Noah Davis, 32

Noah Davis, Los Angeles Painter and Founder of the Underground Museum, Dies at 32
by Alex Greenberger, ArtNews, August 30, 2015

Wes Craven, 76

Wes Craven, a Master of Slasher Horror Films, Dies at 76
by Kenneth Rosen and Erik Piepenburg, The New York Times, August 31, 2015

Gary Keys, 81

Gary Keys, Filmmaker Who Documented Duke Ellington, Dies at 81
by William Grimes, The New York Times, August 30 , 2015

Oliver Sacks, 82

Oliver Sacks Dies at 82; Neurologist and Author Explored the Brain’s Quirks
by Gregory Cowles, The New York Times, August 30, 2015

Oliver Sacks, Casting Light on the Interconnectedness of Life
by Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, August 30, 2015

George Cleve, 79

George Cleve, Conductor Who Interpreted Mozart, Dies at 79
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, August 29, 2015

Johan Renvall, 55

Johan Renvall, American Ballet Theater Principal, Dies at 55
by Anna Kisselgoff, The New York Times, August 29, 2015

Kyle Jean-Baptiste, 21

Kyle Jean-Baptiste, Actor in ‘Les Misérables,’ Dies at 21
by Liam Stack, The New York Times, August 29, 2015

Michelle Sui presents "Body of Song" at Dixon Place

Multidisciplinary artist Michelle Sui
composed and wrote lyrics for Body of Song.
(photo: Len Irish)

Performing for a small audience mainly consisting of your buddies offers a chance for a bit of insider fun. So I'm not sure if composer-vocalist Michelle Sui was speaking in earnest or having a little joke, last night at Dixon Place, when she made reference to doing "site-specific theater."

The site in question, for Songs of Body, was the Dixon Place lounge, squeezed between the famous bar--This pays the bills, folks! Drink up!--and the waiting area and box office for the theater downstairs. Dixon Place uses its lounge space for compact performances of all kinds, but they might as well erect subway poles for a couple of street dancers. That's about as much room as you get, and anyone heading from the front door to the restrooms or theater below distracts audience and performers alike.

I'm still trying to figure out if Songs of Body would just work better in a more suitable, less awkward venue. Or if Sui's singers should perform it while holding cocktails. Or if she needs to cook this work more thoroughly. Maybe all are true.

The work grew of out the artist's interest in polyphonic folk vocals of Georgia and the Balkans--"laughing songs, drinking songs, eating songs, traveling, wedding, healing, dancing--song as function." In these vocal traditions, "music becomes the medicine," Sui told her audience. "It has a life of its own."

Songs of Body is described as an exploration of  "sound as touch, voice as body and language in all its senseless disintegration and relocation." A quintet of white-clad women, including Sui, sing her lyrics--"You have dismembered all melody in my eyes...I will not remember," for example--re-configuring their orientation in space for each song and, on rare occasions, making fleeting, puzzling gestures. In the work's most body-centric moment, a singer cocks back in her chair, allowing her arms and legs to paw the air as if climbing invisible clouds. Otherwise, the women remain as stationary as dolls encased in their factory boxes.

Sui erased expression of the flesh, leaving only traces to discover, contradicting the "body" part of this equation. (Sort of. I do see singing, itself, as an art of the body.) However, it does set off the voices really well because you cling to them for information. Sui's voice sounds like power constricted, reining in a mature fullness that she will let you notice and admire...from a distance. Meghan Hourigan is surprisingly jazzy in timing but like an abstract painting of a horn playing itself. A brief duet between Sui and Tayi Sanusi carries--solely because of Sanusi--an inviting lushness that makes up for the spare and shrill tone of much of the composition.

Unlike the songs that inspired Sui, Songs of Body's function is hard to discern. Its medicine remains elusive.

