It seems fitting that an exhibition of Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare’s work is being shown at the Brooklyn Museum, located in a borough where more cultures meet daily in the Atlantic/Pacific subway station than in high season in a trading port of call. A signature of Shonibare’s work is the use of Dutch wax fabric, […]

In terms of sheer depth of talent, the Twelfth Night that opened at the Delacorte Theater last week is probably the closest thing to the Public Theater’s now-legendary production of The Seagull back in the summer of 2001.  But despite countless Tony-winners, TV stars and one blushing recent Oscar-nominee, at the final preview the buzz […]

The great German choreographer Pina Bausch passed away on June 29 within a brutally short week of a cancer diagnosis, at 68 years of age. It was a terrible shock to the world of dance and performance—the end of an era and the sudden, cold beginning of another without her. Her pieces, performed by Tanztheater […]

This week I’ve been re-reading sections of Oliver Sacks’s 2007 book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain in which the neuroscientist delves into the science behind his long-term interest in music. As Sacks said last October at Frederick P. Rose Hall, where Musicophilia was awarded an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award, since he was about 5 […]

James Ensor (1860-1949) is one of those artists whose name is fairly familiar, but whose work hovers in a mental netherworld of art history. So MoMA’s overview of this Belgian artist offers welcome insight into his weird, intriguing oeuvre that overlapped many influential movements and artists before nestling most comfortably with the expressionists of the […]

It seems like it’s been raining forever in New York, but recently, the showers stopped long enough for me to try out the city’s latest amenity: The High Line park running along Tenth Avenue. Rising 30 feet into the air, the park has been created out of an old railway trestle built in the 1930s […]

Pam Tanowitz’s Be In the Gray With Me (at DTW through last Saturday) is a major step for this choreographer whose work has been shown in New York for years, but in primarily smaller venues. Tanowitz has made a piece (video clip after the jump) that speaks not only about dance and its history, but […]

Keigwin + Company and nicholas leichter dance, two very appealing New York-based companies, take over the Joyce the week of June 23, alternating dates through Sunday the 28th. Both groups, led by accomplished choreographers who are unafraid to experiment, have tremendous popular appeal. Coincidentally, Nicholas Leichter and Larry Keigwin happen to be among the most […]

A modest stack of new Bach CDs has been piling up on my desk over the last several months—when you’re a Bach-lover it’s hard for this not to happen periodically. There are keyboard sonatas (David Fray), violin sonatas (David Grimal), The Art of Fugue (Pierre-Laurent Aimard), two- and three-part Inventions (Till Fellner), and even a […]

Why do we hear music the way we do? Why do human beings make music in the first place? Are its various components things that can even be explained by science? These were topics covered in just one of the events, “Notes and Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus,” at this year’s five-day World […]