Amazing how Bill T. Jones’ work looks and feels as fresh as ever in his company’s 25th year. Serenade/The Proposition, at the Joyce through last Sunday, takes inspiration from Abraham Lincoln, whose bicentennial approaches. The performance combines Jones’ elegant choreography, spoken text, and live chamber orchestra and singer in a rich, luminous hour-long work.
At its heart is the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, which although constantly evolving, always thrills with a heady chemistry arising from a combo of strong individuals. Paul Matteson, a perennial warm presence in the dance world, traces Lincoln’s virtues with his gentle motion, noble bearing, and willingness to aid others. The company members periodically strike unique poses to form a “spine” bisecting the stage, regrouping before bursting apart in individual phrases—a neat metaphor for the united and sometimes disunited states of America. read more
Robert Wilson’s brand of theater art was seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as early as 1969. Forty years after his debut there, Wilson’s work returned to BAM this month with a vivid of Heiner Muller’s Quartett, a 1981 reworking of the 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It opens with an almost 10-minute long tableau that introduces all five characters—Muller’s play calls for only two actors, but Wilson, like when he first staged the work back in 1988, adds three other actors who don’t speak—followed by the Marquise de Merteuil (played by Isabelle Huppert) reciting in breakneck speed (and in French!) what sounds like a letter to her former lover, Valmont (Ariel Garcia Valdes).
The rest of the play unfolds with Wilson’s now-familiar design: minimal sets, a few Parzival Chairs, some sleek, Samurai-esque costumes, and intense, deeply hued lighting changes. read more
Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, at the Whitney through January 24, 2010, doesn’t feel like a museum exhibition. It feels more like several gallery shows in one place at the same time—in a good way. Many solo museum shows can be overwhelming, or hinge around some giant work/s that skew the scale of the rest of the exhibition, often diminishing the intimate stuff. But Horn’s show, on two floors, is delicate, textured, multi-layered, and politely demands that viewers pay very close attention.
That’s not to say that Horn, born in 1955, doesn’t go quietly monumental here, as she does in a set of cast glass geometric shapes whose transparency and glossiness contradict their tonnage. read more
Last night I finally had a chance to hear David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion. The piece is a Carnegie Hall commission that had its world premiere in 2007 with Paul Hillier’s four-member Theatre of Voice.
If you were lucky enough to catch The Little Match Girl Passion premiere at Carnegie or have listened to it on the recent recording, you may agree with the judges who awarded the 35-minute work the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. It masterfully blends the simple tragedy of the Hans Christian Andersen story about a girl going door-to-door, barefoot, selling matches on the coldest night of the year, with a Bach-style passion structure of alternating narrated story passages and vocal commentary.
Lang has now rescored the work for chorus, and that is the version that about 100 of us heard last night, at WNYC’s Greene Space down on Varick Street, with the New York Virtuoso Singers led by Harold Rosenbaum. read more
In our busy daily lives, we don’t often have the opportunity to be immersed in anything outside of the regular stuff… I mean transported, outlook altered, mood changed. I sampled a couple of cultural experiences offering such a chance this week, Minneapolis-based Morgan Thorson’s Heaven at PS 122 which closed Oct 3 and Kurt Hentschläger’s Zee at 3LD Art & Tech Center.
As the audience entered, the tightly bunched group of performers walked very slowly around the periphery of the stage, quietly demanding all attention. Everything was white—the marley, the curtains that lined the walls, the columns (with pleated skirts around their bases), the dancers’ costumes, crafted of quilted fabric with Ace bandage accents. White lace even trimmed all of the industrial audience chairs. Lenore Doxsee designed the superb lighting; Emmett Ramstad the costumes; the two with Thorson designed the visual setting. read more
Artist Bill Viola has a show of work from two decades titled Bodies of Light, at James Cohan Gallery, through Dec 19. He sat down to talk about his work last week.
You had a residency at WNET a long time ago?
The first time I did something at WNET was in 1976; I did a piece called Four Songs that had to do with the passage of time, death, resurrection, but in a slightly different way than I deal with those topics now. It was broadcast on television. The first time my work was seen by large numbers of people, it was not in a museum, it was on NET, then it got syndicated and went to other public TV stations. I was involved with the TV Lab from around ‘75 thru maybe ‘81. That’s how I learned how to edit with high end professional equipment.
