So...I won exactly what?

So I went to Fitzgerald & Stapleton's Smell of Want performance at Abrons Arts Center, reviewed here by Claudia La Rocco of The New York Times and worth reading. It's fairly clear from La Rocco's writing that she had no more of a clue about the import of what she experienced than I did. I have nothing to add, and I can only assume that the description you will find on the Abrons site is deliberately intended to subvert thought and deflect understanding rather to support those things.

Oh--sorry, Steve--there actually is one more thing: Despite being assigned to the infamously glittery Winner's Circle, I walked away totally glitter-free--a small disappointment, as it turned out. In fact, it's kind of funny about the apparent formal significance of when you enter the space, where you sit, what that seating section is called and how it's decorated or not decorated. If any of that has any connection to what's going on in F&S's performance in Abrons' wonderful little Experimental Theater, someone please kindly tell me what I missed.

I did like Kryssy Wright's sometimes wavery lighting on the stone walls in this intimate space that suggests a cozy, dimly-lit sauna--Smell of Want's performers do wear, as La Rocco notes, costumes designed by Mother Nature--as well as lightly evoking something more ancient and ritualistic.

With performances by the Irish choreographers Emma Fitzgerald and Aine Stapleton and dancers Deborah Black, Maryanne Chaney, Anastasia Cohen, Carl Harrison, Linda Sue Stein. Although listed in the program, Arturo Vidich has been performing--and quite spectacularly so--this week in Dancer Crush at New York Live Arts.

Sound by Nicholas Santiago

Smell of Want concludes this evening with an 8pm performance. Click here for information and ticketing. Seating is extremely limited. If tickets are still available, you might be able to select your seating area--ticket price adjusted accordingly.

Abrons Arts Center (Experimental Theater)
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map and directions)

Spirit in the watching

Watching Performance As Spiritual Practice
by Andy Horwitz, Culturebot, April 6, 2011

Collaborative challenge

Jenny Holzer and Miguel Gutierrez Collaborate

by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, July 20, 2010

What's cookin' at the Factory

Keeping It Small at Chocolate Factory in Queens

by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, May 25, 2010

P.S.1 Responds To Censorship Claims Following Incident

P.S.1 Responds To Censorship Claims Following Incident
by Claudia La Rocco, WNYC Performance Club, March 2, 2010

Performance in the cloud

Recording Staged Works for All the World to See
by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, January 20, 2010

Here's to "scragglier" dance!

Bill T. Jones Salutes His Friend Lincoln
by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, September 6, 2009

Talk about new media

NOTE: Start time corrected: 7:30pm

Come to Dance Theater Workshop's Lobby TALKS on Tuesday, June 9 (7:30pm), a free event open to all. In The New Media of Dance (not in performance), organizer Chase Granoff and a host of new media types will delve into new issues raised by the dynamic intersection of dance, dance criticism and cyberspace.

Panelists will include Caleb Custer, Director of Marketing, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet; Marlon Barrios Solano, creator of dance-tech.net and DANCE TECH/The Program; Andy Horwitz, Founder and Editor, Culturebot.org; Claudia La Rocco, Performance critic, WNYC's Art.Cult blog; Kristin Sloan, Founder, The Winger, Director, New Media, New York City Ballet; Ryan Tracy, Counter Critic; and yours truly!

I hope to see you there!

Dance Theater Workshop
219 West 19th Street (7th-8th Avenues), Manhattan

Contractual dust-up

Contract Disputes in Dance - Pavel Zustiak and the 92nd Street Y
by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, May 8, 2009

Debt hobbles major dance spaces

Home is Where You Hang Your Debt
by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, April 3, 2009

While I was away...

When you've had very little (and unreliable) access to the 'Net, catching up with nearly three weeks of dance-related news (just for starters) is quite a task. Here's a handful of notable items culled from The New York Times, just in case you happened to miss these, too.

Gerald Myers, 85, Writer on Dance and Philosophy, Dies by William Grimes, February 23

New Punch in an Old tale as a Trickster Reappears by Claudia La Rocco, February 27 (I'm including this since my pile of email messages reveals quite a bit of raving about this work, and I regret missing it. Damn nicely-done review, too.)

Pearl Lang, Dancer and Choreographer, Dies at 87 by Jack Anderson, February 27

For a Dancer Making His Way, It's All Tap, All Day by Tammy La Gorge, March 1

Bigger Woes for Library, as a Buyer Backs Out by Robin Pogrebin, March 4 (not dance-related, specifically, but...you know.)

Dancing With the Average Folk by David McKay Wilson, March 8, 2009

Tapper should get her due

Tapper’s Tale: She Had the Time-Step of Her Life
by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, January 4, 2008

There should be no doubt about Jane Goldberg's contribution to the worldwide spread and success of contemporary tap dance. She has been all about getting us to recognize the historical work of tap's creative pioneers and, as such, she is one herself. Check out this piece, by Claudia La Rocco, in today's New York Times.

