Fighting Spirit
There’s a distinct warrior theme to the evening shared by Angie Pittman and Kyle Marshall, though the two choreographers are working in very different styles and tone.
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This week at the Joyce, the Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Reflections Festival presented its starriest program yet: “Dancing with Glass: The Piano Etudes.” The show brought together dance world luminaries in five different styles, united by the pensive etudes of Philip Glass and the silken costumes of Josie Natori. (The silk was a fabulous choice to bring out the wateriness of the piano pieces.) Eleven of Glass’s twenty etudes were used, and ten were played by the renowned Glass interpreter Maki Namekawa (Glass composed a piano sonata just for her in 2019). Five etudes were used to accompany dances, the other six spotlighted Namekawa’s solo playing in the front corner of the house. If it was often hard for the dancing to compete with Namekawa’s dazzling virtuosity, there was no harm done in the trying. And the overall conceit of the show was a good one. Etudes are quite literally studies, and Glass created his over two decades as practice tools to enhance and inform his own playing. Taken together, the five disparate dance works had the feel of exploratory sketches. I could see the project morphing and continuing with other dancers, choreographers, or pianists.
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There’s a distinct warrior theme to the evening shared by Angie Pittman and Kyle Marshall, though the two choreographers are working in very different styles and tone.
Continue ReadingIt’s not often these days that aspiring dancers and smaller companies can enjoy the luxury of state-of-the-art facilities to develop their practice and put on a show, especially in a capital city.
Continue ReadingToday I have the privilege of speaking with the divine Juliet Doherty. Juliet was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is slightly more Breaking Bad than “Swan Lake,” but Juliet's grandparents owned a ballet studio which passed to Juliet's mother, and so the artistic genes ran deep.
FREE ARTICLEOne of the gems of New York City’s dance landscape is the Graham Studio Series, a programming cycle that offers behind-the-scenes interaction with the work of the Graham Company in their studio space. In early January, the series presented a Graham Deconstructed event exploring Martha Graham’s modernist masterwork “Cave of the Heart.”
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