Closed. For information on Sui's multifaceted projects, visit her site here. For information on all events at Dixon Place, click here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Melody Patterson, 66

Melody Patterson, Wrangler Jane on ‘F Troop,’ Dies at 66
by Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times, August 27, 2015

Out on the Fringe: "Dancers" dancing time away

Sarah Ware and Sifiso Mazibuko
in a London performance of Dancers.
(photo: Ieva Blaževičiūtė)

At 45 minutes, Dancers is a slight but rich work of physical theater from Ohio's Wrought Atlas Theatre Ensemble. Originally written by Emma Dante for her Sicilian troupe and set to Italian pop many decades old, Dancers depicts an elderly woman's fantasy as she reminisces about romance and marriage to the love of her life. Its two actors--Sarah Ware and Sifiso Mazibuko--share choreographic credits with its translator and director Francesca Spedalieri. 

Ware portrays the aged, ailing widow, and Mazibuko is the deceased husband magically emerging from one of two old, battered trunks of keepsakes. At first, both resemble life-sized marionettes. They wear soft cloth masks attached to their grey hairpieces. With alterations in posture and body language, clever shedding and donning of clothing, the performers become suddenly young and then reflect the progression of their lives as memories unfold, vivid stories within a story. There's sexy, exuberant courtship, merry jitterbugging, a wedding, a few pregnancies and parenthood, all told mostly through interactive gesture, dance, nonverbal vocalizing and that music. Quando, quando, quando, quando...! Words, when they come, have a visceral quality as if birthed straight from the heart rather than the head.

Dancers benefits from energetic, appealing performances--especially the all-around flexibility of Ware and Mazibuko who, by the way, has one of the most beautiful smiles you will ever see. Let me show it to you right here.

One show remains: Friday, August 28 at 8:45. For information and tickets, click here.

The Theater at the 14th Street Y

344 East 14th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan

(map/directions)

For information on all programming of the 2015 New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC), continuing through August 30, click here.

Cynthia Macdonald, 87

Cynthia Macdonald, Poet Known for Humor and Ability to Shock, Dies at 87
by William Grimes, The New York Times, August 24, 2015

Doudou N’diaye Rose, 85

Doudou N’diaye Rose, Senegalese Drummer and ‘Human Treasure,’ Dies at 85
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, August 23, 2015

La MaMa: birthing a new downstairs theater

La MaMa to Open New Theater
Andrew R. Chow, The New York Times, August 23, 2015

Brooklyn reading series launches season in new home

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, founder and host,
Calypso Muse and The Glitter Pomegranate Reading Series
(photo: Peter Dressel)

On Friday, September 25 (6:30pm), join award-winning poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor for the Fall 2015 season of Calypso Muse and The Glitter Pomegranate Reading Series.

Featured readers will be Patricia Spears Jones, Lynne Procope, Eugenia Leigh and Gregory Pardlo.

A Q&A will be followed with an open mike hosted by Boyce-Taylor.

The series kicks off this season in a new venue:

Bedford Stuyvesant YMCA
1121 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is the recipient of the 2015 Barnes & Noble Writers For Writers Award. The founder of Calypso Muse and The Glitter Pomegranate Reading Series, she is a VONA fellow, and co-editor of The Wide Shore: A journal of Global Women's Poetry. A graduate of Stonecoast MFA Program, Cheryl is the author of three poetry collections, Raw Air, Night When Moon Follows and Convincing the Body. her poems are published in numerous publications including: Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, The Mom Egg Review, The Killens Review of Arts & Letters, and Aloud:Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Cheryl lives in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, she has just completed her fourth collection of poetry titled Arrival, a memoir in verse on migration and family life.

Dancing the park: Avilés and Thomson get Bronx-specific

photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Roses don't really grow this way, like wildflowers. 

But, if we want, we can place markers for beauty where we envision it or need it to be. 

For Ritual Dance, Arthur Avilés turned the several green stretches of Owen Dolen Park (East Bronx) into sanctified spaces for white-clad celebrants reflecting the late-day sun in their formal handsomeness and pleasure.

Arthur Avilés Typical Theatre performers
approach their ritual site at Owen Dolen Park.
photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Ritual Dance, featuring thirty dancers, was part of Dancing in the Streets' two-evening site-specific festival Dancing Through the Bronx.

