re-Jones/Zane

New York Live Arts has launched its inaugural season with Body Against Body, an exhilarating program of early works by Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, performed by Jones's current troupe members and dance celebrity guests such as Janet Eilber, Vicky Shick, Richard Move and Matthew Rushing. I attended last night's opener, the first of two discrete programs that run through September 25.

Reasons to check in with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at this juncture are many. Body Against Body revisits conceptual works--such as Monkey Run Road (1979) and Continuous Replay (1977), with its full-on, un-selfconscious nudity and lightly ritualistic accumulation and repetition--that remain startlingly airy and clear in structure and delightful today. The troupe season's title can imply a cluster of meanings--the sensuality of flesh against flesh, the playfulness of adept physical instruments directed by equally top-level minds, the supple and sturdy support of one partner for the other. All of these meanings and values can be found in the works on display here as throughout the best of the art Jones has made as survivor of his personal and professional relationship with Zane, who passed in 1988.

Jones and Zane did the one-on-one format especially right. So, if you can still manage to grab a ticket, be sure to see Monkey Run Road (with the choreographers' casually elegant, harmonious roles taken by Talli Jackson and Erick Montes) and Valley Cottage: A Study (1980/1981) with a rotating cast of partners. Last night's pair included Paul Matteson and Jennifer Nugent, Jones/Zane troupe members and "downtown" dance celebrity artists in their own right. Matteson and Nugent will also appear in Program B's Blauvelt Mountain (A Fiction).

Perhaps, by breathing new life into these historic duets, Jones intends to work some subliminal mojo on any remaining skeptics as he begins his own grand partnership with the former Dance Theater Workshop, host of the original productions of two of these seminal works. It's good to be reminded of where Jones came from, this searching, breakthrough choreographer who now, with Carla Peterson and the rest of the NYLA team, hopes to break down barriers for other artists. His new season should serve as a blessing on NYLA's ambitious venture.

Company performers: Antonio Brown, Talli Jackson, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, LaMichael Leornard, Jr., I-Lin Liu, Paul Matteson, Erick Montes, Jennifer Nugent and Jenna Riegel. Guest artists vary by performance.

With costumes by Liz Prince and lighting by Robert Wierzel


The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in Body Against Body continues tonight and September 20-24 at 7:30; Sundays September 18 and September 25 at 5pm. Pre-show Talk: September 21 with dance critic Marcia B. Siegel and Bill T. Jones.

Post-Show Talk: September 23 with Bill T. Jones, Carla Peterson, Janet Wong and the dance company

Check the box office for ticket availability: 212-924-0077

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

Discover the Von Howard Project

Yes, the best plan for this city weekend is to stay indoors with A/C and the--for now, at least--affordable charms of Netflix. But if you do want to venture out, you might enjoy discovering the young dancers of Von Howard Project, who hail from all over the US plus Kingston, Jamaica. Under the direction of master dancer Christian von Howard, VHP proves to be a disciplined team capable of plasticity, apt timing and finely-calibrated expression in two demanding new works by Susan Douglas Roberts (breath to bone) and von Howard (the New York premiere, Triptych). Triptych--an extended meditation on romance delivered in three sections with a 10-minute intermission--seems a little catch-all, something for everyone, from serene abstraction to sheer mainstream entertainment. But it does offer a sense of this company's range and hints of considerable potential. It also includes a memorable star turn for von Howard himself, a strong man as surefooted as a mountain goat, decked out in a bridal gown and carrying a bouquet of calla lilies. Michael Jarett handsomely supports the evening with lighting keyed to the poetic intent of both works.

Performances by von Howard, Elizabeth Alvarez, Laura Barbee, Rachel Brady, Beth Brandt, Bryanna Brown, Matthew Cumbie, Whitney Hubbard, Aaron Burr Johnson, Christina Carlotti Kolb, Allison Meyer, Nikolai McKenzie, Kelly Oakes, Kim Palmer, Allison Ploor, Kyoko Ruch, Courtney Sauls, Ellenore Scott, Stacie Shivers, Jerome L. Stigler and Rohnie D. Williams

Von Howard Project continues tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30pm with a final performance on Sunday, July 24 at 2pm.

