It’s hard to tell since we’re in the middle of it, but while the current dance scene may not be regarded as “golden,” it is undeniably rich. Part of the impressiveness of it all is the dazzling variety of styles and approaches. In a given week—say, this one—you can choose from a tango musical (Tanguera), a dance/theater interpretation of a film (Big Dance Theater), big ballet with work by contemporary choreographers (ABT), and large-scale heady stuff from Europe (Forsythe Company). Another company, Lucinda Childs, is performing restaged older work at the Joyce Theater. The main piece on the program, DANCE, is from 1979, permitting a glimpse of history in a vehicle that seems as fresh as anything out there, even if as a result of not having seen it for awhile.
Childs was one of the major figures in New York’s dance boom that took place in the 70s and 80s. She formed a company in 1973 which performed her rigorous, dense, graceful dances. read more
Last summer season, the Public Theater paired Hamlet with the musical Hair—which subsequently went to Broadway and won the Tony for Best Revival. This year, the Delacorte played host to another Shakespeare classic, Twelfth Night, paired with another bawdy piece: the Greek drama The Bacchae, scored with new music by Philip Glass. Alas, this Bacchae is not likely to transfer or win any awards. JoAnne Akalaitis’s concept has some interesting and ambitious notions, but they never quite fuse with the text or the performances. The result is a sluggish 90-minute show that feels much longer. (And which inspired numerous walkouts on the evening I attended—the first time I’ve witnessed that in years of attending the Delacorte). read more
It’s spring in New York, and Philip Glass is bursting out all over.
The biggest event is his Satyagraha, which is in the middle of its first-ever run of performances at the Metropolitan Opera. Naxos has just released a four-CD boxed set of previously recorded works called Of Beauty and Light: The Music of Philip Glass, which contains his second, third, and fourth symphonies, plus The Light, Prelude and Dance from Akhnaten, Violin Concerto, and Company, for string orchestra. At the IFC Center, they’re showing Scott Hicks’s 2007 film documentary of the composer, Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts. Glass even managed to get in last week’s New York magazine after he stated at an April 9 Brooklyn Academy of Music gala that he thinks the United States should pull out of the Beijing Olympics because of China’s record on human rights.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Glass is how his place in the classical-music universe has changed over time. read more
For most stage directors, enticing audiences towards an appreciation of a work has always been something of an exercise in accommodation. That is, giving recherché knowledge the appropriate context. Style, epoch, provenance, language, politics, philosophy, etc., all amount to considerations that must be grappled with and reconciled, in one way or another, before an audience might find meaning or relevance in a performance. Witness the abiding success of an opera production like the Met’s Franco Zeffirelli Bohème, which takes all the bustle and hubbub of a Parisian street-scape and plops it down on the company’s stage in an effort of exacting verisimilitude. At the same time, consider the ways in which a production like Robert Wilson’s Lohengrin — an austere and hyper-stylized staging that also happens to be one of my favorite productions in the Met’s repertoire — arguably succeeds by emphasizing the universal and archetypal over the specific.
In this case, I’m not talking about the details of singing, acting or music, but rather the onstage creation of time and place, “setting.” And I can’t help but wonder if we’re living in an era of live performance that will amount to the setting-sun of traditional scenery and stagecraft. read more
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