In the Galleries
In Maia Chao’s “Being Moved,” the audience was ushered up to the 7th floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art in a large, crowded elevator with all sixty or so passengers carrying on conversations at maximum volume.
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Winter Games
This winter has been one of the wintriest in recent New York City memory. Between the unnavigable mounds of dirty snow at every intersection, dangerous patches of black ice, multiple days of subzero temperatures, power outages, and frozen pipes, there has also been the bone-chilling rise of authoritarianism in America.
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Life, Death, Little Deaths, and a New Year Too
Dominica Greene makes snow angels in a small pool of light. As the audience chatter at Danspace Project quiets down, she revs to life. Rocking and talking about a rickety fan found in her grandparents’ house in Guyana, her shakes and shudders illustrate the pleasure her body derives from the appliance’s particular rhythm.
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Past Lives, Future Selves
In an animation that is woven through the performances of traditional dances in Indigenous Enterprise’s “Still Here,” a young boy watches a video of powwow musicians and dancers with his grandfather on Youtube.
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Fall Fashion
“Was it Benjamin Franklin, that sagacious and witty man, who, on signing the Declaration of Independence that hot July day in 1776, admonished his colleagues that they had better hang together lest they all hang separately?
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Emergent Summer, Part 2
The lobby of the Ace Hotel Boerum Hill is an excellent place to work, particularly in the room with the long table and library lamps.
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Emergent Summer
Tushrik Fredericks walks as if in a trance, arms floating forward and pushing back with each step. Fog transforms the air into a tangible element.
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A Rolling Piece
Angelina Laguna kneels on the sidewalk and places her body perpendicular to the flow of the First Avenue foot traffic.
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Notable Women
When Camille A. Brown appears out of the dark upstage and into the light, it prompts an unironic version of the question: “To what do I owe this honor?”
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After Ailey
Okwui Okpokwasili’s arms undulate, reach, and circle in the near dark under an oval projection of rippling water. Her arms babble out from her expressive back, capable of relating tales both epic and intimate. Notably, this is how I first encountered her work, nearly a decade ago, in “Bronx Gothic”—through her incredibly articulate spine and upper body coming into its own, conveying the metamorphosis of adolescence.
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Super Nothing
In the world premiere of Miguel Gutierrez’s “Super Nothing,” the quartet of performers fly through the vast, empty black box theater at New York Live Arts, small forms cast out like particles of light.
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On Endurance
In a four-day span of early January I saw: Monica Bill Barnes wrestle a giant beach ball at Playwrights Horizons; Malcolm-x Betts and Nile Harris shoot blanks into the rafters of the Chocolate Factory in honor of Judith Jamison’s spirit; Symara Sarai run in and out of a swirling lasso at New York Live Arts Studios; and Angie Pittman dart across a shallow stage, in character as a vampire, cape flying, at BAM Fisher Hillman Studio in a shared bill with Kyle Marshall Choreography. In short, it was APAP season.*
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Firebird Rising
Long before the dancers take the stage, Dance Theatre of Harlem’s season at New York City Center feels like one of the most energizing cultural events of the spring.
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Rare Birds
It is rare for George Balanchine’s grand, bedazzled “Symphony in C” to open a program. Its champagne-popping finale for 52 dancers tends to be a nightcap.
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The Spring is Blooming festival, by Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, now in its fifth year, has become a highlight of the spring dance circuit.
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Jack of Hearts
As the audience come to their feet at the end of this ballet there is a noted difference to be seen on stage. Three women stand with joined hands, taking their call as the romantic leads of a loud and proud lesbian ballet.
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School Report
One of San Francisco Ballet’s greatest assets is its home venue, the Beaux-Arts style War Memorial Opera House, with four rings of seating that require performers to project their energies practically to the exosphere.
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