Click here for tickets, or call 212-924-0077.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan,
(directions)

New York Live Arts announces new season

What in the world is happening here?

Well--believe it or not--it's sort of an impromptu plein air press conference convened by the ever-resourceful Bill T. Jones in front of New York Live Arts (formerly Dance Theater Workshop, now merged with Jones's dance troupe) but actually in front of an NYFD fire truck.... Wait. Is this getting way too complicated?

Let me start over.

At a morning press conference inside NYLA's Bessie Schönberg Theater, Jones (NYLA Executive Artistic Director) had just been introduced by the organization's CEO Jean Davidson. Jones surprised us by elegantly, delicately dancing and even singing a little as he made his opening remarks. Halfway through, he started to talk about his own troupe's upcoming season but, suddenly, the NYFD ordered everyone to leave the building and assemble across the street!

We had to wait until the fire truck pulled up and the firemen did...something...I have no idea and no one seemed to know what. In the meantime, Jones doffed his shirt, as is his wont, and completed his address to the crowd of press, staff, dance world colleagues and curious passersby. Happily--and to the great relief of Carla Peterson, NYLA Artistic Director, who would have had to shout over street noise--we were soon able to return to the theater.

Truth be told, for the first time, the very idea of New York Live Arts does seem hot enough to warrant the arrival of a truckload of firemen. And it certainly seems dance enough to still the fears of folks who thought that the loss of the name Dance Theater Workshop meant something sinister.

The upcoming season--beginning September 16 with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company--and other NYLA programs rock. I'll drop a handful of names, just for starters: Reggie Wilson, Yvonne Meier, Rachid Ouramdane, John Kelly, Richard Move, Ivy Baldwin, Jodi Melnick, John Jasperse, RoseAnne Spradlin and Big Dance Theater. Over 40 diverse emerging, mid-career and established dance artists will participate in the presenting season or other NYLA programs. NYLA will continue DTW's traditions of commissioning cutting-edge performance, offering audiences opportunities to revisit seminal works and giving artists the chance to develop and show new projects in informal presentations.

The 2011-2013 recipient of a new program--Resident Commissioned Artist--will be Yasuko Yokoshi, the well-regarded, Hiroshima-born choreographer who has worked in New York since 1986. Yokoshi's two-year award includes a salary, health insurance, and support for creation and possible touring of new work. Imagine that! Jones described this as "a new standard for the entire field." Indeed and amen, amen.

"We launched New York Live Arts because we want to instigate change, not react to it," said Jones, later explaining the organization's initiatives as "a leap of faith."

There's much more to learn about New York Live Arts. So, for complete information about the mission, the upcoming season and the spectrum of artist services, click here.

Liberate your soul

Krissy Keefer of Dance Brigade
(photo by Anastacia Powers Cuellar)

San Francisco's feminist troupe

Dance Brigade

presents

THE GREAT LIBERATION UPON HEARING

 

at Dance Theater Workshop 

Thursday-Friday, July 7-8 (7:30pm)

Saturday, July 9 (2pm and 7:30pm)

Writer/director/choreographer Krissy Keefer, called a "rabble-rouser" by the San Francisco Weekly, has turned to the Tibetan Book of the Dead for her unique new work, performed by a group of 12 including a taiko drummer. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, whose actual title is "The Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State" or "Bardo Thodol," acts as a guide for the dead during the state that intervenes death and the next rebirth. It is read aloud to the dead while they are in the state between death and reincarnation in order for them to attain liberation.

Founded in 1984, the feminist group Dance Brigade engages diverse communities and artists in their multicultural, multi-media dance/theater works. At home, in San Francisco, they operate the Dance Mission Theater, support the dance company, produce a series of annual events showcasing both emerging and established Bay Area choreographers, and conduct dance programs for adults and youth. For more information, click here.