Gutierrez takes action

Miguel Gutierrez’s 24-Hour Dance of Solidarity
by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, December 29, 2008

Abraham and Thompson: Captivating mysteries

Kyle Abraham and Layard Thompson - Scrutinize the Shield, Beware the Mirror
by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, December 4, 2008

Creating "The Scales of Memory"

Compagnie Jant-Bi of Senegal and Urban Bush Women of Brooklyn Come Together
by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, November 16, 2008

No quarrel with Jones

Bill T. Jones's A Quarreling Pair, which regrettably closes tomorrow evening at BAM's Gilman Opera House, is a huge, generous apparition--95 minutes of full-tilt, multidimensional vaudeville of the mind. Blown up from a four-page, two-character puppet play written by Jane Bowles in 1945, it has become a thing of delicate and bodacious beauty, oddity, vulgarity, fierce insight and poetry in equal measure. It speaks of the nakedness, the vulnerability of the artist who ventures out into the messy, messy world.

Every artist who put his or her shoulder to this wheel gave of the highest quality: Bill T. Jones (conception, direction, originial text, and choreography in collaboration with Janet Wong and the company), Bjorn G. Amelan (set design--wow!), Robert Wierzel (lighting), Liz Prince (costume design--heavenly!); Janet Wong (video design); Sam Crawford (sound design--crafty!), and the excellent team of Wynne Bennett, Christopher William Antonio Lancaster and George Lewis, Jr. (composition and performance of original music). Jones's sublime performers include Antonio Brown, Asli Bulbul, Peter Chamberlin, Leah Cox, Maija Garcia, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, LaMichael Leonard, I-Ling Liu, Paul Matteson and Erick Montes with Tracy Ann Johnson.

Sure to stand as one of the highlights of the current season and of Jones's exceptional career, A Quarreling Pair should be seen now and revisited. I can barely wait for its return.

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
718-636-4100




Bill T. Jones, in Giddy Mood, Unveils Comic `Pair'
by Tobi Tobias, Seeing Things, ArtsJournal.com
(originally in Bloomberg News, October 2, 2008)

At the Next Wave Festival, a Woman Wanders in Search of Herself
by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, October 1, 2008

I couldn't have said it better!

For those of us who spend many of our waking hours in theaters, this time of year can feel like staring down the chute at the start of a long, daunting obstacle course: the shows are coming, and fast, more than we can ever possibly see. How to make it to the winter holidays and take in most of them? How to remain sane while doing so?

--Claudia La Rocco, "When Perceptions Are Performance," The New York Times, Spetember 12, 2008

I deeply empathize with Ms. La Rocco, who opened her review of Jérôme Bel with this telling plaint. I, for one, have decided to opt for sanity. And since I have now completed my three-year term on the Bessie Awards committee--see you at the awards celebration on Monday?--it should be easier for me to achieve that sanity and some balance in my life (I have one) and my dance-going (which is still a very nice part of a privileged life). I've been at this dance criticism thing for 32 years, and I've come to learn that it has its limitations, many of them.

I want to spend less time "staring down the chute at the start of a long, daunting obstacle course" and more time staring through camera lenses and binoculars at the wondrous world. It would be nice to have more time to stare at my cats and my wife and to stare at other forms of art and science and other beautiful and rich places on our planet. I'm also due for a little navel-staring--or is that gazing?--some loving, renewed attention to my spiritual life and work and my own creativity. I also have to do some serious staring (without flinching) at what's going on politically in this country with its serious choice between a road of reactive retrogression, arrogant lying and aggression and a road of progress and healing, because if we're not careful, we'll be staring at something far worse than what we've stared at for the past eight years.

So, bear with me as you find me perhaps staring a little less--or a little less fixedly--at dance in the coming season. I might not get around to a lot of your shows, but I still care deeply about you and your work and about this field, and I hope to serve it more through the medium of sound, through Body and Soul podcast, a medium for many creative, authoritative voices as opposed to one critical one.

All the best,
Eva

Cedar Lake: Copy this

In ‘The Copier,’ Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet Moves and Invites the Audience to Follow
by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, August 21, 2008

Couldn't agree more

Need to Branch Out
Letter to the Editor from Rochelle Zide-Booth
The New York Times, June 22, 2008

Superdelegate...not!

The very idea of a dance critic being a "superdelegate"--see La Rocco in today's Times reviewing The A.W.A.R.D. Show--even if expressed in giddy jest, gives me hives and is the sort of thing that feeds justifiable resentment among dance artists. Bad enough that much mainstream criticism reads like it is written from what feels to me to be a free-floating place of purported omniscience which is not where I feel I am nor where I want to be in relationship to this art. Let's leave the superdelegates in politics where they belong and where they might actually do some good this evening.