Audience members could move about and watch from any number of vantage points, all good. With perfect weather and a convivial atmosphere, Ritual Dance drew many curious onlookers from the neighborhood--a dance placed on the green and in the open air, like unexpected blossoms.

Please enjoy these images from Ritual Dance.

photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Ni'Ja Whitson
photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Ni'Ja Whitson
photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Ni'Ja Whitson
photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Arthur Avilés
photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Arthur Avilés
photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

In contrast to Avilés's playful, purifying light, David Thomson brought intimations of night's veil in his enigmatic short stories, a trio of diffuse but affiliated solos for women dancers--Emmanuélle Phuon, Jodi Bender and Omagbitse Omagbemi. The dancers migrated to various patches of green, carrying the mystery of their identity, intentions and interior engagements.

Emmanuélle Phuon,
above and below, in David Thomson's short stories

photos ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Jodi Bender, this and next two photos
in short stories
©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Omagbitse Omagbemi,
above and below, in short stories
photos ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Acclaimed site-specific choreographer Joanna Haigood, a longtime associate of Dancing in the Streets, served as artistic advisor for Dancing through the Bronx.

The second event in this series will be held tomorrow, Sunday, at 3pm at the Gaudí-inspired Hayden Lord Park. This program includes works by dance artists Marsi Burns, Shizu Homma, Monifa Kincaid and Rebecca Lloyd-Jones.

For directions to Hayden Lord Park, click here.

Dance artist and BAAD! artistic director Arthur Aviles (r)
with his partner and BAAD! executive director Charles Rice-Gonzalez
at 2008 Bessie Awards party at South Street Seaport
(photo ©2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

Out on the Fringe: Shamamian shakes the earth she loves

Louisine Shamamian
(photo: Kyle MaKrauer)

Courage can take many different forms. Comic Louisine Shamamian binds together distinct forms of true courage in her new monologue, Shake the Earth (FringeNYC), directed by Misti B. Wills. But don't expect one of her standup routines or her offbeat "lesbian matchmaker to the straights" videos.

While Shake the Earth has sweetly amusing moments, its Armenia-born writer-performer earnestly imparts two stories--her immigrant youth and coming out in Brooklyn and the Turkish oppression and slaughter of its Armenian population, including members of her family. This year marks the centenary of the Armenian genocide, a crime still denied by the Turkish government. In fact, in today's Turkey, it's criminal to even breathe the words "Armenian genocide." Shamamian breaks all silence--personal and political.

First, she charms us with family portraits and vignettes. As a kid, her red shock of hair and her size made her stand out; her kin called her "a red round tomato." There were enormous, festive gatherings with "women cooking for days." She recites a litany of food and its flavorful ingredients, the music, the dancing. You know how it goes--familial and, even to this Bajan-American, instantly familiar, the same sort of memories for many in an audience hailing from around the American melting pot.

Curious about the odd eating habits of one relative, the young Shamamian began asking questions and eventually researching the genocide with a "passion for a mythical place," her Armenia. At the same time, another life-altering passion stirred--a crush on a beautiful Black butch who returned her interest. Her sweetheart "didn't entertain shame." They became the first openly queer couple in their high school.

Shamamian took a big step in coming out to her mother. I don't know if the comic is aware of this, but her mom's initial reaction ("There are no gay people in Armenia!") syncs up perfectly with the words of comedian Margaret Cho's mom ("There are no gays in Korea!") in Cho's I'm The One That I Want performance. Some day, these two mothers--both of whom came around because they love their daughters--should really get together.

On occasion, Shamamian falls into a didactic tone that feels arid and artificial. There must be more efficient ways to impart facts than these flat, inserted teachings. (Expand the brief notes on genocide in your program? Project some text on the curtain behind you?) But she hits her high point with a recounting of one man's amazing escape from a Turkish work camp near Aleppo, Syria. We learn the source of her dedication to accurate history and honesty about the continued threat to Armenians and Kurds.

