NYPress.com - New York's essential guide to culture, arts, politics, news and more » Chelsea Clinton News Westsider Susan Reiter dance

A Choreographer Who Doesn’t Tiptoe Around the Music

Susan Reiter — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 20:17:04 +0000

The Mostly Mozart Festival, Tanglewood, the Ojai Music Festival—these would be familiar stops on a solo musician’s or conductor’s itinerary. But they are also settings where Mark Morris is a welcome fixture, thanks to his depth and range of musical knowledge, and abiding commitment to the important, irreplaceable role of music within choreography. His company, the Mark Morris Dance Group—which returns to the Mostly Mozart Festival next week—participates regularly in these august music events, and Morris has increasingly taken on an expanding role within their programming.
The Mostly Mozart performances of his 1989 masterwork Dido and Aeneas will feature the illustrious mezzo-soprano (and Metropolitan Opera regular) Stephanie Blythe singing the role of Dido. The musical forces will also include baritone Joshua Jeremiah, sopranos Yulia van Doren and Clarissa Lyons, the Trinity Choir and an expanded MMDG Music Ensemble. Wielding the baton will be Morris himself, who has been conducting his troupe’s Dido performances regularly since 2008, everywhere from California to Moscow. But this will be his first time conducting the work in New York, and his first time appearing as a conductor at Mostly Mozart.
The music world’s embrace of Morris is logical, given his exceptional insight into the scores he selects and his sophisticated familiarity with an incredibly broad spectrum of music.
“It’s because I live in the world of music. Very few choreographers have ever done that, and nearly none do it now. So I’m an anomaly,” he said recently by phone from his Brooklyn headquarters. “Most dance doesn’t participate with music in any serious way. And please quote me because I mean it. I always do a very close reading of the music I work with. You find out more when you’re choreographing it than probably any other way. So I know those things about the score that I learned from analysis in order to choreograph them.”
Morris’ move into conducting began with the Vivaldi score for Gloria; he took charge of the music for that work during the company’s 25th anniversary season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Since then, he has taken on a “heavy-duty conducting schedule,” leading not only Dido but other scores for his dances. “A few months ago, I conducted a full program: Gloria, the Bach motet Jesu, meine Freude and Haydn’s second horn concerto [the score for his 1991 A Lake]. The Bach was pretty daunting, but it all went very well.”
The Mark Morris-Mostly Mozart connection now spans 10 years, with annual troupe appearances including the commissioned premiere of Mozart Dances in 2006. He’s on the faculty of Tanglewood Music Center, where his company performs regularly; last month he spent an additional week working with vocal students.
“I staged scenes from six different operas with about a dozen young vocalists,” he said. “I worked with them on comportment, diction, rhythm and breathing—everything that you have to do in order to sing and get a scene across at the same time. That was wonderful.”
Ojai has named Morris its music director of the 2013 festival, which takes place in June. He is the first dancer/choreographer to hold the position, and will present a focus on American music, particularly Lou Harrison. He’ll be featuring many illustrious musicians who collaborate regularly with his company, which always offers live music of the highest caliber. In naming Morris to the 2013 position, Ojai’s artistic director Thomas W. Morris (not related) cited “his comprehensive knowledge of and passionate belief in music. He frankly knows more music than almost anyone I know. That strong belief forms a central basis for his choreography.”
Mark Morris and Stephanie Blythe first worked together when she took over the role of Orfeo in his Metropolitan Opera production of Orfeo ed Euridice, but he already knew and admired her.
“I loved Stephanie’s work, and I insisted that she be Orfeo in the second run of my production,” he said. “The first time I heard her perform was in the Met’s Julius Caesar, and she was unbelievably great. That’s when I fell in love with her. … I went to Seattle specifically because she was in three of the four Ring operas.
“And we’re friends—which is even better. She had never sung Dido before.”
Blythe first sang the role with MMDG in Berkeley last fall.
The dual role of Dido, ill-fated Queen of Carthage, and the Sorceress—which Morris created so indelibly—is now performed by Amber Star Merkens. When the work was revived in 2006, Morris split the roles, with Merkens performing Dido and Bradon McDonald as the Sorceress. So this will be Merkens’ first New York appearance in the complete role.
Morris’ stark yet vividly dramatic work is now an acknowledged classic and a mainstay of the company’s repertory. While no longer holding center stage as its dual heroines, he is marshaling its musical forces and can recognize its power: “I marvel at how beautifully built it is.”

Dido and Aeneas
Mark Morris Dance Group. Aug. 22 to 25, Rose Theater, Broadway at 60th Street. www.MostlyMozart.org; times vary, $35 & up.

Mark Morris Dance Group..

