10). This jewel received a single on-stage performance last April, the night before the SF Opera House closed. With a different cast, recorded last summer, it will have to do until sometime after the Company returns live. Yet Frank Zamacona’s superb direction for the screen lets the camera be our eyes without distracting editing. The only note of sadness -- besides those inevitable in the medium -- is the second act where all, of a sudden, the dancers look so shrunken.

Miracles of Dance at LaMama

LaMama Moves/Online
Tamar Rogoff with Merri Milwe
"Wonder About Merri" 
Kevin Augustine/Lone Wolf Tribe 
"Body Concert"
Tamar Rogoff with Mei Yamanaka
"The Yamanakas at Home"
January 27, 2021

by Tom Phillips
 Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

 

It's not that often that three disparate dance pieces fit together so well that they seem to be subtly referring and comment- ing on each other -- but last night's trio of experiments from LaMama seemed to have been made with each other in mind.  The bookends were two short pieces by Tamar Rogoff --  one set in downtown Manhattan, the other in a residential neighborhood of Tokyo -- with entirely different characters and themes, but a single groove -- a Motown beat that gets you on your feet, and won't let you do anything but dance. 

The Yamanakas at Home -- Photo by Mei Yamanaka

The Grand Union

“The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance: 1970-1976”
Wesleyan, 2020
by Wendy Perron

by Gay Morris
copyright 2021 by Gay Morris

The Grand Union existed for a mere six years, from 1970 to 1976. Yet its performances were legendary, in good part because a number of its members were among the brightest lights of postmodern dance. Would we still be interested in the Grand Union if it had not included Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, Tricia Brown, Doug Dunn, and Barbara Dilly? I suspect not.