Star Dust
We are all of us, beings, in a constant state of continual change. We humans are a composition of oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen.
Continue ReadingWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
In 1924, Captain John Noel, with the aid of his hand-cranked camera (and steel nerves, I wager) captured footage of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine’s infamous attempt to climb Everest in all its beauty and brutality. The footage, recently restored by the British Film Institute National Archive in The Epic of Everest: The official record of Mallory and Irvine’s 1924 expedition (with a score composed, orchestrated and conducted by Simon Fisher Turner), saddles a backpack to the shoulder of the viewer even by today’s standards, and leaves me in little doubt as to the majesty of such an environment. Alongside the earliest film records of Tibetan life, the harsh landscape presented is one part awe-inspiring beauty to one part endurance test, and it is this punishing survival element that links an expedition with Chloe Chignell and Timothy Walsh’s new work “Post Phase: The Summit is Blue.” The landscape traversed in both film and dance is one that covers vulnerability and exhaustion, against a backcloth of extreme conditions.
Performance
Place
Words
Still from The Epic of Everest: The official record of Mallory and Irvine’s 1924 expedition, film by Captain John Noel, 1924
“Uncommonly intelligent, substantial coverage.”
Your weekly source for world-class dance reviews, interviews, articles, and more.
Already a paid subscriber? Login
We are all of us, beings, in a constant state of continual change. We humans are a composition of oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen.
Continue ReadingThe title of Catherine Tharin’s latest production, “In the Wake of Yes,” is a reference to “Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy,” an inner monologue on womanhood and sexuality, from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Tharin matches the tone of this work as she picks up on an exuberant string of “yeses” from that text. Her witty series of dances explores romance and its complications. At the center of the show is a film by Lois Robertson that lifts the dancers out of the tiny East Village stage and transports them (and us) to scenes of contemporary New York City. Tharin, who danced with the...
Continue ReadingThrough its newly opened program, “Other Dances,” Dutch National Ballet kicks off the summer with a slate of lighthearted fare that varies in precise approach but altogether evokes an effervescent mood.
Continue ReadingTaking the historian’s long view, the message within “Last and First Men,” that “the whole duration of humanity, its evolution, and many successive species, is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos,” is, to me, ultimately a comfort.
Continue Reading
comments