Arab Spring Dances into the Fringe Fest

Susan Reiter — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 15:06:53 +0000

As the child of Turkish parents, growing up in Berlin from an early age, Nejla Yatkin always felt she was living in two cultures. “As an immigrant child, you had to catch up so much, so you wanted to assimilate and be part of your environment. For my parents, women had to be a certain way; you couldn’t do certain things, couldn’t laugh too loud. So there was a sense of oppression at home. And after a girl turned 12, she was not allowed to do certain things,” Yatkin said.
Yatkin was clearly immersed in her parents’ culture while at the same time looking at it from an outside perspective. Now a thoughtful creator of dance works that explore contemporary issues from a distinctly personal perspective, she recently made a piece, Wallstories, that examined the implications of the fall of the Berlin Wall, something she had experienced firsthand. That work was honored for Overall Excellence in Dance at last year’s New York International Fringe Festival. This year’s Fringe Festival is presenting a preview of her latest ambitious project, which also hits close to home for her.
Oasis: Everything you ever wanted to know about the Middle East but were afraid to dance is an evening-length multimedia dance performed by a cast of seven, inspired by images and stories from the Middle East. With an original score by Iranian-American composer Shamou, it incorporates video, shadowplay and speech as Yatkin draws on her personal experiences as well as the tradition of magical realism.
“While I was working on the Berlin Wall project, the seeds for this were planted,” Yatkin said by phone recently following a Brooklyn rehearsal. “I was thinking that the time when the Wall came down—we were so relieved, the sense of freedom and endless possibilities—reminded me of the Arab Spring. Originally, I was thinking of a piece that was more spiritually based, with a focus on Rumi. But then that happening changed the direction. I read a lot about the Middle East, and remembered from traveling to Turkey and Egypt, what it was like, and talking to women there.
“I’m not going into the political stuff, more into the cultural stuff. I feel like it’s important that we from the Middle East also deal with issues that are important, like the veiling, women’s rights. There’s all this talk about democracy, but then women are culturally so oppressed in that region. There’s a big focus on that—on rape of women, torture And then the last part of the piece deals with a little bit of spirituality and religion,” she said.
The piece is framed by a well-known Persian love story, Layla and Majnun, that she describes as “the Romeo and Juliet of the Middle East,” and opens with a duet representing those lovers. Their contrasting backgrounds doom their love affair.
“But they’re so deeply in love that at one point the man goes crazy—which is interesting, because in Western culture, usually the woman goes crazy for love. The story’s allegorical meaning is about humanity; the man stands for humanity and the female represents the soul. When you read it deeper—because Persian stories are very poetic—it’s about humanity losing its soul, then being in constant search for its other half, the spiritual thing that we lost by gaining knowledge.”
Following a first showing at Washington, D.C.’s Dance Place (a co-commissioner of the work) in March, Yatkin has been editing, shaping transitions and refining the performances. “I’m trying to get them to a very honest place, where they don’t ‘act’ it but can be the role more, deepening the truth in it and the honesty of the roles that they’re playing so that it’s not mimicry or pantomime, but honest and real. It’s not easy, because it deals with difficult issues. But some parts use more irony and humor.”

Oasis: Everything you ever wanted to know about the Middle East but were afraid to dance
Aug. 18, 19, 22, 23 & 26, Theater 80, 80 St. Marks Pl., www.fringenyc.org; times vary, $15.

Performing "Oasis". Photo by Dixie Sheridan

Gene Kelly, When He Was Young

Susan Reiter — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 20:13:16 +0000

