What do you do when it’s time for a TV commercial break? If you’re like me, you check your e-mail, brush your teeth, grab a cookie, throw some laundry in the drier, pay some bills—anything but watch the darn thing. And of course, though I’m too technophobic to learn how to use it, TiVo (DVR) [...]

Jane Comfort’s An American Rendition, which recently closed at the end of September, is the latest work in an oeuvre that continually reaches beyond what most other New York choreographers are producing. Comfort has never shied from topical subject matter, complex collaborations, or pushing her performers past what is normally demanded of them. This new [...]

Fall for Dance is a wildly successful annual festival at New York City Center featuring $10 tickets and an amazing range of dance companies, 28 total. Now in its fifth year, the festival – produced by Ellen Dennis – spanned ten nights, with six different programs. All three programs I saw offered intriguing variety and [...]

Coming right on the heels of the vice-presidential debate and shortly before Oliver Stone’s biopic about George Bush, W., this Sunday’s segment on Culture Project’s In Conflict, at the Barrow Street Theatre, reminds me of how crucial political art is in our tumultuous times. The Iraq war alone has inspired myriads films (both features and [...]

In the ongoing babe-ification of the Western world, welcome to this week’s episode: Classical Babes 2.0. I’m referring, of course, to “Too Hot to Handel,” a current feature on the online arts and entertainment segment of Playboy. Sexing up classical music certainly isn’t anything new. I can remember a Beethoven LP cover from the 1970s [...]

It’s not exactly news that space in New York is at a premium, particularly for space-hungry ventures like dance studios and performance venues. So it is with special interest that a few spaces off the beaten path have offered distinctive, thoughtful shows in the last few weeks. CPR – Center for Performance Research inaugurated its [...]

Much as I have loved Babar from childhood, I had forgotten about many of the stories’ details that make the character more than just your average elephant. Besides the suit, bowler, and crown, Drawing Babar: Early Drafts and Watercolors, the exhibition at the Morgan Library reminded me of the complexities and richness that have forged [...]

As the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zanes Dance Company returns to BAM with A Quarreling Pair, I was thinking that while I’m not a big fan of his work, Jones has been branching out in interesting directions in the past few years—not so much in the dances he creates for venues such as Lincoln Center or [...]

The Met Museum’s exhibition, Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964, is like a primer on how to appreciate painting. It’s also the first comprehensive retrospective on the artist in this country, unbelievably. Morandi has a reputation as an artist’s artist, lionized by art students and scholars, but in the shadow of household name artists. This most likely would [...]

Every year there are rumors that Coney Island as we know it is about to die, and every year the amusement park in Brooklyn gets a reprieve. This time, however, things do look grim: Astroland, which occupies three acres in the heart of Coney Island, closed for good earlier this month. It’s not all Coney [...]