Child's Play
Fittingly, I caught Kaori Ito’s charming production “An Upside Down World” on Children’s Day, a national holiday in Japan.
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World-class review of ballet and dance.
The haute joaillerie house Van Cleef & Arpels has a long history of supporting dance, since Louis Arpels attended the Paris Opera Ballet in the 1920s. In the 1940s, the company began producing jewel-encrusted ballerina clips. When Claude Arpels met George Balanchine in 1961, it led to the New York City Ballet’s first abstract full-length ballet, “Jewels,” in 1967. Since 2012, the house has sponsored the L.A. Dance Project, and, in 2015, they began awarding the Fedora–Van Cleef & Arpels Prize for Ballet. Winners include Alexei Ratmansky, William Forsythe, and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. So it was fitting that VC&A commissioned a new dance to be performed during its second annual Fifth Avenue Blooms festival, an outdoor celebration of spring running along NYC’s Fifth Ave from 50th-59th Street throughout the month of May. What was less fitting was the choice of downtown experimentalist choreographer Pam Tanowitz to headline this floral-festooned uptown stretch of consumerism—and the incongruity was a delight.
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Fittingly, I caught Kaori Ito’s charming production “An Upside Down World” on Children’s Day, a national holiday in Japan.
PlusJoy is the goal of Parsons Dance. That is immediately apparent from the opening of the program for its New York season at the Joyce Theater: “Ludwig,” a brand-new David Parsons original, features all nine company dancers, smiling and dressed in varying shades of sunset oranges and yellows, moving vigorously to the second movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony.
PlusCathy Weis’ SoHo loft is haunted. This is not because of the skeleton that dangles on the wall, or the iron hand that floats ominously above the piano. 537 Broadway—or Weis Acres, as the multi-media artist Weis dubs it—is enchanted by spirits of artists and eccentrics past.
PlusSuccess, as so many artists know, can be a devilishly mixed blessing. On the San Francisco Bay Area’s aerial dance scene, which counts site-specific innovators Joanna Haigood and Jo Kreiter among its many notables, the company formerly known as Project Bandaloop has long attracted national attention for dances that scale Seattle’s Space Needle, or rappel down a 2500-foot-high rock face in Yosemite.
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