In the middle of the 1943 film musical Thousands Cheer—a clunky wartime rouser, certainly one of the lesser-known of the 23 Gene Kelly films recently shown by the Film Society of Lincoln Center—there is a number in which you can observe the Kelly persona and style taking shape.
Playing Eddie Marsh, a cocky, rule-breaking soldier who comes from a celebrated troupe of circus acrobats, Kelly expresses his restlessness, romantic yearnings and all-American sense of playful fun in under three minutes. Mopping the floor as the soldiers prepare for a huge morale-boosting show at their base, he begins by caressing a mop, turning it into the girl of his dreams who floats back in his arms. Tossing it away, he uses a broom as a mock-rifle, tapping merrily on a bandstand while holding it with proper military form on his shoulder, then using it to “fire” at a poster of the enemy while his foot deftly rat-a-tat-tats the sounds of bullets firing.
Kelly then really goes to town, dancing around, and over, a bar, creating rhythms with objects behind the bar, launching himself onto the bar and then over furniture. A sense of mischievous joy pervades the dance, and one can see Kelly, 31 and only in his second year in Hollywood, trying out moves that would later emerge with enduring impact in his most celebrated numbers in films such as On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952).
Already evident is how effortlessly Kelly—an all-American guy here sporting a white t-shirt, bell-bottom jeans, white socks, which became a trademark of his in many films, and black shoes—incorporates his ballet training (those smooth, graceful pirouettes!) with Broadway-style hoofing and precise, inventive tap dancing. He blends everything together seamlessly and makes it all look wonderfully spontaneous. He’s just a carefree, regular guy, cutting loose.
One can’t help wondering whether a young Jerome Robbins might have seen and been inspired by that number a year later, when he had one of the sailors in his landmark ballet Fancy Free use the bar for rhythmic expression.
This was the first time Kelly created his own choreography in a film, although he already had several Broadway choreographic credits before he decamped for Hollywood in 1941. Much as he is known and beloved as a dancer, often mentioned in the same breath as Fred Astaire as the pinnacle of dance talent in films, he is less immediately remembered as a choreographer and director, though he served in those capacities on many of his films.
As his widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, recalled during her eloquent, informative and entertaining July 21 talk during the Film Society’s series, he took primary pride in his choreographic innovations and mainly wanted to be known for his creative contributions to film.
Gene Kelly would have turned 100 on Aug. 23, which was the occasion for the Film Society’s series and presentations by his wife on both coasts. If you missed seeing the films in all their glory on the Walter Reade Theater screen, there is the consolation that they are readily available on DVD and remain amazingly fresh and illuminating.
Kelly’s dancing is recognized as being distinctly “American”—he’s the guy next door, playing characters who inhabit low-rent nightclubs or vaudeville houses rather than swanky, high-life settings. He’s convincing as a soldier, (especially, and more than once) a sailor or a baseball player. His look is casual—jeans, sport shirts, loafers—and whenever he dances, his ballet training is put to understated use and sometimes even mocked.
His best-known set pieces, which only look better and inspire increased amazement with repeated viewings, are marked by joie-de-vivre. They often take place out on the street, where Kelly’s characters are far more at home than in any grand ballroom. In Cover Girl (1944), he, Phil Silvers and Rita Hayworth cavort happily on a street set in a merry trio that prefigures “Good Morning” in Singin’ in the Rain. Later in the film, Kelly is again on the street in a far more serious mode, expressing his doubts and inner arguments in the brilliantly conceived and executed “alter ego dance,” a major innovation for its time and one that took weeks to conceive and plan.
Then there is his iconic number on roller skates (“I Like Myself”) from It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), in which Kelly’s elegant placement, grace and ease are awe-inspiring, and the immortal Singin’ in the Rain title number.
Watching that number again, one can only marvel at the sheer invention and the carefree freedom with which Kelly performs something that must have taken a tremendous amount of detailed planning. But you don’t notice the carefully plotted camera angles or the evolving street scene or wonder whether (and how often) he changed into drier clothes in the course of filming it. The number just carries you along; it is sheer perfection.
As he often did, Kelly works in everyday characters and situations—the police officer eyeing him skeptically and the lucky passerby to whom Kelly hands off his umbrella at the very end. Even though I knew that moment was coming, it moved me once again. That was an important facet of Kelly that is expressed in all his dance numbers and performances: his humanity.

Pilobolus Returns With Trademark Whimsy and New Twists

Susan Reiter — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 17:41:28 +0000

Many people enjoy Pilobolus, some adore it, some find it exasperating. There are plenty of people in the first two categories, since Pilobolus reliably keeps the Joyce Theater filled for four weeks each summer. Whatever your point of view, you can’t deny that this unique, quirky ensemble—now middle-aged at 41—remains true to its principles.
A program note identifies it as “a community of artists who view the world as playfully as possible,” and they continue to approach their work in a spirit of exploration and communal creation. Rather than showcase a single choreographer’s vision, they prefer to investigate through group give-and-take, with multiple names sharing credit in the program.
For the past five years, Pilobolus has ranged far and wide in seeking out collaborators for new works. For Azimuth, one of three 2012 premieres, they made the inspired choice of Michael Moschen, the veteran juggler/performer who has long specialized in setting unlikely objects in graceful motion. His performances often have a meditative, dream-like quality as he embarks on duets with sculptural objects that he manages to make into elegant, graceful partners.
As an adventurous, fiercely disciplined creative investigator who defies easy categorization, he seems an ideal Pilobolus collaborator. He joined forces with longtime artistic director Michael Tracy and associate artistic director Renee Jaworski, as well as eight company members, on this project.
Azimuth (whose title refers to the arc of the horizon) is a gentle reverie in which six Pilobolus dancers engage imaginatively with metal circles and arcs and several colorful balls. A giant metal ring, first held by a central dancer like a ceremonial object, then suspended above the action, is a dominant protagonist, seeming to awaken and set initially inert bodies into action. They try out the possibilities of the round objects—two dancers use a ball as a connective tissue between their bodies, others brandish and slice the air with semicircular metal sculptures. Three dancers pass three balls between them in a pattern that humorously mimics what a skilled juggler like Moschen would achieve with his two hands alone.
In one of the more extended, fluid sequences, four dancers manipulate and move within the semicircular pieces, evoking a prison that entraps them while finding ways to use them to both join and divide their bodies. Varied musical textures and tempos, including a French-flavored accordion-dominated piece, provide a supportive impetus.
It’s interesting to watch the Pilobolus dancers, who usually lift and entwine each others’ bodies, more engaged with the inanimate objects than each other. Azimuth has the look of a work that will cohere with further performances as the dancers relax into the specific challenges that Moschen has provided. It’s an intriguing, and welcome, new byway for them to explore.
This second of two programs is a notably somber one, with relatively little of the whimsy that is often a Pilbolus trademark. It includes Pseudopodia, the only work in the current repertory from the troupe’s early years. Jun Kuribayashi is remarkable in this short but memorable solo, making a fluent argument against gravity as he twists, rolls and dives through seamless moves that are part extreme yoga, part pure daring invention.
Korokoro, last year’s collaboration with Takuya Muramatsu, sets Pilobolus in primal, ritual territory it has explored before, but makes a persuasive case for its tribe of seemingly stranded figures making do in an unforgiving environment. They link up for lifts and slow-motion feats of strength and counter-balance, but their struggles seem ultimately futile.
Also from last year is the brief but effective All is Not Lost, a collaboration with Trish Sie set to a song by OK Go, in which dancers take clamber around and over a large clear table. As they alternately crawl and splay, glue themselves on and pry themselves off its surface, a video of their live action reveals what all this would look like to someone perched beneath the table.
A new addition to Pilobolus’ programs this year are brief films screened while the stage is reconfigured between pieces. Studies of bird in flight, traffic patterns and zany explosions not only serve their transitional purpose but fit in well with the Pilobolus zeitgeist.
The other Pilobolus program includes Automaton, a collaboration with the busy Flemish choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, as well as their second music-video-inspired piece with Sie and OK Go.

