Feed

Dance

By Robert Gottlieb 4:50pm

Dance

Balanchine's "Liebeslieder Walzer." (Courtesy Paul Kolnik/City Ballet)

The Fashions and Passions of City Ballet: From the Sublime to the Inconsequential

New York City Ballet’s spring gala came and went, as galas will do, and left behind two unnecessary new ballets plus new costumes for Symphony in C, that Balanchine masterpiece to Bizet, that has been absent from the repertory for four years or so, God knows why. It’s true that the Karinska costumes, which some of us have been looking at lovingly for a lifetime, had come to seem a little dowdy; why not freshen them up? The job has been done by Marc Heppel, the company’s director of costumes, and though the result is a touch heavy—trying just a little too hard for a fashion look, with a sprinkling of tiny crystals (a nod to the ballet’s original title, Le Palais de Cristal) and an over-determined cleavage—they’ll serve. Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 3/27/12 4:48pm

Dance

Gossamer Gallants. (Courtesy Paul Taylor Dance Company)

House of Taylor: His Annual Exhibition of Men, Women and Bugs

Who could have guessed that what Paul Taylor needed was a redhead? He recently found one (or she found him); her name is Heather McGinley, and she’s been blazing through the current season at the Koch—and not just because of her flamboyant hair. The Taylor Company has an astounding variety of talented leading women: Amy Young, who has grown at a steady pace into a dominating presence—lyrical, composed, radiant, except when she’s powerful, haunting and, in Big Bertha, malevolent, evil, grotesque; Parisa Khobdeh, ardent, exotic, exciting—and funny; Laura Halzack, beautiful, elegant, balletic, with a new forcefulness that makes her seem less of a lovely exception to the rule and more an exemplar of the rule; sassy, quick, daring Michelle Fleet … the list goes on. What McGinley gives us is a potential successor to the most thrilling of Taylor’s recent crop of stars, Annmaria Mazzini, whose reckless daring was sometimes nearly unbearable to watch. (Her hips eventually paid the price.) Watching McGinley in, say, Mazzini’s role in the wild rush of Syzygy was to feel that life as we know it may still go on. Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 3/20/12 4:45pm

Dance

Abdiel Jacobsen and Diana Vishneva in 'Errand into the Maze.'

Mythologies: Despite Admirable Effort, the Martha Graham Company Just Can’t Measure Up to Its Founder

This has been Martha Graham week in New York. Every year or two the Graham company bravely flings itself at us, living out its dream that things can be again as they once were. Alas, they can’t. To begin with, Graham as a creative force was a thing of the past long before she herself was a thing of the past. And then, in total fury mode, she expelled from her company the magnificent dancers who should have been the keepers of the flame. Today, the dancers are not on this level—they’re highly capable, but they’re not larger than life the way Graham’s own dancers seemed to be. The only real exception has been Fang-Yi Sheu, and apart from special appearances, she’s now a thing of the past too. Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 3/13/12 5:43pm

Dance

Stephen Petronio in Steve Paxton's 'Intravenous Lecture.' (Photo by Julie Lemberger)

A Forced Marriage: In a Performance-Packed Week, Ballet and Modern Dance Renewed Their Semi-Vows

The eternal and uneasy relationship between ballet and modern dance endures, but radically altered in tone and intensity. For decades it was war—an either/or standoff—with time-outs for wary collaborations, like the one between Balanchine and Graham when in 1959 they joined forces (sort of) for Episodes, or earlier, when Merce Cunningham made The Seasons for Ballet Society and almost two decades later presented his Summerspace at New York City Ballet—only now on pointe. Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 3/06/12 4:24pm

Dance

At right, Amber Star Merkens in 'A Choral Fantasy.'

Forward March! Mark Morris’s A Choral Fantasy Assaults, but Four Saints Is Enchanting

Why Beethoven’s flawed and surfacy “Fantasia in C Minor for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra”? Why all the military bombast? Why so literal a translation of music into movement? It’s a puzzlement—but then Mark Morris frequently chooses to puzzle us. Sometimes his puzzles charm and tease; in his new A Choral Fantasy—premiered at BAM this past week—he neither charms nor teases; he assaults. Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 1/17/12 6:23pm

Dance

"The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess."

Necessarily So: Porgy and Bess May Not Be Known as a Dance Show but Its Choreography Can Make a Difference

Porgy and Bess has never been thought of as a dance show, and yet it’s filled with dance. It uses dance to punctuate the action, or as background, or as atmosphere; even when it’s front and center it isn’t crucial. Back in 1935 when it opened (at the Alvin Theater, on Broadway), it was reviewed by both the New York Times’s theater critic, Brooks Atkinson, and its music critic, Olin Downes. Atkinson never mentions the show’s dance component, and Downes has only this to say: “Admitted the instinct of Negroes to dance, did the inhabitants of Catfish Row set themselves in centrifugal patterns along the floor and wiggle hands and toes like the ladies who are auxiliary to a soloist’s performance in a revue? Of course this was amusing. So was the clogging of Sportin’ Life in the forest scene.” Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 12/13/11 5:41pm

Dance

"Biped" (1999) (Stephanie Berger/BAM)

The Long Goodbye: Merce Cunningham Has His Last Posthumous Turn at BAM

This past week marked a unique circumstance in the history of dance in America—the first time I can think of when a major figure took a last (posthumous) bow and shut up shop. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company gave four performances at BAM, featuring six of Cunningham’s major works, and apart from several Events—pieces being performed simultaneously on three stages (the audience wanders from one to another for 45 minutes) later in the month at the Park Avenue Armory—it has only a two-week season in Paris remaining before it permanently disbands. Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 11/21/11 5:46pm

Dance

"Gossamer Gallants" by Paul Taylor.

A Weekend of Song and Dance: Unflagging Invention in an All-Taylor Evening, and Ellington on Exhilirating Fast-Forward

Saturday
City Center
2:00 p.m.

The Encores! series and Jazz at Lincoln Center blasted off their new collaboration with a spectacular show called Cotton Club Parade—all-singing, all-dancing, all-Ellington. (Even the non-Ellington numbers sound like his.) Of course a big theater like the City Center can’t replicate the feeling of an intimate place like the Cotton Club—for one thing, they didn’t have miking back in the day. (Lucky them.) And presumably a show at the club was relaxed: pauses between numbers; waiters passing through with drinks clinking; customers coming and going. Whereas the Parade is a semi-Broadway show, and one of its strongest virtues is that it’s driven at breakneck speed through its 23 numbers—its energy is never allowed to falter; even segues are ultraminimal. And there’s no intermission. But authenticity of venue isn’t the point. You leave the performance with a real sense of the variety, the ingenuity, the sheer fun of what things must have been like up on 125th Street in the ’20s and ’30s. Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 11/15/11 5:55pm

Dance

Adrienne Schulte and Sean Stewart in Merce Cunningham’s "Duets."

Let’s Get It On: An Energetic Week of American Ballet Theatre

ABT nailed its contemporary colors to the mast for its recent one-week season at the City Center—no imported stars, no full-evening classics or faux-classics. Instead, Tharp (three pieces), Taylor (two), Cunningham, Ratmansky, Clarke (Martha) and Volpi (one each). Volpi? He’s the 25-year-old dancer from the Stuttgart Ballet, originally from Argentina, who was commissioned to create a new piece for the occasion. Read More