"Hold this information with me today," she says. "It is all I ask."

In accordance, each audience member receives a forget-me-not pin--the centennial symbol not only of past suffering but also the hoped-for unity, futurity and eternity of the Armenian people.

Remaining performances of Shake the Earth:

Saturday, August 22 (7pm)

Monday, August 24 (2pm)

Saturday, August 29 (8:45 pm)

For information and tickets, click here or here.

Read an interview with Shamamian here.

For information on all programming of the 2015 New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC), continuing through August 30, click here.

Spectrum

121 Ludlow Street (between Delancey and Rivington Streets), 2nd floor,  Manhattan

(map/directions)

Ruth Asawa, 87

Ruth Asawa, an Artist Who Wove Wire, Dies at 87
by Douglas Martin, The New York Times, August 17, 2015

William Jay Smith, 97

William Jay Smith, Poet and Craftsman of Rhythm, Dies at 97
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, August 19, 2015

What's happening on Second Avenue at 2:22pm on 8/22?

Darcy Naganuma (of Naganuma Dance, Naganuma 2 and The ZGroove Project) promises "a heart revolution" and "a phenomenal cast of house/street dance pioneers, prominent contemporary dancers, DJs, MCs, and visual artists," plus a New York City Ballet surprise, this Saturday, August 22, at 2:22pm. Where? The East Village at St Mark's Church in-the-Bowery.

For more information, check here.

St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Yvonne Craig, 78

Yvonne Craig, Actress Who Played Batgirl, Is Dead at 78
by Katie Rogers, The New York Times, August 19, 2015

Bud Yorkin, 89 [UPDATE]

Bud Yorkin, Writer and Producer of ‘All in the Family,’ Dies at 89
by The Associated Press, August 18, 2015

Bud Yorkin, Writer and Producer of ‘All in the Family,’ Dies at 89
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, August 18, 2015

Tony Gleaton, 67

Tony Gleaton, 67, Dies, Leaving Legacy in Pictures of Africans in the Americas
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, August 18, 2015

Writers Danticat and Brown on feminism and Caribbean diaspora

Edwidge Danticat
(photo: Jonathan Demme)

Barnard Center for Research on Women

presents

Caribbean Feminisms on the Page:

Edwidge Danticat and Victoria Brown

Thursday, September 17, 6:30pm

Barnard alumna Edwidge Danticat and novelist Victoria Brown come together in the second event in the series, Caribbean Feminisms on the Page. This series places distinguished writers in conversation with emerging authors to discuss issues including feminism, diaspora, and method.

Free admission. 

For information, 

click here.

Edwidge Danticat is a 2009 MacArthur fellow and is the author of several books, including Brother, I’m Dying, which was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. This year, she will publish a picture book, Mama’s Nightengale, and a young adult novel, Untwine.

Victoria Brown is the author of Minding Ben (released in paperback as Grace in the City), a novel about a teenager from Trinidad working as a nanny in New York City. She has an MFA in Fiction from Hunter College. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, NBC news, New York Magazine, The Sunday Salon Fiction Zine, and Babble. She teaches in the English Department at LaGuardia Community College, and is currently at work on her second novel.

Event Oval, Diana Center
Barnard College
3009 Broadway, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Celebrate New York's traditional African dance artists

N'Deye Gueye
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Town Hall

An Evening with Traditional African Dance Artists in NYC:

Conversation, Demonstration and Celebration

A presentation of Dance/NYC

Thursday, September 17

6-7:30pm

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Admission is free 

with required reservation. 

Click here.

Dance/NYC and the New York Public Library's Jerome Robbins Dance Division present an evening of conversation and dance demonstration with Master African dance artists who have greatly transformed the dance landscape in New York City. Interviewed during the African Dance Interview Project of 2014, these esteemed artists include Maguette Camara, Marie Basse-Wiles, Mouminatou Camara, Youssouf Koumbassa, and N'Deye Gueye. This initiative, conceived by Jan Schmidt with Carolyn Webb serving as Project Director, was developed to increase community knowledge, awareness, and appreciation of traditional African dance in NYC. Renowned scholar and lecturer of the African Diaspora, C. Daniel Dawson, will moderate the evening.