For reservations, call 212-924-0077 or click here.

Dance Theater Workshop

219 West 19th Street (between 7th & 8th Avenues), Manhattan

(map and directions)

tweetINTUIT

My former writing students, from DTW/New York Live Arts, are now on Twitter @danceINTUIT!

Trust the public

So I'm reading Movement Research Performance Journal on the M15 crosstown to Chelsea. There's an interview with Bill T. Jones about how professional dance absolutely must change to survive. I'm staring down into that strange, typical soup of words, intense energy, blunt provocation and frustrating lack of specificity--and, yes, I do mean typical for both BTJ and MRPJ. But just before the bus pulls into its 18th Street terminus, I get to this passage from Jones:

Are you clear about what you believe and what you make and how you make it? Are you so clear about it that you could actually invite the most stupid person in there and give that person just a little taste of something that's human in what you do and that is not superior. This whiff of arrogance and superiority--believe me honey I have it, big time. And I'm telling you something, I've had to learn, because it sneaks through, that we actually feel, and this is the history of alienation, that somehow we are entitled because we are a privileged and long-suffering elite that is wandering in the wilderness of mediocrity which is the whole world. Now if that doesn't sound like a load of shit, then you tell me. (MRPJ #38, February 2011, p. 5)

I don't care for the descriptive "stupid," but I think I begin to get what he's getting at despite the fragments and tangents.

Jones is impatient for contemporary dance to break out of its cocoon and make both pragmatic and creative connections out there in the hell of other people. That's what he has in mind for New York Live Arts--the new entity formed from the merger of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop--and it begins with the individual artist deciding that he or she respects and can trust the public.

Detail of Sarah Sze's STILL LIFE WITH LANDSCAPE (MODEL FOR A HABITAT), High Line Park (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

A few steps, a few stairs, and I'm surrounded by the gorgeous, lush greenery and wildflowers of High Line Park, walking its new section. I take photos of a mourning dove alight on an elaborate wildlife sanctuary by artist Sarah Sze. The sculpture provides watering holes, seed feeders and places for resting and nesting. "It's like a mansion for birds," one visitor exclaimed. Yes, now even birdies, butterflies and ladybugs can find an upscale perch in Chelsea!

Detail of Sze sculpture (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Above and below: Mourning dove (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Above and below: Seen from High Line Park (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

I stroll to 30th Street. Though reluctant to leave the flowers, the butterflies, the breeze, the views across this cityscape, I ride the elevator down to 10th Avenue. I'm off to the Sean Kelly Gallery for Robert Mapplethorpe: 50 Americans: fifty photographs "selected by fifty Americans of diverse occupations, ages, races and backgrounds...one from each state in the Union...invited to select a single artwork from over 2,000 images in Mapplethorpe's collection that resonated with them personally." Portraits, still lifes, a wintry landscape...the range of these selections is broad and lovely.

Right away, I stumble upon, like a secret wink meant just for me, a 1985 portrait of--yes--Bill T. Jones chosen by a 32-year-old woman from Birmingham, Alabama, a children's author and storyteller. Jones jumps straight up, his body breaching the frame, rendered headless, and as my mind helplessly starts to read something into this that the white Alabama native might not have considered, I move along.

A 66-year-old grandmom from Vermont enjoyed working through the photo collection with her granddaughter. She chose Horse #5 (1982) and wrote, "I was drawn to all the images of animals. I love animals. These horses reminded me of my farm....Lots of memories and stories came to life through his work."

Her response is fairly common: Lots of these folks found that they could relate to aspects of Mapplethorpe's diverse imagery on a personal level. They share their experiences here. Reading the plaques that accompany the photos and bear the selectors' words and a thumbnail picture of each, I find my heart going out to many of them.

Prior to getting involved in the gallery's project, most of the participants knew little, if anything, about the photographer and his work. Some knew just enough about Mapplethorpe's reputation for homoerotic imagery to be a little nervous about having to view it. Some clearly avoided the erotica when making their choices from among the collection's variety of subjects. Yet these non-experts crowd-curated a beautiful, instructive show, and their reflections on this work demonstrate remarkable perception and insight as well as appreciation for Mapplethorpe's sensitivity and brilliance.

