It’s natural to associate MoMA with cutting-edge. But a visit to Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present retrospective on view through May 31 is a reminder of just how staid the institution is, nominally ignoring performance art. Here are actual live people doing re-performances of the artist’s original works, which have nearly always involved herself and her ex-partner, Ulay. So wherever you look there’s an often naked person, usually a woman, pinned to the middle of a wall, lying under a skeleton, wedged in a doorway. And in between are many small, medium, and large video screens showing recordings of the original performances. Although in an understandable, if toothless gesture, the museum has added an alternative passageway to Imponderabilia (1977/2010), in which a naked woman and man line a narrow doorway, causing viewers to brush against one or the other.
Despite all the live elements, the most powerful artifacts in the show, curated by Klaus Biesenbach, are the wall labels. Without them, we most likely wouldn’t get the point of all the … read more
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
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
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
A Little Night Music is a little more “little” this time around. Trevor Nunn’s scaled down version of Stephen Sondheim’s 1973 musical (currently running at the Walter Kerr Theatre) features a mere eight musicians in the “orchestra” pit. In contrast, the first (and only previous) Broadway production boasted a band of 25.
This is the main problem with this problematic production—it renders one of Sondheim’s most musical musicals as a play with occasional songs. This paring down of Sondheim is all the rage these days, with Sweeney Todd, Company, and Sunday in the Park, all seen on Broadway recently in minimalist stagings. Sometimes they work (Sweeney) sometimes not (Sunday) but it’s important to note that this wasn’t always the case. In the 1990’s the fashion was to go big with Sondheim: the last time Night Music was seen in Manhattan was in a grand, lavish production at New York City Opera (no skimping on the orchestra there). read more
East Village Opera Company, the opera-rock hybrid company, first attracted buzz in 2004 with its live performances at Joe’s Pub. Two members of the company, co-founder Tyley Ross and AnnMarie Milazzo are currently singing miked, rock-infused versions of arias like Lakme’s Flower Duet, Verdi’s “La donne e mobile,” and Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” as part of Remember Me, an integrated production featuring singers onstage with members of the Parsons Dance Company at the Joyce Theater. The show—one of three programs the Parsons is doing during this month’s residency at the Joyce—is billed as a completely revamped version of the show that aired on PBS last year, and features new choreography and costumes by Project Runway designer Austin Scarlett.
Remember Me is a bit analogous to a show like Mamma Mia in that it adds a story line to provide a framework for tunes that people already know—certainly the operagoers in the audience know them, and many of the non-opera audience do as well. read more
After watching i get lost: An Evening of Solos (February 4-6), part of the platform curated by choreographer Ralph Lemon at Danspace Project, I wondered why more solos aren’t paired on programs. Then again, that’s part of the allure of this new series, to allow accomplished artists to juxtapose other unique artists in ways that reveal so much more than if they were isolated. By nature, a soloist is both form and content, and so can be very difficult to execute, but both Judith Sánchez Ruíz and Souleymane Badolo excelled in the medium.
Sánchez Ruíz, from Cuba, performed And They Forgot To Love. Instantly striking was her costume, which appeared to be a lace-front, sheer-back top, when it was actually white tape applied carefully, her back bare above a black lace skirt. This immediately set forth the idea that our perception was one thing, reality another. read more
subscribe to RSS feed
find SundayArts on Facebook