Pilobolus
Through Aug. 11, Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave. (at 19th St.), www.joyce.org; $10+.

Sixty-Five Minutes of Outlandish Incongruity

Susan Reiter — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 19:18:14 +0000

Citing such masters as Charlie Chaplin and Gene Kelly as inspiration certainly sets the bar high in terms of expectations. But those are among the influences on I Love Bob, the latest show from the spirited, inventive troupe Parallel Exit, which is opening at Joyce Soho this week. Their earlier works have merrily defied categorization, winning over theater and dance critics alike; this world premiere focused on the misadventures of a hapless deliveryman could be identified as either a “comic ballet” or a “dance musical,” according to its co-creator and Parallel Exit founder Mark Lonergan.

“We create an outline from which we work—which is essentially just stage directions—and then the material is really created in the rehearsal room with the performers,” he said recently by phone in between rehearsals

I Love Bob, with a cast of 12, is the largest work Parallel Exit has undertaken. “They are a diverse group. Some come from the world of tap, since there’s tap choreography in the show. Some of them come from a more musical theater background and some from an improv/comedy background. We’re putting all of their skills to use. It’s not a group that wd normally be put together—only for a show like this!”

Lonergan, choreographer Ray Hesselink and composer Wayne Barker are the show’s co-creators. The genesis for the project was a Joyce residency; Lonergan and his colleagues were part of an ambitious initiative focusing on collaboration and experimentation between dance and theater artists. The residency provided a dramaturg, Kirsten Bowen, who brought her expertise and an outside eye to the creative process.

“It was a very new thing for all of us, to have that person in the room,” Lonergan remarked. “And it was immensely helpful, because her focus was on making sure that we were getting the story across clearly.”

There is a definite story and specific characters, but no text; Parallel Exit’s approach, in shows that range from a tale of aging tap dancers about to lose their home to a witty depiction of office life aims to recreate onstage the comic, expressive art of silent film masters like Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

With company mainstay Ryan Kasprzak portraying Bob, “The story follows a very classic structure. The one film I would say it’s closest to would be City Lights—and only in the sense that it’s about two very innocent characters falling in love in the midst of a teeming metropolis,” Lonergan said.

Lonergan founded Parallel Exit in his native Toronto. The first time he brought one of its shows to New York, it won the top award at the 1997 New York International Fringe Festival. He continued to originate shows in Toronto and bring them here before relocating in 2005. Recent Parallel Exit shows have been presented on both dance and theater venues and have received a Drama Desk Award for “unique theatrical experience.” They manage to charm both dance and theater critics.

The New York Times’ Neil Genzlinger called Room 17B, their most recent show, “65 minutes of outlandish incongruity,” writing, “The whole thing is so charming and mindlessly amusing that it may not be immediately apparent just how much skill is on display.” The Times’ dance critic, Roslyn Sulcas, writing about their earlier show Time Step, praised its “wordless yet lucid physical comedy”.

Though Lonergan and Hesselink, a choreographer and dance instructor whose credits include training the children who performed in Billy Elliot, are working together for first time, Lonergan reports that the collaboration has been “seamless.”

“In the rehearsal room, Ray and I are finishing each other’s sentences. Often I’ll say to Ray, ‘In this bit of choreography, could you try this?’ and then when we’re doing more of an acting moment, Ray will step in and suggest, ‘Try this.’ We’re very careful not to give the performers two different ideas at the same time. We let each other step in when the moment is right,” Lonergan said.

Lonergan also has high praise for the third collaborator, composer Wayne Barker, who among his multiple and varied credits wrote the original music for Peter and the Starcatcher. “Wayne has an encyclopedic knowledge of the last 200 years of music. He sits at the piano as we’re working on something, and he’ll play something. He has an unbelievable Rolodex of every style of music in his head. I imagine there are many things that I don’t even know he’s sourcing.”

Though Lonergan and his colleagues look to past masters for inspiration and pay homage in their work, he emphasizes that the show itself is very much of today. “The show isn’t set in the past. It’s very current—the subject matter and the characters. But it certainly has the feeling of a classic movie musical or a classic silent film comedy.”