I was moved by the capacity people have to meet art with open minds when given a chance to really look at it and allow it to draw close to them, to search their lives for common ground. No wonder repressive social orders seek to manipulate or destroy art. I was touched, too, by this gallery's trust of the American public, and that brought me back to Bill T. Jones.

I stopped for dinner on the way home and, once again, took out my now-rumpled copy of MRPJ. This time, I turned to "New York's Alright," an editorial by dance artist Eleanor Hullihan and was amazed to read this passage, including her reference to Mapplethorpe's great soul mate, Patti Smith:

Phyllis Lamhut and Patti Smith are two women I admire who in different ways have encourage people to get out of New York and either make work where they came from or where they can afford to live more easily.  We could benefit from decentralizing dance in the states. We can't keep talking about the rest of the country like it is full of idiots who don't understand us if they don't have the opportunity to see what we do. I recently had one of the most positive audience responses from a show I did with John Jasperse in Helena, Montana. Montana? Hell yes. It was not a dance audience but they came and enjoyed and wanted to talk afterwards. This may be a mission for our generation of makers. It may also be a mission for people younger than ourselves. (MRPJ #38, February 2011, p. 6)

Okay, Universe, I get it. Trust the people. Just get the work out there. Spread it around, that "little taste of something that's human in what you do and that is not superior." Just trust. Good for artists to remember. Good for people who write about art to remember, too.

Robert Mapplethorpe: 50 Americans ends Saturday, June 18.

Sean Kelly Gallery
528 West 29th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan 212-239-1181
(map)

danceINTUIT blog launches!

Yesterday, I told you about a new quarterly, The Dance JOT, launched by students from my Dance Theater Workshop/New York Live Arts' Writing on Dance series as one of their final projects. They have also created a fresh new dance blog, and I'm delighted to announce that danceINTUIT is live! Go visit, subscribe, enjoy!

The Dance JOT debuts!

I'm thrilled and proud to announce the publication of The Dance JOT, a new quarterly journal created by students from my Spring 2011 Writing on Dance workshop at Dance Theater Workshop (New York Live Arts). As a final project for the course, the participants formed a collective to create The Dance JOT as a venue "for investigating and discussing the art form of dance as well as reflecting on the unique challenge of capturing dance in words."


Read The Dance JOT
Digital Publishing with YUDU

Check it out free online at YUDU (click here). And please consider making a donation to DTW's scholarship fund to help make future Writing on Dance workshops accessible to more students. To donate, visit this link. Thank you!

A meditation on "The Making of Americans”...and writing

Juliette Mapp’s The Making of Americans
by Maura Nguyen Donohue, Culturebot, April 21, 2011

Trisha Brown: The air is full of pictures

The air is full of pictures no matter where you reach in.

(Jack Gilbert, "The Difficult Beauty" from The Dance Most of All)

I was reading The Dance Most of All, Jack Gilbert's book of poems, during intermission at Dance Theater Workshop's presentation of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. I came across the line above and thought, "Wow, that's really true. That's exactly how I experience Brown's spacious world." And we reach in, again and again, because it is such a joy to do so.

Particularly true of Foray Forêt (1990) with the subtly Near East opulence of its Rauschenberg costumes, the tantalizing near/far wanderings of its offstage/outdoors marching band, and its generous abundance of movement. Particularly true of the easy-flowing yet precisely connected and rendered macro- and micro-movements danced by Brown's tribe with their yielding knees and wafting arms and the assured and articulate, if arcane, hieroglyphics of it all.

