I Almost Danced With Alvin Ailey!
Last Saturday, I saw a stunning Alvin Ailey evening of pieces like "Streams," "The Evolution of a Secured Feminine," and "Urban Folk Dance." The night ended with "Minus 16," a jagged, exciting ensemble...
View ArticleA Night Of Modern Dance And Lap Dances
The Paul Taylor Dance Company is doing a few weeks at the Koch Theater, and on Saturday night, I caught their performance of "Speaking In Tongues," a haunting work about the culty expressiveness of...
View ArticleIn 'Strike a Pose,' Madonna’s Backup Dancers Take Center Stage
In Madonna's famous "Vogue" music video, released in 1990, dancer Luis Camacho poses in the company of statues, flicks his hands around his face as if making a series of frames, and — having shed his...
View ArticleFaerie Tales: A Bevy of Gender Pioneers Brings Love and Death to the Lower...
Katy Pyle, a smart Texan kicked out of ballet class at sixteen because she was too sturdy, has imagined, for her Brooklyn-based Ballez ensemble, a mash-up of Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast....
View ArticleSet (Re)Design: Yve Laris Cohen Rebuilds Martha Graham Set at Company Gallery
When choreographers die, their sets and costumes grow exponentially in importance — they're sometimes the only tangible link to a now-forgotten dance. But they too can be damaged, mishandled — or, in...
View ArticleCity Moves: Juliette Mapp Distills the Traumas of Metropolitan Life Into Dance
Juliette Mapp is a classic example of a mid-career artist in the New York dance world. Hard at work here for over twenty years, she lands performing opportunities, teaching gigs, and a slew of awards...
View ArticleJust Dance: This Summer's Most Spectacular Performances in NYC
Catskill Calling The American Dance Institute, under the direction of Adrienne Willis, recently broke ground at ADI/Lumberyard, a state-of-the art facility for new dance and performance on the Hudson...
View ArticleBlack Iris Project Soars Into Its Debut Season With a Plan to Buck Ballet’s...
It's a bustling Saturday afternoon at the Harlem School of the Arts. Sunlight filters through the floor-to-ceiling windows into the main performance space and energizes the children, who squirm...
View ArticlePromised Lands: Four Different Dances Explore Places of Pleasure and Pain
The formidable Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater closes its spring season at Lincoln Center this week with a challenging "21st Century Voices" bill that features new and recent work by four...
View ArticleTwyla Still Orchestrates That Old Black Magic
Spectators at the opening performance of Twyla Tharp's summer season didn't exactly spring to their feet when the final curtain fell; an older crowd, knowledgeable in the intricacies of Tharp's body of...
View ArticleThe Best Dance Performances in NYC This Fall
Critic's Pick: John Jasperse, who's shown his crafty, enigmatic dances at BAM since 2000, returns to the Next Wave Festival with Remains (September 21–24, BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street,...
View ArticlePastoral and Postapocalyptic Programming at the Joyce Theater
A shake-up of the programming — and, for that matter, the audience — at the Joyce, arguably the country's busiest dance theater, has been long overdue. For several years, regular visitors had noticed...
View ArticleCompany 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...
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