I Love Bob
July 20-29. Joyce Soho, 155 Mercer St. (betw. Houston & Prince St.), www.joyce.org; 7:30, $25.

Oui, Oui, the Paris Ballet is Finally Back in New York

Susan Reiter — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 16:01:51 +0000

Sixteen years is far too long to wait between visits by the Paris Opera Ballet, one of the world’s most illustrious classical companies—for one thing, it basically represents a generation of dancers; those who were new members of the corps de ballet in 1996, when the company last graced a New York stage, are now its seasoned veterans. Finally, thanks to the Lincoln Center Festival, the city will once again welcome this troupe, which is offering 12 performances of three contrasting programs presented over two weeks.
Artistic director Brigitte Lefèvre had only been in her position for a year when the Paris Ballet last appeared here. Now, she has put her own stamp on the repertory, maintaining the essential 19th-century classics and other landmark works but bringing in a host of contemporary choreographers, including some not associated with classical ballet. These ranged from Benjamin Millepied and Alexei Ratmansky to Trisha Brown, Jerome Bel and Sasha Waltz.
For the current U.S. tour (which included Chicago and Washington, D.C.), Lefèvre chose a highly varied selection of works that the company has never brought to New York before. The mixed bill of three ballets set to French music “pays tribute to three essential choreographers who have opened up the horizons of neoclassicism in the 20th century and marked the life and evolution of the Paris Opera Ballet,” she wrote in her introductory program statement for this tour.
Giselle, which will receive six performances showcasing both veteran and younger “étoiles,” as the company’s highest-ranking dancers are designated, is of course performed worldwide, but it was created for the Paris Opera and represents the epitome of the romantic style. It could not be more different from Pina Bausch’s production of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, a 1975 “dance opera” that the late choreographer created for her celebrated company and set on the POB in 2005.
The program of works by Serge Lifar, Roland Petit and Maurice Bejart is, according to ballet étoile Marie-Agnès Gillot, one they perform regularly and often and have taken on tour to Russia and Italy. Speaking from Washington last week, she described Lifar’s 1943 Suite en Blanc, in which she dances the “Cigarette” variation, as “very classical, but with contemporary humor coming in. For us, it’s like Balanchine is for American dancers. There’s nothing narrative, just technique and style.”
The Russian-born Lifar (1905–1986), who made his name as a stellar dancer in the later years of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (creating the title roles of two Balanchine masterworks, Apollo and Prodigal Son), had a lengthy and controversial tenure as Paris Ballet’s director in the 1930s and ’40s. A prolific choreographer, most of his works were overtly dramatic, so the restrained purity of Suite en Blanc is unusual.
Petit (1924-2011) achieved international stature with his own company, for which he created many ballets marked by dramatic detail and vivid characters. Paris Ballet is performing L’Arlésienne, which he created in 1974 for his own company and set on them in 1997. Based on a novel and set in southern France, the atmospheric ballet is set to a richly textured Bizet score. (It may sound familiar to some, since Christopher Wheeldon’s recent Les Carillons used the same music.)
Bejart (1927-2007) was another pivotal European figure whose own Brussels-based company was wildly popular in the 1970s for his sensual, over-the-top extravaganzas. His celebrated 1961 staging of Ravel’s Boléro as a stylized erotic rite has a central figure – originally a man, now performed by both genders – poised on a large central table, arousing the passions of a male ensemble.

Gillot calls the lead role “the hardest piece I ever danced in my life. You have to prepare to be dead on stage. You have to go for it, give 300 percent.” She was last woman Bejart chose for the role before he died. The tell, elegant, versatile ballerina observed that “this piece always changes with the maturity of the artist,” and recalled that Bejart “always shaped the details on the artist he had in front of him. It’s about the personality of the dancer.”

Gillot, who will also be seen as Myrtha in Giselle, performs Eurydice in Bausch’s evening-length work. The cast learned it from the original lead performers and worked closely with Bausch. Her staging of Guck’s glorious opera includes both singers and dancers portraying the major roles, and features a full chorus. Gillot describes a symbiosis between singers and dancers: “In the final act, the vibration passes through my body, I thought that it’s me singing, but it’s her. At one moment, you don’t know who is who.”

Different though Bausch’s 20th-century innovative aesthetic may be from the troupe’s centuries-old tradition of elegance and refinement, Gillot did not find the experience so foreign.

“With Pina, even though it doesn’t look classical, to arrive at the right position and the right feeling – it’s almost pure like the classical. It’s really strict like the classical, to dance her work. You have to be really precise.”

Paris Opera Ballet
Through July 22, David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center (Columbus Ave. at 63 St.), www.lincolncenterfestival.org; times vary, $25 & up.

