The Turning World (54)

McCain’s Suspension Bridge to Nowhere
by Frank Rich, The New York Times, September 27, 2008

Westwood and VIA show the way

If you haven't yet had a chance, listen to my interview (click here) with emerging choreographer Adrienne Westwood of VIA Dance Collaborative.  Her new work--The Dream Project: Lullaby in Surrealism--premiered last night at the Ailey Citigroup Theater and continues its run through tomorrow evening (8pm). It's a beautiful ensemble piece, inspired by the art of Rene Magritte, rich in elegant, total design and performance--which helps as some of its latter passages stretch on maybe a bit too dreamily. Westwood is a promising choreographer of delicate craft, one worth watching.  

Ailey Citigroup Theater

305 West 55th Street (at 9th Avenue), Manhattan

Ticketing at SmartTix or 212-868-4444

Fall for Farrell

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet appears on tonight's Fall for Dance bill at City Center. Hear an interview with Farrell and company member Elisabeth Holowchuk on yesterday's Leonard Lopate Show (WNYC).

O'Connor's "Rammed Earth"

I relished the chance to return to Tere O'Connor's Rammed Earth (2007)--which I'd first experienced at The Chocolate Factory last autumn--with its dozens of chairs that, for the initial section, spread audience members throughout the performance space, each chair facing this way or that, set in its own eccentric inclination. Against the ushers' gentle suggestions, I kept my well-stuffed messenger bag (on my lap, where it would not get in the way of any dancer). And in accord with a (perhaps not so gentle) suggestion that O'Connor once offered dance critics some time ago--a suggestion I clicked with straightaway--I left my notebook and pen stowed deep in the recesses of that bag where they would not get in my way.

I remembered what it felt like to inhabit the same space as Rammed Earth, with its high-pitched, mysterious poetics and its wide-open possibilities of meaning, and these masterful dancers--Hilary Clark, Heather Olson, Matthew Rogers and Christopher Williams--so weirdly good they make my skin crawl. This time, in the Howard Gilman Performance Space at Baryshnikov Arts Center, it felt as if we, the audience, were being buffeted and shaped by those four powerful bodies and intelligences.  Make that five, not four; of course, O'Connor shapes us, too, as architectural elements in his environment and as nervous systems that cannot help but fire up in such a charged setting.  

More than any other, this dance explicitly reminds me that a work of dance seen more than once is never the same, that it alters and is altered by the giver and by the receiver, and that there's always more there than can be grasped on first glance or easily told. I cherish this dance without needing to figure it all out. And even those things I think I do know about it are things that I'm just as happy to silently nod at and leave alone.

See Tere O'Connor Dance in Rammed Earth, now through Sunday, with two shows per evening: 7pm and 9pm; no late seating.

Baryshnikov Arts Center

450 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan

Ticketing at Ticket Central or 212-279-4200

First steps in Dance@DMAC

Michelangelo Alasa brings big dance to small places--well, to his Duo Multicultural Arts Center on East 4th Street--with this incandescent lineup of "downtown" dancer-choreographers in what he hopes will be an regular presentation at DMAC. Check it out on Wednesday or Thursday, October 8-9 (8pm).

Ticketing at SmartTix.com

Information at DMAC

In Cleveland, one beat does not go on

Cleveland Music Critic vs. Maestro - One Of Them Loses His Beat
by Daniel J. Wakin, The New York Times, September 24, 2008

Yummy baked goods at Fall for Dance

Mmmm... Some scrumptious doings at last night's Fall for Dance dance-sampler festival at City Center from Ayman Harper and Mario Zambrano of Richard Siegal/The Bakery in Siegal's The New 45, a duet premiered in 2006. It was like watching some of those Tharp-heyday performances from Sara Rudner, Shelley Washington, Rose Marie Wright...and then some. Loose, fluid, spritely physical with impulses that come from everywhere and from out of nowhere, zippy timing, an outpouring of invention and easygoing humor, and that impudent way of snuggling up to jazz and calypso. The audience roared.

Siegal will perform his solo, As If Stranger--which won Siegal and his collaborators a 2008 Bessie Award for visual design--for the opening ceremonies of EMPAC, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (Troy, New York, October 9-10). I missed As If Stranger when it ran at Danspace Project this past season. After savoring The New 45, I intend to run to the next show Siegal brings to New York City.