The invisible, peripatetic band--conductor Tom Goodkind's TriBattery Pops, a volunteer crew of Tribeca and Battery Park residents--plays a repertoire stretching from "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" to jazz. The strange effect of "following" them with our ears alone as they move outside our vision creates a sense of a wider space in which Brown and the dancers make their work. It's a distinctly American and diverse environment, one with complicated history encoded in the very things that are meant to entertain us or rally us. At first, Brown's serene dancers seem to inhabit a rarified enclave, but then you realize that they're co-existing with the world implied by the music, not contradicting it, and maybe it is gently informing what they're doing. After all, Brown is an American shaped, as we all are, by popular culture and circumstances. Although nothing is crudely underscored, you begin to see places where music and movement fondly caress each other.

In the midst of all of this heady material, please be sure to keep an eye on Elena Demyanenko. The way she places her feet, cocks her head, draws and expels her breath are all of a piece, a deep, connected way of dancing the incredibly complex coordinates that looks like a way of addressing the incredibly complex demands of life--burning within, alert, intuitive and wise.

More power to Neal Beasley for taking on a legendary, iconic Brown solo--Watermotor (1978). Perhaps it's a matter of physical difference--he is compact--but his explosive attack turns Watermotor into a very different dance (which might be just fine with Brown). I found it hard to see the movement slip through his body the way it slipped through hers. I saw the periphery of the rapid movement instead of the play of the rapids. I saw the end result of the force, a virtuosic, if considerably less interesting, performance.

For M.G.: The Movie (1991)--with its audacious stillness, even more audacious repetition (check out that nearly endless opening sequence), cheesy theatrical special effects and stilted movement aesthetics--seems to be anything but a dance critic favorite. However, the key to it, I think, might be Time--both literally giving it time to work on you and, after you've seen how it shapes up, thinking back over how Brown fractures and distorts time throughout. I can't claim that I feel drawn to this work, but I do think Brown's doing something here around time that's intriguing.

Hard to believe that this season marks this company's debut at Dance Theater Workshop. Trisha Brown Dance Company. Dance Theater Workshop. All I'm sayin'.

See Trisha Brown Dance Company tonight through Saturday at 7:30pm (program and ticket information)

Dance Theater Workshop
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

NYLA, for your viewing pleasure

New York Live Arts Community Welcome Session

Filmed February 19th, 2011. Co-Presented by Dance/NYC.

The leadership of New York Live Arts: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop re-imagined, conduct a panel to discuss the decisions and visions behind New York Live Arts. Moderated by Michelle Coffey

Reminder: DTW Writing on Dance application deadline

Here's a quick reminder that the deadline for applying for my Writing on Dance series at Dance Theater Workshop is Friday, March 18! Details below.

photo by Deborah Feller

I'm honored to be facilitating a new session of Writing on Dance (Spring 2011) for Dance Theater Workshop, beginning March 30!

This series will be an informal, supportive lab for discovery of your self as writer; for lively engagement with art; for celebration of your unique voice and creative response.

We share this lab with others who are also questioning: Why do I write? Who am I as perceiver and witness of art? How do I relate and respond to dance? Why write about dance? What is my role? Who is my reader? What is the larger context in which art is made, presented, experienced and interpreted for the public? How can I, as writer, make something new, meaningful and useful in this time of disruption and transition?

Please note: Although I will encourage participants to attend, contemplate and write about dance performances during this course, our work will not focus on the nuts and bolts of dance criticism or dance journalism, and our group need not be limited to students who wish to pursue a professional career in dance criticism.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: March 18

For Writing on Dance's complete schedule and application details, please click here.

Ghosts in the machine

And All the Question Marks Started to Sing might be the most extravagant experience Dance Theater Workshop has ever hosted. The hour-long, enigmatic fantasia of theater, music and visual and sound art, created by Norway’s Bessie-winning Verdensteatret collective, commandeers nearly every surface of DTW’s performance space and explodes throughout its air.

DTW’s theater has been transformed into a complex machine that generates and splatters not only sounds but muted light, intense shadows and the roving, wall-high animations of ghostly imagery. In this highly functional display, the most prominent features are revolving wheels (bare or decorated in what appears to be dried flowers, leaves and/or feathers) that emit amplified bleats, thrums and other sounds as if hooked up to the shattered remains of a jazz band. Handlers--Hai Nguyen Dinh, Ali Djabbary, Gjertrud Jynge and Øyvind B. Lyse--manually spin some of these wheels and carefully attend to other matters. Sometimes they contribute vocalizations to the sonic layers.