Stevie Wonder, Again the Apple of Ronald Brown’s Eye

Susan Reiter — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 16:38:13 +0000

When Ronald K. Brown meets the music of Stevie Wonder, you can expect the results to alter and expand your ideas of that beloved veteran pop musician’s songs. This always thoughtful, exploratory choreographer probes deeply in his works, often drawing on spiritual ideas and celebrating the connections between people.
Brown, whose company Evidence returns to The Joyce next week, began his exploration of Wonder’s music last year with On Earth Together, which incorporated five songs in which Brown focused on the idea of compassion. From the start of the project, he envisioned a full-evening work, and he has now added a second section, Everybody at the Table, set to four additional songs.
The two pieces will be performed together as a continuous work, and this time there will be live musical accompaniment from eminent recording artists and, on opening night, three cast members from Broadway’s The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, which Brown choreographed.
“I’m excited about being able to develop the work,” Brown said recently by phone. “It’s an incredible learning experience; to keep working on it and trying to obey what’s right.”
He found, as he expanded the work, that two of the newer sections should open it. “I want to introduce the characters and where they lived. There’s a through line in the piece; we need to establish who they are, where they live in the world, and I think ‘Living for the City’ establishes that. Then it goes into ‘As,’ which further develops the relationships. I wanted to use some music that wasn’t so familiar, and then there’s music you feel you have to us. It was a great challenge.”
Another song to which he created a new section, “They Won’t Go When I Go,” resonated on a new and deeper level for Brown, who created a solo to it 25 years ago. Now, he found he associated it with the memory of the late Dr. Sherrill Berryman Brown, an influential dance educator who founded Howard University’s dance department.
“We are her legacy,” he said. “Literally, what the lyrics say: ‘They won’t go when I go.’ We’re left to do the work that she has imparted on us.”
When he spoke about On Earth Together last year shortly before its premiere, Brown sounded almost surprised that the piece was taking him in new directions in terms of partnering, which he was using more than in earlier works. Not only has that continued with Everybody at the Table, but he has expanded the partnering in one of the older sections.
Sharing the program with Brown’s two works to Wonder is Gatekeepers, which he created in 1999 for Philadanco but never staged for his company. He was inspired to return to this dance, which has a cast of seven and is set to music by Wunmi Olaiya, through his experience bringing different generations together in dance classes.
“I brought folks age 85 and older to the high school where I was teaching, had them dancing with these young people. There was an incredible dynamic with the young people learning how to respect the elders. I think Gatekeepers helped me connect with all of that—to these classes.
“The interesting thing is that the first image I had in making the dance was the last image in the piece,” he said. “I didn’t remember that until I came back to work on it. The first thing I thought of was people waiting for an ancestor to come. Then I had to go back to the research I did, to understand what the term ‘gatekeeper’ meant.”
In addition to creating and touring with his company in the time since Evidence last appeared at The Joyce, Brown had his Porgy and Bess experience, making his Broadway debut and winning an Astaire Award last month for his choreography.
“I was glad to be part of a team that was so open,” he said. “When I started, that was one of the questions I asked: ‘Are you looking for a choreographer-for-hire?’ They said, ‘No, we need someone on the team. You let us know where dance should be in the show.’ That willingness and openness—‘bring us what you have, take us where you want to go’—was remarkable.”
He worked intensively on such scenes as the on-stage killings and the funeral as well as the more overtly danced sections, such as the exhilarating picnic scene, in which everyone on the stage dances. “It was funny, during the audition process, they kept asking me, ‘How many dancers do you want?’ I said, ‘Everyone’s going to dance.’”

Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, a Dance Company
July 9-14, Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave. (at 19th St.), www.joyce.org; times vary, $10+.

The Pillow & Beyond: Summer Dance Programs Near NYC

Susan Reiter — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 17:21:37 +0000