Bruno Walter Auditorium

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

40 Lincoln Center Plaza (between Columbus and Amsterdam), Manhattan

(map/directions)

A fantasy of James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney

Harlem Stage 

presents a staged reading of

TO THE LIGHT 

(A FANTASY INSPIRED BY TWO AMERICAN GENIUSES: 

BALDWIN AND DELANEY)

a new play by Bil Wright

directed by Reginald Douglas

Wednesday-Thursday, October 7-8 at 7:30pm

Tickets: Free with RSVP

To the Light (A Fantasy Inspired by two American Geniuses: Baldwin and Delaney) is a play by Bil Wright that celebrates the loving, dramatic, complex relationship between writer James Baldwin (1924-1987) and painter Beauford Delaney (1901-1979). It chronicles their friendship from their first meeting through each of their deaths. Both of these men were highly significant in the history of American arts and culture. They both lived and created during times of enormous political change in the United States, especially in regards to the country’s race relations. Both were also enamored with Paris, as were other black artists, feeling it was a mecca in which art prevailed and African Americans considered beautiful both physically and artistically. This was a huge bond between the men, with both men dying in Paris, Delaney the victim of severe mental illness.

Tickets and reservations to Harlem Stage go on sale starting August 24 and can be purchased online or at 212-281-9240 ext. 19/20.

Harlem Stage Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Caleb Teicher: Watch those feet!

Bessie Award-winning tap performer Caleb Teicher
introduces a showing of excerpts from his work, Variations,
at American Tap Dance Center
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Perhaps you've found yourself cursing the fact that you had to watch a tap show in a theater with bad sightlines, unable to see the dancers' feet. When that has happened to me, I've consoled myself with the thought that tap is music. At least, I can listen. However, I prefer to be able to see how each dancer works those musical instruments.

Left-to-right: Elizabeth Burke, Gabe Winns and Teicher
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Watching the crisp, incisive choreography of Caleb Teicher, you will want to see entire bodies, from head to toe. Lots going on there. But the feet, in particular...the feet! You must observe how the feet--scrupulous, sensitive, clear--reveal every impulse and inflection and variation of the music--in this case, the singularity of Glenn Gould playing Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations.’

Winns at work
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Burke at work
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

So, I wish you excellent seating this weekend for Tap 'N Time, the Saturday night program at Jersey Tap Fest (Bloomfield College's Westminster Arts Center), featuring excerpts from Teicher's Variations as well as works by Heather Cornell and Jason Samuels Smith.

For complete Jersey Tap Fest information and tickets, click here.

Dance artist Sydnie L. Mosley joins TV discussion on "walking while woman"

Hollaback! co-founder and executive director Emily May and dance artist Sydnie L. Mosley (Sydnie L. Mosley Dances) discuss street harrassment on this segment of PIX11 News.

Click here: Walking While Woman

American dance criticism: RIP?

The Death of the American Dance Critic
Why are there so few mainstream outlets covering the art form?
by Madison Mainwaring, The Atlantic, August 6, 2015

******

My comment:

If mainstream dance criticism is dead, the appropriate question is: What's next? Not all dance blogs are ballet-centric or inaccessible in language. Mainwaring could have explored a little further and discovered US dance writing in venues like The Brooklyn Rail and my own blog, InfiniteBody, that continues sensitive observation, documentation, analysis and sharing of meaningful experiences with dance. Dance writing in mainstream media has withered, yes, for all of the reasons that Mainwaring details, but dance writers are still out here, using our knowledge and skills in service to an art we greatly respect and love. We would appreciate your acknowledgement and support.