While this is not officially a dance-oriented piece, movement looms large, quite literally, although I’m not talking about anything typically associated with the performing body. Rather, these human bodies serve the machine, and the machine and its effects dance without cease.

I found, nevertheless, an unmistakable dancerliness at moments when Jynge grasped one of the wheel stands and rose on her toes to vocalize into its crackling microphone. It seemed obvious that that stand could have been made short enough so that she wouldn’t have to strain to reach the mic. However, the clutching and the straining and the plastering of her torso against the stand and particular arch of her feet in her little boots seemed to be an essential part of the design. In other words, dance.

A co-presentation of Dance Theater Workshop, FuturePerfect and Performance Space 122, And All the Question Marks Started to Sing, with its multitude of recycled mechanical parts and contraptions, has a charming old-fashioned feel. And just look at those those angelic pigeons, that crazy little breeding gull, that accordion squeezing all by itself, the prayer beads clicking away in Djabbary’s hands. This baby is a machine, all right, but not from our slick, digital age. It’s made by artists. The beauty, the wit, the ingenuity go on forever.

And All the Question Marks Started to Sing continues tonight (7:30pm) and tomorrow (5pm) at DTW, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. Hurry for your tickets! (information and ticketing)

Dance Theater Workshop
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

And All the Question Marks Started to Sing is the inaugural event of FuturePerfect 2011, a new performance, art & technology initiative in New York City. Produced in partnership with leading national and international cultural institutions, FuturePerfect highlights new hybrid performance practices, media forms, and artistic ideas that emerge as digital technologies evolve and become ubiquitous in contemporary culture. And All the Question Marks Started to Sing is also presented as part of PS122’s 30th Anniversary Season.

What happens, what remains

Click here for my Dance Magazine review of Walter Dundervill's Aesthetic Destiny 1: Candy Mountain (Dance Theater Workshop).

Apply now for DTW's new "Writing on Dance"

I'm honored to be facilitating a new session of Writing on Dance (Spring 2011) for Dance Theater Workshop, beginning March 30!

This series will be an informal, supportive lab for discovery of your self as writer; for lively engagement with art; for celebration of your unique voice and creative response.

We share this lab with others who are also questioning: Why do I write? Who am I as perceiver and witness of art? How do I relate and respond to dance? Why write about dance? What is my role? Who is my reader? What is the larger context in which art is made, presented, experienced and interpreted for the public? How can I, as writer, make something new, meaningful and useful in this time of disruption and transition?

Please note: Although I will encourage participants to attend, contemplate and write about dance performances during this course, our work will not focus on the nuts and bolts of dance criticism or dance journalism, and our group need not be limited to students who wish to pursue a professional career in dance criticism.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: March 11

For Writing on Dance's complete schedule and application details, please click here.

David White appointment at The Yard

David R. White (executive director and producer of Dance Theater Workshop, 1975-2003) has been appointed consulting artistic director at The Yard.

The Yard Welcomes David White

Invitation from NY Live Arts, Febuary 19

New York Live Arts Community Welcome Session

Saturday, February 19, 3pm

Dance Theater Workshop

Bessie Schonberg Theater

219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan

RSVP required: nyla.eventbrite.com

Meet the staff of New York Live Arts and get answers to your questions about the new organization!

You are invited to a Welcome Panel and public discussion addressing the recent merger between Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop to create New York Live Arts.

 Panel

Jean Davidson, Executive Director, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company 
and New York Live Arts

Andrea Scholler, Executive Director, Dance Theater Workshop

Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director, New York Lives Arts

Carla Peterson, Artistic Director, New York Live Arts

Moderator TBA

Followed by open Q & A

Reception to follow in the Dance Theater Workshop Lobby

RSVP required: nyla.eventbrite.com

Miller and Bell: new work at DTW

Andrea Miller's Gallim Dance and Sidra Bell Dance New York are bringing something that feels like high glamour to Dance Theater Workshop this week. With their juxtaposed world premieres, these two confident artists and their creative teams take dance theater and punch up the theatricality to an aggressive level. 

