Seeing Valda Setterfield

Valda
by Tobi Tobias, Seeing Things, ArtsJournal.com, October 24, 2012

Dance critic Tobi Tobias receives honor

While I was away on vacation this month, dance critic Tobi Tobias--my dear colleague and former review editor from my early days at Dance Magazine, who now blogs on dance for ArtsJournal.com--sent word that she had been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism!

My congratulations to the Pulitzer winner, Wesley Morris, film critic at The Boston Globe, but I'm going to continue to borrow a little of Tobi's glow to bask in for the arts of dance and dance writing! Note the historic nature of this honor: "...the first time a dance critic has been given the Pulitzer distinction for work created for the Internet...."

We're on the move!

Here's Tobi's note:

Dear Readers,

I want to share with you the honor and pleasure I feel in having been named a finalist in this year's Pulitzer Prize for criticism.  The citation reads: “For work appearing on ArtsJournal.com that reveals passion as well as deep historical knowledge of dance, her well-expressed arguments coming from the heart as well as the head.”

This year's winner is Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe for film criticism; the other finalist is Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post for cultural criticism. 

I'm especially pleased about the fact that this is the first time a dance critic has been given the Pulitzer distinction for work created for the Internet--in my case, reviews written for my column, "Seeing Things," which appears in ArtsJournal.

Readers are an essential part of a writer's life.  I thank you--friends, colleagues, and hundreds of people I've never met--for your contribution to my work.

tt

Hearty congratulations, Tobi!

Dance critic Tobi Tobias remembers Bill Como

Admittedly, Bill and I were an odd match. We must have disagreed about three-quarters of the issues that came our way. Our artistic taste was light years apart. Just for instance, he was a Béjart guy; I was a Balanchine gal. (Need any more be said?)

-- Tobi Tobias on Dance Magazine's Bill Como

Beginning in the dynamic 1970s, Tobi Tobias was my first review editor at Dance Magazine at the launch of my professional writing career and, along with Burt Supree at The Village Voice, eagerly sent me out on a million quests for what's interesting in dance across all kinds of traditions and techniques. (So, now you know who to thank--or blame, perhaps--as I do.) Here's a spot-on, gorgeous blog post about the start of her own dance writing career and her working relationship with Bill Como, the magazine's editor-in-chief from 1970-1988, who died in January 1989.

The Boss: Personal Indulgences No. 21
by Tobi Tobias, Seeing Things, ArtsJournal.com, January 16, 2012

Burrows and Fargion, then and now

Veteran dance critic Tobi Tobias posted a lovely appreciation of performers Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion on her ArtsJournal blog, Seeing Things. Click here and enjoy.

Tobias contemplates "The Farrell Dilemma"

The Farrell Dilemma
by Tobi Tobias, Seeing Things, ArtsJournal, October 21, 2011

Tobias on the allure of Trisha Brown

Mining the Past

by Tobi Tobias, Seeing Things, ArtsJournal.com, January 14, 2011

Bloody swans!

They Lost It at the Movies

by Tobi Tobias, Seeing Things, ArtsJournal.com, December 2, 2010

Tobias: And so, in summary

Ballet Diary No. 9

by Tobi Tobias, Seeing Things, ArtsJournal.com, July 12, 2010

Surviving greatness

The Afterlife

by Tobi Tobias, Seeing Things, ArtsJournal.com, March 8, 2010

Always have Paris

Wiseman's Lens on Dance
by Tobi Tobias, Seeing Things, ArtsJournal.com, November 3, 2009

Tobias at the Met

Dancing Without Motion
by Tobi Tobias, Seeing Things, ArtsJournal.com, September 24, 2009

Do dancers save troubled dances?

Dancers to the Rescue
by Tobi Tobias, Seeing Things, ArtsJournal.com, August 9, 2009

Two more takes on Merce

Grand Old Master
by Tobi Tobias, Seeing Things, ArtsJournal.com, April 17, 2009

Merce Cunningham, Turning 90: Meanings Still Pour From Movement
by Alastair Macaulay, The New York Times, April 17, 2009

Two prominent dance critics weigh in on Nearly Ninety, which runs through tomorrow afternoon at BAM. And what did your humble blogger friend think of the piece? You'll have to wait for the Dance Magazine (or DanceMagazine.com) review to find out!

The beat does not go on

Hey, there.

I've just returned to New York and the news that my colleague (and first Dance Magazine editor) Tobi Tobias has just lost her paying gig at cost-cutting Bloomberg News.

Sigh...

Two recent reviews by Tobi, originally posted to Bloomberg News and re-posted to her ArtsJournal blog, Seeing Things:

Paul Taylor Celebrates Walt Whitman on Life, Love
March 6, 2009

Murdered Reporter Pearl Evoked in 'Daniel' Dance
February 26, 2009

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

Tobias on a life of indulgence

Unhooked: Personal Indulgences No. 7
by Tobi Tobias, Seeing Things blog, ArtsJournal.com

My friend and colleague Tobi concludes this essay with "some people even think I can write." She can, and she's funny, too.

Vishneva's City Center turn

Here's Tobi Tobias's review of Diana Vishneva: Beauty in Motion.

Regular readers of InfiniteBody will easily figure out that I'm not much of a ballet fan. (I once was a bedazzled young woman, but I drifted.) Nevertheless, I took my sister-in-law to Vishneva's show last night, and we both left with a gnawing hunger to see the truly beautiful-in-motion ballerina dance something classical--the more classical, the better!

I'm definitely a sucker for anything Loie Fulleresque, though, and that "Water Flowers" section of the Moses Pendleton's otherwise trivial F.L.O.W. was a knockout. Check out a slide show of images here, and read Alastair Macaulay's review here. Tobias and Macaulay nail it.

Diana Vishneva: Beauty in Motion concludes this afternoon (details here), heads to Moscow (February 28-29), and returns to the states for a June 19-22 run in Chicago.

Kirov Ballet--with Vishneva among its jewels--comes to City Center in April (details here).

Tobias insight on change at NYCB

Bolshoi's Ratmansky Would Bring Stardom, Heart to City Ballet

by Tobi Tobias, SEEING THINGS, ArtsJournal.com, February 7, 2008

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on February 7, 2008.

Critics tell it like it is

My December 5th blog essay about taking friends to dance concerts has generated a lot of fun in the dance blogosphere. Apollinaire Scherr and Tonya Plank chime in at Foot in Mouth, and your participation is invited. And my buddy and former editor Tobi Tobias courageously takes the wraps off a five-year-old essay the editor of The Dance Insider warned her against making public! It's brilliant, comprehensive and hilarious. A must-read!

And I can't get up!

Here's a piece by my friend and colleague Tobi Tobias on the phenomenon that is Fall for Dance.