Afro-Haitian workshop with Adia Tamar Whitaker, September 19-20

Choreographer Adia Tamar Whitaker
of Àṣẹ Dance Theatre Collective

The International Partner Dance Intensive 

Workshop Series 2015

presents

Roots and Beyond: 

An Afro-Haitian  Intensive workshop

with 

Adia Tanar Whitaker

Saturday and Sunday

September 19-20 (2pm-7pm)

Battery Dance Studio

380 Broadway, 5th Floor (at White Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

Arguably one of the most influential of the "ethnic" dance forms, Afro-Haitian dance has had a profound impact on hip hop, commercial dance, and a variety of modern dance forms.

Join award-winning choreographer, ethnographer, dancer, teacher, and all-around powerhouse, Adia Tamar Whitaker, and musicians from her award-winning dance company, Àṣẹ Dance Theatre Collective, for two intense, joyful days immersed in Afro-Haitian dance and music. 

Limited to 30 dancers. Tuition: $135 for the 8-hour intensive. Payment plans available. Low-cost housing for out-of-town participants available.

For more information and to register, click here.

TIPDI (The International Partner Dance Intensive) is a series of workshop weekends and extended dance camps for adult dancers, based in New York City. Our full TIPDI program is a cross-training intensive, where dancers 18 and older take daily, leveled classes in all six dance forms offered--Argentine Tango, Ballet, West Coast Swing, Modern, Salsa, and Afro-Haitian dance, taught by world-class instructors. Over the course of our first three years, we've welcomed dancers from 12 states and 11 countries, ranging in age from 20-70.

Jonathan Ollivier, 38

Jonathan Ollivier, Dancer Featured in Matthew Bourne’s Work, Dies in Crash
by Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, August 10, 2015

Out and about: Vermont Performance Lab's September festival

Dahlia Nayar
(photo courtesy of Vermont Performance Lab)

Vermont Performance Lab's Progressive Performance Festival (September 4-6) welcomes Lab resident artists Martin Chaput and Martial Chazallon, presenting the US premiere of The Round, "a 90-minute experimental site work that combines movement, media technology, theatricality and sound installation with community involvement."

Audiences members, each equipped with ear-buds and their own smartphone, follow instructions for individual choreographed journeys around downtown Brattleboro. These experiences, the artists suggest, "will interrogate and alter our relationship with a familiar mobile phone technology, raising questions about the uses and potentials implicit in its ubiquitous presence in our lives."

Other festival events include:

Schwanze-Beast by Cuban-American feminist performers Carmelita Tropicana + Ela Troyano--"equal parts performance, scientific lecture and installation...the future becomes a lens through which to examine our present cultural landscape. The status of the animal species and their civil rights is closely tied to climate change and the preservation of all species, as well as class issues, immigration, sexual preference, race and gender."

Dahlia Nayar's dance and sound installation, 2125 Stanley Street, "influenced in part by her experiences growing up outside of Chicago with parents from India and the Philippines."

Vermont Performance Lab is a new type of performance incubator in the foothills of Vermont. VPL takes creation of new work beyond the walls of the studio and into the community by fostering experimental approaches to research and performance.

For a complete description and schedule of VPL's Progressive Performance Festival events, click here.

The Joyce celebrates ballet: Joshua Beamish on the MOVE

Joshua Beamer
(photo: David Cooper)

You can tell, surely, from reading InfiniteBody, that I'm not much of a ballet person. Or, at least, I haven't been for a long while. When I first started writing for the venerable Tobi Tobias at Dance Magazine in the '70s, ballet formed part of my well-rounded diet. But I've gotten away from it and only lately have I considered going back with fresh eyes.

So, after catching the closing night of Joshua Beamish/MOVE: the company--the first course of The Joyce Theater's week-long Ballet Festival--I thought, "Hmmm. Maybe it's me." As in that break-up statement: "It's not about you. It's about me."

It might be me. There's an audience for this kind of contemporary ballet that pulls pointe work--here equated to women's work--and respectable extensions and port de bras and hetero pas de deux full of elaborate lifts out of the context of narrative spectacle, splashing these conventions across open space so we can savor tonal and textural qualities and choreographic cleverness. All of that throws me back on individual dancers, because I am looking for something more. Like, the core reason for each movement, the why of its connection to the next and the next, even in the midst of abstraction. And some kind of conviction. A sense of genuine soul. And when I don't get that, I go looking for particular dancers to fall in love with.

