Company XIV Is All Swarovski-Studded G-Strings and Strong Performances
Brush up on your Greco-Roman mythology before you travel to Fort Greene for Austin McCormick's Paris, the latest in his ten-year effort to sex up classic tales. Trained as a baroque dancer, McCormick,...
View ArticleBaryshnikov as Nijinsky: God, a Dove, a Man of Love
How do you represent madness on a proscenium stage? What happens when the most notorious dance artist of his generation loses his mind? Happily for us, the collaboration between Robert Wilson and...
View ArticleBill T. Jones Etches a Nightmare Landscape
Since the beginning of his distinguished career, Bill T. Jones has combined talking and moving, riding the seam between theater and dance, welding it with the sheer force of his beauty and brains, his...
View ArticleMichelle Dorrance's Tap Crew Delivers Masterful Music and Dance
Tap wizard Michelle Dorrance is nothing if not resourceful; years ago, she mounted a whole program of irresistible dancing at St. Mark's Church, where metal taps are not permitted on the sanctuary...
View ArticleLucinda Childs Mines the Streamlined Power of a Rhythmic Pulse
The brainy and beautiful Sarah Lawrence grad Lucinda Childs hit the New York performance scene over fifty years ago, attracting crowds with her rigorous, elegant dances. Part of the experimental...
View ArticleXaviera Simmons Elevates Queerness
On a recent sunny afternoon, the artist Xaviera Simmons sat in the window of a Pakistani restaurant in view of the Ace Hotel, in Manhattan. Pointing to a group of loc'd and kurta'd men outside, she...
View ArticleBlended Families: Black Male Choreography at Ailey, and an Unlikely Woman...
Fifty-six years ago at the 92nd Street Y, a 29-year-old Alvin Ailey unveiled Revelations, the piece that would eventually be seen as his masterwork. Now the foundation of his troupe's vast repertory,...
View ArticleFun Is a Thing With Feathers: Boy Ballerinas, Hissy and Fit
Romances are interracial (and interspecies), gender codes are switched, and all the dancers have triple identities in Tory Dobrin's wonderful travesty ballet troupe, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte...
View ArticleMust-See Performance Festivals Kick Off 2017
The beginning of the year is always a highlight of the New York theater season, for its array of festivals featuring adventurous international and interdisciplinary work. The Public's Under the Radar,...
View ArticleIsrael's Revolutionary Choreographer, Ohad Naharin, Hits the Screen and Stage
Ohad Naharin is the 64-year-old dean of new Israeli dance. Charismatic, magnetic, imperious, and intense, he's in demand as a choreographer by companies worldwide, and a film screening here this month,...
View ArticleLincoln Center's Dance on Camera Festival Celebrates the Beauty and...
The 45th edition of the Dance on Camera festival, running February 3–7, makes clear that not everything is beautiful at the ballet, or in flex and tap dancing. Political rivalries, racism, and mental...
View ArticleComplexions Celebrates David Bowie
Dwight Rhoden, founding director (along with legendary dancer Desmond Richardson) and choreographer at Complexions Contemporary Ballet, came of age in the 1970s adoring the songs and personas of David...
View ArticleThis Wondrous New Workout Class Lets You Run Through the Halls of the Met
At 8:15 on Sunday morning, I sat on the Met's front steps — the first time I could ever remember having them all to myself — watching runners cut through the fog and proprietors of...
View ArticleDance Icon Martha Graham's Legacy Comes to Life in Work Both Old and New
Sustaining a dance troupe after its founder's death requires enormous feats of imagination. The Martha Graham Dance Company, just over ninety years old and since 2005 in the custody of former principal...
View ArticleDance Icon David Gordon’s Delightful Archives Inspire at an NYPL Gallery
At eighty, David Gordon looks like the grandfather he is: He's gained a little weight, but his eyes still sparkle when he contemplates his remarkable career. A native New Yorker and a graduate of...
View ArticleChoreographer Paul Taylor's Spring Season Blends the Strange and Engaging
Paul Taylor, now 87, is what my mother used to call a nervy individual. He formed a company in 1954, while performing in Martha Graham's troupe, and tweaked every assumption about what was possible on...
View ArticleThe Visionary: Trisha Brown Redefined Dance With Wit and Daring
Trisha Brown died at the age of eighty on Saturday, March 18, but I had been mourning her for several years, ever since illness started ravaging her brilliant mind in 2011. When I began to write dance...
View ArticleStep to It: This Spring's Most Electrifying Dance Performances
Critic's Pick: Judson Redux What's extraordinary about the Judson Dance Theater, started 55 years ago by experimenters including Yvonne Rainer, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton, is not merely how vital...
View ArticleFrom Stage to Page: Unpacking a Shelf of New Dance Publications
First, a bit of autobiography. Years ago I set out to write, to teach, perhaps to become a literary critic. Tortured by the need to sit still, I took dance classes to break up days at my desk, and was...
View ArticleIn "Poor People’s TV Room," Okwui Okpokwasili Sheds Light on Women's Enduring...
As we enter the theater at New York Live Arts, Poor People's TV Room has already begun; figures move on the wide stage, both behind and before a sheet of translucent, striated plastic. The space is...
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