As summer gets underway, there’s no dearth of dance events in the city, indoor and outdoor, expensive and free. But if you’re escaping New York for somewhere greener or closer to the sound of the waves, there are plenty of first-rate dance offerings available.
The verdant Berkshires, the culture-rich area in western Massachusetts, offer the richest and most varied schedule of dance performance, thanks mainly to the venerable Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, which is marking its 80th anniversary. Located in Becket, Mass., “The Pillow,” as many refer to it, bustles with activity from June through August.
In addition to amazingly diverse programming in its two theaters—companies perform Wednesday through Sunday in each—there is the Jacob’s Pillow School, which welcomes students from around the world; numerous free performances on its beautiful renovated outdoor stage; free PillowTalks with artists and scholars offering additional insights on the performances; and exhibits.
The programming selected this year by Ella Baff, The Pillow’s executive and artistic director, offers well-known American companies, rarely-seen international troupes and adventurous unique events. This weekend, in the larger Ted Shawn Theater, Morphoses is premiering WITHIN (Labyrinth Within), a new work by Swedish choreographer and filmmaker Pontus Lidberg that merges dance onstage and dance on-camera. New York City Ballet’s Sara Mearns and Adrian Danchig-Waring join several Morphoses regulars in the cast.
Crystal Pite, a young Canadian choreographer who has received acclaim for her darkly dramatic works, brings her company Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM to the more intimate Doris Duke Theater for a return engagement of Dark Matters.
Two of The Pillow season’s notable events bring together male dancers from an amazingly broad range of backgrounds. From July 10–14, a program entitled The Men Dancers: From the Horse’s Mouth will pay homage to the tradition of the Men Dancers, an ensemble formed by Ted Shawn, the pioneering choreographer who founded and directed Jacob’s Pillow. The notably eclectic rotating cast of performers ranges from veterans like Arthur Mitchell, Lar Lubovitch and Gus Solomons to young tappers Jason Samuel Smith and Cartier Williams, as well as Trent Kowalik, from the original Broadway cast of Billy Elliot. Also performing will be former New York City Ballet principal Jock Soto and Robert Swinston, Merce Cunningham Company dancer and director of choreography.
Much attention will surely be paid to CURTAIN, a collaboration between Jonah Bokaer, the young, adventurous dancer/choreographer with a busy international career, and David Hallberg, the American Ballet Theater luminary who also dances with the Bolshoi Ballet. This U.S. premiere will be seen in the Doris Duke Theater July 11–15.
August highlights include the Trey McIntyre Project (Aug. 8–12) and a rare opportunity to catch up with the Joffrey Ballet (Aug. 22–26). The season’s international offerings include Israel’s Vertigo Dance Company (July 4–8); Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen’s Borrowed Light (July 11–15); Hong Kong Ballet (July 18–22); Royal Winnipeg Ballet (Aug. 1–5); and Brazil’s Compagnie Käfig (Aug. 15–19). For more details, visit www.jacobspillow.org.
Also in the Berkshires, the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, a lovingly restored 700-seat former vaudeville theater and movie palace in Great Barrington, has begun to program dance events in recent years.
Momix will perform its lusciously imaginative Botanica there July 6 and 7. The Paul Taylor Dance Company will also perform two alternating programs (twice each) July 26–28. The repertory includes such landmarks as Aureole and Esplanade, the large-scale masterworks Mercuric Tidings and Syzygy and two of Taylor’s most recent works.
While you’re waiting for New York City Ballet’s fall season to begin in mid-September, you can catch recent repertory as well as a world premiere by company member and rising young choreographer Justin Peck, during its annual two-week run at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (July 10–21). The programs include the recent revivals of Balanchine’s Symphony in C and Kammermusik No. 2, along with works by Robbins, Martins, Wheeldon, Ratmansky and Millepied.
Held in a setting that can’t be replicated anywhere, the Fire Island Dance Festival (FIDF) is not only a worthy fundraiser but a hot event that draws a trendy, in-the-know crowd. A diverse array of dancers and companies give three performances on a stage created on a private property right on the bay, so the view is spectacular. One of Dancers Responding to AIDS’ annual events, now in its 18th year, FIDF always attracts notable performances.
This year’s programs (July 20-22) include a pièce d’occasion by Broadway’s Rob Ashford (Evita) and performances by Ballet Hispanico, Monica Bill Barnes, David Grenke, Rennie Harris and Momix. Humorist/TV commentator Mo Rocca will do the hosting honors.

On the Stage This Time, David Gordon Watches the Dancers

Susan Reiter — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 18:37:17 +0000

David Gordon has shifted the audience’s physical perspective at Joyce Soho just as he has been doing creatively for five decades. For his deftly layered, smart and stimulating new work, Beginning of the End of the…, the seating is along the north side of the black-box space, providing a much wider, shallower performing area. With four separate performance areas marked out within that area, it creates moments when it feels like one is watching a tennis match, keeping tabs on the action at opposite sides.
Gordon, one of the founding artists of the seminal Judson Dance Theater and a first-generation postmodernist, whose work has cleverly and unexpectedly blended speaking and movement, has been a shaggy, low-key but influential figure for years. Unconcerned with labels, he’s been considered one of the dance world’s luminaries, but his “constructions”—as he called his works for many years—called for performers comfortable with language and behavior as much as with identifiable steps.
Of late, he has applied his distinctive, sly approach to “collaborative adventures with dead artists,” including Shakespeare (Dancing Henry V) and Brecht (Uncivil Wars); I have particularly fond memories of Aristophanes in Birdonia, his timely and typically rambunctious take on a classic Greek comedy.
In his latest work, he has found an ideal “collaborator” in Luigi Pirandello, particularly his celebrated 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author, as well as The Man with a Flower in his Mouth, a 1922 one-act, and a 1913 short story, A Character’s Tragedy. Tightly shaped, with a stellar and unflappable cast performing multiple roles, Beginning of the End of the… juxtaposes and deconstructs elements of all three, interweaving them with self-referential questioning and resentment of Gordon’s own intentions.
The cast includes Gordon himself seated at an upstage table as the “Director and Author,” who instructs, scolds and corrects the performers. Just as he may or may not be playing himself, the others move in and out of roles and situations with elegant nonchalance.
Leading the way is Valda Setterfield, the personification of downtown elegance as well as dry wit and patient exasperation. Identified in the program as “Leading Lady and Author’s Wife,” she is precisely that in real life, but Gordon has written and shaped the material so that her prickly exchanges with him resonate both literally and theatrically.
Moving across the various mini-stages and through portions of Pirandello’s texts, the performers take on and switch roles and personas with ease. Jennifer Tipton’s gracefully understated lighting helps immensely. The performers are adept at transporting and positioning the homespun, functional scenic pieces—including the frames that Gordon has favored and used with such dexterity in previous works—that create doorways and fluid settings.
Gordon has assembled a truly stellar group of mature artists. Gus Solomons (like Setterfield, a one-time Merce Cunningham dancer) reveals new gravitas, speaking and moving with equal grace. Feisty Norma Fire, querulous and skeptical, is a veteran of Gordon’s works, magnificently at home with his shifting perspectives and skewed repetitions. Charlotte Cohn and David Skeist hold up the theatrical end with aplomb, while a fine trio of seasoned dancers—Scott Cunningham, Karen Graham and Aaron Mattocks—reveal their mastery of understated, evocative movement, functioning as provocateurs and chorus.
Those who have followed Gordon’s career through the decades can find numerous reverberations and themes from earlier works. Just as the title of this tightly structured work reflects the way it circles back on itself, it also evokes a sense of looking backward as well as forward—an autumnal but fresh and nimble exploration by a veteran, yet constantly questioning, artist.

