France’s Lyon Opera Ballet returned to the Joyce after 15 years with a wonderful program of works by Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe, and Maguy Marin, which runs through Mar 14. Even though none of these works were New York premieres, it was enormously gratifying to see them all together. Beach Birds (Cunningham) and Duo (Forsythe) resonated with one another strongly. I’ve always considered the two choreographers as two very distinct monumental skyscrapers, but in this program, put together by Lyon’s artistic director Yorgos Loukos, they came into sharp focus as proximate buildings in a neighborhood. These two cool works were balanced by Marin’s visceral, hot-blooded Grosse Fugue.
The choice of music for each dance helped with the comparison—for Beach Birds (1991), John Cage’s delicate score, played live, of plinking piano notes and rain sticks; for Duo, Thom Willems’ offstage live piano, similarly spartan, and augmented by an additional gentle soundscape. read more
The other day, I heard Chopin’s Nocturne in C minor, Op. 48 No. 1, performed live on a nineteenth-century Corning Steinway piano. As Igal Kesselman, the pianist, made his way through that nocturne’s melancholy, stormy, and contemplative sections, in the background a woman checked out a flouncy silver-grey dress on the racks at Ann Taylor. The Steinway, it turned out, was also for sale. Kesselman was one of dozens of professional and amateur pianists who played on six pianos set up at the World Financial Center as part of “Chopin 200: A Bicentennial Celebration of the Composer and His Music” held at the Winter Garden and complex from March 1 to 5. These free events began each day at 9 a.m. with “aficionado open mic” performances, followed from noon to 7 p.m. by a parade of established and up-and-coming professional pianists, and at 7 p.m. a featured performer on the Fazioli concert grand piano on the big Winter Garden stage. The six pianos, with manufacturers ranging from Steinway, Fazioli, and Kawai to the lesser-known Sauter and Wilhelm Steinberg, were stationed near escalators, near shops like Ann Taylor and Ciao Bella, and in the big open area near the palm trees. read more
William Kentridge’s drawing style is so bold and lively that it hardly needs animation to bring it to life. And yet his animated films crackle with energy, just like anything he creates, despite the fact that it is nearly entirely done with rare, hence extremely effective, daubs of color. A survey of his work is at MOMA through May 17, entitled William Kentridge: Five Themes, covering major themes and periods in his oeuvre—Ubu, Soho Eckstein/Felix Teitlebaum, in the studio, and his operas. The artist appears frequently as subject matter as well.
The installation’s flow and layout work well with the material at hand. Videos are screened on full walls in cube-shaped rooms with wide doors, integrating them into the larger installation, rather than ghetto-izing them, as often happens with curtained video projection spaces. read more
Two companies that dazzled New York last season with highly praised pairs of plays are back this spring.
The first is Theatre For A New Audience, which last year presented two highly regarded Shakespeare productions (Hamlet and Othello), who is currently mounting Measure For Measure directed by Arin Arbus (who helmed the aforementioned TFANA Othello).
Measure For Measure is not as satisfying a drama as either of those great tragedies; indeed it is usually classified as a “problem play.” Arbus’ problematic production has moments of comedy—best delivered by Jefferson Mays. Mays excels as Vincentio, the oddly aloof Duke of Vienna. He is charming, fey, quirky, and always engaging on stage, providing a bizarre, if ultimately benevolent royal. read more
There is nothing in the world of contemporary dance that even comes close to Paul Taylor Dance Company’s annual season at City Center, now through Mar 14. The troupe performs in repertory eighteen dances in different combinations over eighteen shows. Because they’ve been doing it for so long (the company is in its 55th year; Taylor celebrates his 80th birthday this year), it’s easy to take this feat for granted. But don’t, because not only is it epic, it’s normal for them. read more
My visit to the 2010 Whitney Biennial coincided with reading Don Delillo’s brief novel, Point Omega. Moving through the Biennial’s many galleries, I couldn’t stop thinking about the author’s descriptions of watching Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (the film Psycho slowed down to run over 24 hours) or the protagonist’s interactions with other gallery viewers, or even the presence of the security guards in the museum. The current Biennial has a large number of videos necessitating the protocol involved in video watching en masse. In quantity like this, it takes on its own quasi-performative aspects that—due to their repetition and for better or worse—become an aspect of seeing the show, curated by Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari. A choreographed performance in and of itself, by the viewers.
Personal performances aside, the 2010 Biennial (through May 30) feels like a good cross-section of what’s being seen in galleries today, without the more sensational big-name artists sucking the air from the place. read more
The Park Avenue Armory has become an increasingly alluring venue for performances in the past few years, as the location for events such as Lincoln Center Festival’s Die Soldaten, Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Ephémères, and now Brennan Gerard/Ryan Kelly’s Armory Show, co-presented by Moving Theater and the Park Avenue Armory. Performed last weekend, the company of dancers and actors, plus the musicians of ICE, inhabited the ornate side halls, capacious even though minute compared to the main Armory space, and bedecked with wrought-iron candelabras and sconces. The audience sat on risers watching the action performed in between two halls; we later followed the players into another room with a small Juliet balcony. Live, close circuit video was projected onto two screens overhead, so we were able to watch live the dancers as they gamboled in the hallways of the complex.
The dance segments shifted in vocabulary enough to defy categorization. read more
Ballet can be a spectacle, but the big companies tend to sublimate this aspect in deference to emphasizing the classic stories, its rich history, the ever-present sublime beauty. So there’s something refreshing, if blunt, about the frank populist appeal of Kings of the Dance which took place at City Center last week. Produced by Ardani Artists, if the artists involved weren’t truly world-class, the title would be more humorous than serious. Fortunately, the cast boasted local stars Marcelo Gomes, Jose Manuel Carreno, David Hallberg (all ABT), Desmond Richardson (Complexions), and Joaquin de Luz (NYCB), plus Guillaume Cote (National Ballet of Canada), Denis Matvienko (Mariinsky), and Nikolay Tsiskaridze.
This year’s densely-packed 2.5 hour program was well put-together for such a star vehicle. It led off with Christopher Wheeldon’s gentle For 4 (2006), which opens with the four crisply silhouetted like a pantheon of, well, kings, with each man’s solo overlapping with the next to Franz Schubert’s music. read more
The singer/songwriter Stew wrote the most exciting musical theater piece of the last decade: Passing Strange (recently broadcast for Great Performances), which played at the Public Theatre in 2007 then moved to Broadway’s Belasco Theatre in 2008 (winning Stew a Tony for Best Book of a Musical).
Since then, Stew and his longtime collaborator (and sometime companion) Heidi Rodewald have continued to try their hands at theatrical experiments: last summer they re-mixed Broadway showtunes for a Lincoln Center Festival concert then Stew wrote some incidental music for a Connecticut production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
This week Stew and Rodewald are putting on a new show titled Making It. It’s less a story-based work like Passing Strange and more of a song cycle clustered around a loose theme. If Passing Strange was a portrait of an artist as a young black man; Making It is a portrait of artists as a slightly older couple. read more
The Guggenheim Works & Process Emotion & Motion program on Feb 14 & 15 featured two top-ranking dancers (étoiles) from the Paris Opera Ballet—Clairemarie Osta and Mathieu Ganio—performing three ballet excerpts, plus the speaker Dr. Helen Fisher. Works & Process events usually trace a theme elucidated in dance performance excerpts, or preview an upcoming performance, or the work of one or more choreographers. This program, timed for Valentine’s Day, oddly felt more like a variety show than a unified presentation, with unrelated dance segments breaking up blocks of Dr. Fisher’s more conventional, if interesting, lecture. read more
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