So many people have large format HD screens at home now… it’s a readymade format for your work.
I totally agree. The advent of flat screens have reconnected video to the art forms that since the beginning of video I’ve felt it was connected to. The flat screen confirmed all that, and the connection between the moving image and painting. That’s what plasma screens have allowed. And people like Jim and Jane Cohan (of James Cohan Gallery) get artists’ work on a wall in a portable format, which is what the original notion of painting was—frescoes, or cave paintings. People in the late middle ages were able to travel much farther than ever before, and they wanted to take their little icons with them. So artists painted icons, and the paintings started to grow, and eventually it eclipsed fresco. read more
It’s hard to view Strindberg’s Miss Julie—even Patrick Marber’s updated After Miss Julie—in light of today’s values. The tragic weight of the play stems from the fact that after two people of a difference social class make love, their world is turned upside down.
Today, a quickie with someone below you in social status is not a shocker, but an exercise in branding—a step on the celebrity ladder of success. In our world of sex tape “scandals” and Levi Johnson posing for Playgirl (one year after standing on the podium of the Republican National Convention next to Sarah Palin) how can we seriously buy the morning-after angst of Julie and her father’s valet? Regardless of whether its set when Miss Julie was written (1888 Sweden) or updated in Marber’s version to 1945 England, the only dramatic question for modern audiences is: will she text her snooty friends and brag about shagging the help—or whether he’ll slip the news to the Post or TMZ in the hopes of a long career of snogging rich debutantes? read more
I think it’s safe to say that George Steel and Peter Martins are probably two of the happiest men in New York today.
Last Thursday morning, Steel and Martins—the general director of New York City Opera and Ballet Master in Chief of the New York City Ballet—invited members of the press to a preview of the newly renovated David H. Koch Theater (a.k.a. the New York State Theater), which is finally set to re-open on November 5 with American Voices, a program of American music. The gala reopening will honor Koch, who gave a $100 million lead gift to the joint capital campaign of the two companies, which both perform at the theater. Also at this morning’s preview was New York City Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate D. Levin—the city of New York also donated $26.9 million toward the rebuilding project. Steel joked that the opening-night gala will be an opportunity to hear “ballet, opera-theater, and Rufus Wainwright—all at one low price.” Martins quipped that the theater’s 40-foot legroom space would be maintained, and the theater’s changes meant that Tchaikovsky could now be heard “as he was meant to be heard.” After the jump, you can see some pictures of the newly renovated space. read more
Brazilian Deborah Colker’s company may rarely visit New York, but going by 4 Por 4 at New York’s City Center through Oct 25, the choreographer does not lack ambition. The program features four simply-titled dances with distinctive sets by different artists whose visions lay the thematic groundwork.
Each dance’s visual environment sets parameters for the choreography, whether it be mood or physical limitation. The opening dance, Corners, is just that—six mobile cutaway room corners that constrain the dancers or challenge them to escape and enter from above. Whether by intent or not, the womens’s slick gyrating movements and stiletto heels conjure images of go-go dancers. Men replace them (not wearing stilettos), eventually climbing upon the units and jumping down from what appears to be an alarmingly high distance. The dated music adds to the pseudo-club atmosphere that quickly becomes repetitive and is distinctly lacking in irony. read more
A Steady Rain, which recently broke the weekly record for highest grossing play in Broadway history, is simply a Chippendales show for women (and men, I suppose) who like to like to watch two hunks show off their brains as well as their muscles. (For those New Yorkers whose internet has been out of service for the past month, A Steady Rain stars James Bond and Wolverine—Daniel Craig and High Jackman—as two ethically challenged Chicago beat cops.)
Keith Huff’s two-hander is a serviceable piece of theater. I hesitate to call it a play since it’s basically two monologues, intercut without much style or grace. (The production values are top notch at least: the moody lighting courtesy of Hugh Vanstone, the ghostlike sets by Scott Pask, not to mention John Crowley’s sure-handed direction.)
The plot is solid but feels more like the draft of a pilot for new Primetime cop show (CSI: Chicago, anyone?). Both men tell their side of the story concerning a wild evening that begins with a blind date and bullet hole in 52-inch plasma screen. read more
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