Beamish's world premiere featuring ten American Ballet Theatre dancers--set before a busily animated backdrop of geometric figures and rising/falling brick walls--carries the title Surface Properties, and yes to that title. Both the visual and musical aspects of this production grate, distract and mystify. More than that, they don't go anywhere...at least, once again, not for me. Although I enjoyed early moments when women sort of strutted en pointe with their carriage making me imagine shoulder pads or fur wraps where there was nothing of the kind. But those were moments, and they were early.

From Pierced (2012), Beamish himself danced a picturesque solo "Little Eye"--which I loved for his compact, precise technique and the suggested drama of its compressed imagery--and a comparatively sluggish bitter love duet performed by ABT dancers Luciana Paris and Sterling Baca.

Burrow (2015), a male-male pas de deux set to a Shostakovich piano quintet, made its US premiere and gave me a dancer to fall in love with. That would be ABT's spidery Jose Sebastian, completely right for the Art Nouveau stylings of this work, liberally flowing around the more stolid and grounding, there-when-you-need-him Matthew Dibble (from Twyla Tharp's troupe).

Stay (2015), a male-female pas de deux of solemn architecture, benefited greatly from a more open, equitable flow between, through and from Dimitri Kleioris and ABT's Stephanie Williams. Theirs was an expressive, believable partnership and won a well-deserved roar from the audience.

The Joyce Theater's Ballet Festival continues through August 16. For information on the full roster of companies and to purchase tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(directions)

London's Krar Collective brings Ethiopian grooves to Lincoln Center

London's KRAR COLLECTIVE is coming to Lincoln Center for a free concert!

Free Thursdays at the Atrium
Thursday, September 24 , 7:30 pm

David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center
Broadway between 62nd and 63rd Streets, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Serving up a colorful feast of mind-blowing grooves, this unstoppable London-based trio—Temesegen Zeleke on the krar (an ancient five- or six-stringed lyre), Genet Asefa on vocals, and Amare on drums—performs a rootsy yet contemporary take on traditional music from Ethiopia based on other-worldly modes and driven by hypnotic rhythms. The traditional acoustic krar is associated with the azmari minstrel tradition; electrified in the hands of Zeleke, it becomes a gritty, ancient rock guitar. Add to it Amare’s traditional kebero drums and Asefa’s stunning singing, and this minimal lineup creates a surprisingly full sound that has led to the group being dubbed ‘”The Ethiopian White Stripes.”

Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information, including program updates, visit atrium.lincolncenter.org.

Movers and Shakers: Dance Activists in NYC panel, November 19

Please join me and some sensational guests for Movers and Shakers: Dance Activists in NYC at Brooklyn Historic Society -- Thursday, November 19, 6:30pm (FREE!)

New York City has always been a place where artistic expression and activism merge, and the dance world is no exception.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa leads a discussion about artistic expression as activism among pioneering dancers who are leaders in their genre including Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Camille A. Brown, Jason Samuels Smith and AntBoogie.

Doors open at 6pm. Event begins at 6:30pm. Please note that seating is first come, first served.

Click here to RSVP!

Brooklyn Historical Society

128 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn

(map/directions)

They've got a theory: If Old Masters wrote artist statements today

The Artist Statements of the Old Masters
by John Seed, Hyperallergic, August 4, 2015

Cilla Black, 72

Cilla Black, Who Turned a Coat-Checking Job Into a Singing Career, Dies at 72
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, August 4, 2015

Robin Phillips, 75

Robin Phillips, Director Who Revitalized Canada’s Stratford Festival, Dies at 75
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, August 2, 2015

Ivan Moravec, 84

Ivan Moravec, Pianist, Dies at 84; His Music Penetrated Iron Curtain
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, July 30, 2015