Beginning of the End of the…
Through June 30, Joyce Soho, 155 Mercer St. (betw. Houston & Prince Sts.), www.joyce.org; times vary, $22.

King’s Ballet Doesn’t Draw a Line at Modern Dance

Susan Reiter — Mon, 07 May 2012 19:36:02 +0000

Caroline Rocher in Alonzo King LINES Ballet. Photo by RJ Muna

Within San Francisco’s busy, diverse dance scene, Alonzo King LINES Ballet has been an important and influential company for three decades. This technically accomplished, independent-minded troupe of 14 dancers performs King’s choreography that draws on his unusually varied dance background and reflects his intense curiosity and intelligence. But the company is just the best-known aspect of King’s enterprise. LINES’ downtown Dance Center offers everything from public classes in three dozen different movement techniques to a rigorous BFA program in conjunction with Dominican University.

King grew up in California, but came to New York for intensive dance training that included study at the School of American Ballet, American Ballet Theatre School, Harkness House and Alvin Ailey. Heading west, he danced with Bella Lewitzky in Los Angeles before founding LINES in 1982. His dancers must have strong classical technique, even as his choreography moves in diverse directions.

“I take it for granted that they have mastered the language of what I refer to as Western classical dance,” he said. “And with that under their belt—not in terms of mimicry, but in terms of full understanding of it as a science—then from there we can go forward.

“I choose dancers who are honest, have humility, and are fearless. All the things we admire in human beings are the things I admire in dancers, because that’s actually what you’re going to see on stage. Their character and their understanding are the dominant things that are broadcast from the stage.”

LINES returns to the Joyce Theater, where it last appeared in 2009, with two recent works—Scheherazade and Resin—by King that reflect his extensive musical knowledge and interests. Speaking by phone last week from San Francisco, King was reticent about discussing the specific idea behind these dances, beyond saying that “we picked the ones that make a program that has variety, the ones that will have the strongest impact.” But he was more forthcoming when the conversation turned to the specific musical scores for these works.

Scheherazade came about when Jean-Christophe Maillot, director of the Ballet de Monte Carlo, invited King to contribute a work to a 2009 Ballets Russes Centenary program in Monaco. King loved the Rimsky-Korsakov score for the famously sensual 1910 Fokine ballet, but his own version has a specific starting point—and a related but significantly different score.

“I was intrigued by the question, Who is Scheherazade?—because no one really talks about who she is as a person,” he said. “That’s where I began.”

He researched different versions of The Arabian Nights. “I read the Egyptian version, the Syrian version, the Iraqi version—getting as much input and differentiation as I could. Zakir Hussain reworked the original score,” he said. “Rimsky-Korsakov was looking to the East, as he often did, and Zakir is from the East, so he’s looking back towards the West. He’s keeping some of the original melody, but he brought in ancient instruments from Persia and India into the score, combining Western and Eastern instruments.”

King’s works often explore and reflect a wide range of cultural influences, and his musical choices are particularly diverse.

“I don’t have a limited taste when it comes to music. I think of music as another language, a world that you enter regardless of its cultural beginnings,” he said.

For Resin (2011), he choreographed to Sephardic music from many different countries—including Turkey, Yemen, Morocco and Spain. “The Sephardic diaspora is enormous. I was fortunate to meet an expert named Francesco Spagnolo, who was invaluable in that he provided me with field recordings that are not catalogued or produced. That was a real coup, to be able to get access to that kind of material. Some of them are very old, and some are recent.

LINES is particularly popular in Europe, touring there twice, or even three times, a year. Performances in New York have been far less frequent, but bringing his company here allows King to reconnect with the place where he studied as a young dancer. After years of absorbing and synthesizing a variety of styles, he says he now doesn’t think specifically in terms of ballet and modern dance as separate and exclusive.

“When you begin training in modern, from the very beginning the teachers are talking to you about ideas, concepts, principles, connections,” he said. “In ballet training, that’s not the case. It’s usually about approximating some ideal to a physical form, without much discussion about the origin of things, what their meanings are. That’s changing today, but I see them working together to create what is great dancing. So for me there’s no division; I think they support each other.”

Alonzo King LINES Ballet

May 8 to 13, Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave. (at 19^th St.), www.joyce.org. Times vary; $19 & up.