Dance

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Criticals, Dance, Film, History, Literature, Music, New York, Short Cuts, Television, Theater, video

Season’s Dreams

November 23, 2011

A reason for the seasons was what I got when, in grade school, I was taught the myth of Demeter and Persephone; the idea that a spell could be cast to wither grass and leaves made a stronger impression than the myth’s true focus: a mother’s longing for a daughter she could only see six…

Criticals, Dance, Gay, Music, Short Cuts, Theater

Of Reliquaries and Retrospects

October 24, 2011

The mournful qualities of fall—all those dying leaves whose color mimics that of dried blood—complement the inaugural season at New York LiveArts, the still-young merger between Dance Theater Workshop and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Dance Company. With evergreen works by Jones and John Kelly being remounted, how intriguing that so far the theater unfolding in the…

Current Affairs, Dance, New York, Theater

Mourning Songs for a Theater, in a City Still Reeling

September 14, 2011

This week in Manhattan, Ground Zero isn’t the only repository of grief and longing. At the Marriott Marquis Theater in midtown, you’ll find a different kind of mourning going on. Before the curtain rises on the current revival of Follies, Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 elegiac musical, the audience is treated to a scene familiar to that…

Current Affairs, Dance, Music, My back pages

Gladys Horton, lead singer of the Marvelettes, 1945-2011

January 30, 2011

Link: See them sing “Don’t Mess with Bill.” the-marvelettes-don-mess-with-1vwvs_2ey2h_.html They-Were-Great-Once Dept: the day Gladys Horton cajoled a few girlfriends into starting a singing group ultimately called the Marvelettes, they couldn’t have foreseen how happy they’d make a bunch of black kids growing up in Ohio. Their snappy, sexy melodies propelled a street-corner symphony heard around the…

Criticals, Dance, Film, Theater

Winter Storms on the Great White Way

December 31, 2010

Published in Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine, Winter 2011 2010 ends as the country strives to dig itself out of snowstorms that clobbered both the Eastern and Western regions of our nation. The weather feels an apt metaphor for a multiplicity of woes beyond airport delays and unplowed streets—think, for instance, of the snow job visited…

Criticals, Dance

Swan Lake’s Great Escape

November 11, 2010

Published Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine Winter 2011 After a bravura Broadway run in 1998, Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake returns to New York’s City Center this fall. Amazing how little things have changed since this revisionist take on Petipa’s classic ushered in a new era of dance theater. Then as now, our political times were in…

Criticals, Dance

A Sensual World

October 17, 2010

Published in Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine Winter 2011 Watching the late Pina Bausch’s torrential Vollmond made me marvel at the theater’s ability to mirror life. The show, part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, arrived in New York at the end of what could accurately be described as The Week of the Monsoon. …

Criticals, Dance

Under Moneyed Clouds An Artist Unfurls

August 8, 2010

Published Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine Fall 2010 The gods of Wall Street beamed from halcyon skies during the last performance of Paul-André Fortier’s mesmerizing Solo: 30X30. It was another matter on the ground, as it took more than the charms of an agile Canadian to reach those overachievers who plowed past Fortier’s temporary domain at…

Criticals, Dance, Film, Music

Traffic Patterns

April 4, 2010

Published Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine Summer 2010 In the late Eric Rohmer’s Love in the Afternoon, the film’s hero, Frederic, rhapsodizes about the city: “I love the city. The suburbs and the provinces depress me. Despite the crush and the noise, I never tire of plunging into the crowd; I love the crowd as I…

Criticals, Dance, Music

In a Mellow Tone

March 11, 2010

Published Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine Winter 2010 It’s rare that one art form forces you to take the measure of another, but such was the case during the February engagement of the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company at the Joyce Theater. It was a question of jazz: Lubovitch presented an evening of pieces set to works…