Miller's half-hour For Glenn Gould--inspired by a kind of before/after consideration of the pianist's two contrasting approaches to Bach's Goldberg Variations--evokes Gould's eccentricity. Metal folding chairs suggest the specially-designed piano chair that Gould insisted on using; stacks of books and other items prop up dancers' prone bodies just as Gould used blocks to raise his piano to an unusual, preferred height. The stage is littered--colorfully, artistically--with found objects, the detritus of internal disorder spilling outward from a brilliant artist to his environment. Safe to say, dances containing metal folding chairs are going to be irritating--sonically and, perhaps, otherwise. On that score, For Glenn Gould does not disappoint. But Gould seems to exist here as a screen upon which to project and pick through issues around irrationality and creativity in a way that proves more sensational than satisfying. The oddball Gould proves to be a very specific and specifically distracting screen. On the other hand, the Gallim ensemble--Caroline Fermin, Troy Ogilvie, Francesca Romo, Dan Walczak, Jonathan Royse Windham and Arika Yamada--drive the choreography and their bodies at a serious pitch that always amazes.

Bell's Pool ups the theatrical ante with disco-like decadence and sensational performance by Jonathan Campbell, Austin Diaz, Alexandra Johnson, Caroline Kirkpatrick, Zach McNally, Maud de la Purification and Kendra Samson. Miller and Bell share the same lighting designer, but, here, Vincent Vigilante has stepped up his own theatrical attack with stark lighting that carves out sharply-delineated zones and ovular pockets of space with radically different temperatures. Oh, baby, you feel the lighting--a truly impressive thing--while you wonder if you shouldn't be feeling the choreography, too, and getting a better grasp on meaning. Pool keeps spooling out more and more wild cleverness, seeming about to end and always finding more play (if not more sense) in that spool--a stretch of 41 minutes that seems to go on forever.

Gallim Dance and Sidra Bell Dance New York continue at Dance Theater Workshop through this Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For more information, click here.

Dance Theater Workshop

219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan

(directions)

"Nut/Cracked" at DTW

The Bang Group in Nut/cracked
(photo: Yi-Chun Wu) 

One balalaika plinging! 

Two thumbs a' sucking!

Copious vodka flowing! 

Four tap shoes tapping! 

Sunglasses gleaming! 

Ellington a'jazzing!

Bubble wrap a'popping! 

Xmas tree erecting! 

Uh...where was I?

How fun to hang out with David Parker's jazzy, sassy, goofy and yet quite meticulous Nutcracker variation, Nut/Cracked (2003) in the final performance of The Bang Group's DTW season!

As much fun as a harmless slip on skating rink ice and an irresistible waltz with flowers that make you sneeze.

As much fun as finding you've got Tchaikovsky looping in the brain but with considerable help from the likes of Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller.

The kind of fun where nothing's sacred but everything's beloved--ballet and vaudeville, Broadway and Hollywood, dancers of every shape and talent. Let's hear it for fun!

Jennifer Sydor and Aaron Mattocks in Nut/Cracked
(photo: Yi-Chun Wu) 

And so, thank you, David and company, for the fun and the sugar plums and the smiles on an almost-winter night.

All it's cracked up to be

See a live performance of David Parker and The Bang Group's Nut/Cracked, streaming live!

Watch tonight, December 20, 7:30-9pm ET. Click here.

Now in its fourth appearance at Dance Theater Workshop, Nut/Cracked incorporates an enterprising mix of tap, ballet, contemporary, disco and even toe tap. Tinged with whimsy, Nut/Cracked is a comic, subversive neo-vaudeville danced to novelty and popular arrangements of the score as well as the traditional orchestral suite. This year, each of the performances will feature students from all of five New York City boroughs.