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Off the Deep End

“For Glenn Gould”
GALLIM Dance

“POOL”
Sidra Bell Dance New York

Dance Theater Workshop
New York
January 19, 2011

by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2011 by Kathleen O’Connell

Andrea Miller and Sidra Bell want to bowl you over with big movement and big ideas, and they’re not afraid of making the body look weird in the process. There’s nothing particularly novel about their brands of weirdness: Ohad Naharim and William Forsythe respectively are obvious models for the hyperkinetic dislocations on display in Miller and Bell’s shared bill of premieres at Dance Theater Workshop. The big ideas—the creative process, life and death, order and disorder—have been big for millennia, too. Unfortunately, neither woman trusted movement to speak for itself: they were at pains to tell us on their websites and in their program notes what their works were all about, but the works didn’t live up to their words. Sometimes the less said the better: what might seem a rich ambiguity if left to our imagination can come across as half-baked when we’re told what to see.

Pattern Reconition

“Sticks,” “Scallops,” “Locus Solo,” and “Roof Piece Re-Layed”
Trisha Brown Dance Company
MoMA | The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium
Presented in conjunction with “On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century”
New York
January 12, 2011

by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2011 by Kathleen O’Connell

The definition of drawing that informs MoMA’s “On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century” is expansive enough to include Picasso collages, Calder mobiles, and a Zilvinas Kempinas installation in which two large fans blow a loop of magnetic tape around and around in an endless circle. It’s expansive enough to embrace dance, too, albeit of a particular kind. Four of Trisha Brown’s spare meditations on movement—“Sticks” (1973), “Scallops” (1973), “Locus Solo” (1975), and “Roof Piece Re-Layed” (2011)—are being performed in MoMA’s atrium as part of a month-long performance series presented in conjunction with the exhibition, and they resonate nicely with the show’s main point: the painstaking and austere elaboration of the line into abstract pattern.

The Hard Nut

“The Hard Nut”
Mark Morris Dance Company
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Brooklyn, New York
December 12, 2010

by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2010 by Kathleen O’Connell

Mark Morris’ “The Hard Nut” looks as fabulously chic and shiny as when it premiered nearly 20 years ago, if somewhat less self-consciously outré. Now that comic books—pardon me, graphic novels—have been upgraded from underground cult objects to emblems of hip connoisseurship, the Charles Burns-based production seems almost a platitude. No matter: the work is greater than the sum of its presumed irreverence; it’s still fun and fundamentally generous in spirit. Morris sugar-coats in reverse: he’s lodged a soft, sweet center of redemptive love inside a sometimes-arch-sometimes-acid send-up of both crass 70’s suburbia and gauzy Nutcracker nostalgia. It’s a brightly-wrapped, high-concept gift of Christmastide sentiment for people who think they’re allergic to that sort of thing. 

Camille A. Brown and Andrea Miller at The Joyce

“Wonderland”
Gallim Dance

“New Second Line,” “Good and Grown,” “Girlz Verse 1,” “Been There, Done That,” “City of Rain”
Camille A. Brown & Dancers

The Joyce Theater
New York
August 11, 2010

by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2010 by Kathleen O’Connell

Camille A. Brown and Andrea Miller may have shared a bill as part of Gotham Arts’ week-long, four choreographer showcase at the Joyce, but their work had little in common—except for the things that made it worth watching. Both women demonstrated that they can fill a stage with viscerally exciting movement without resorting to bogus pyrotechnics. Both deftly integrated touches of the vernacular or gestures from other styles into their own vocabulary to make their theatrical points. Both made dances that were smart, focused, and bracingly confident: they’re young choreographers still mastering their craft, but there’s nothing tentative about their work.

Chui Chai

Chui Chai
Pichet Klunchun Dance Company
Gerald W. Lynch Theater
at John Jay College
New York
July 24, 2010

by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2010 by Kathleen O’Connell

 One of the smartest things that Thai dancer and choreographer Pichet Klunchun did before he stepped on stage in “Chui Chai” was take his shirt off. No, not because the work needed a bare torso to grab the audience’s attention. The exotic sheen of its traditional materials would have been enough for that. And Klunchun could have held the stage wrapped in burlap with a bag over his head; he’s saturated with charisma. But by stripping off his top and he laid bare the architectural beauty of the movement itself.

Miroku

“Miroku”
Saburo Teshigawara / KARAS
Rose Theater
New York
July 9, 2010

by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2010 by Kathleen O’Connell 

 
The audience for the New York premiere of Saburo Teshigawara’s “Miroku” knew exactly how long the work was supposed to be: the house staff was at pains to both apprise us of its length—70 minutes—and warn us that there would be no intermission. (In other words, hit the restrooms now.) But time, it turns out, is peculiarly elastic in the disquieting universe of “Miroku,” whose solitary inhabitant seems bound in a cycle of serenity and struggle.

Mixed Doubles

“After the Rain,” “Luce Nascosta,” “Who Cares?”
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater
New York, NY
June 10, 2010

by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2010 by Kathleen O’Connell

 
“Luce Nascosta (Unseen Light), Mauro Bigonzetti’s fourth work for New York City Ballet, looks dramatic but isn’t drama. A lot goes on—furiously, and for a long time, too—but nothing ever happens. Lit by Mark Stanley in striking chiaroscuro, nine couples dressed in black engage in the kind of fraught, convoluted partnering that’s “dramatic” in the sense of looking like mortal peril, but is in reality only a simulation of drama. We see emblems—of what? dysfunction? cruelty? torment?—but not the arc of a human encounter. It’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing more than a reflexive, moody angst that’s the lazy sentimentality de nos jours. 

Never Draw to an Inside Straight

“Interplay,” “Call Me Ben,” “Scotch Symphony”
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater
New York, NY
June 5, 2010

by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2010 by Kathleen O’Connell

“Call Me Ben,” Melissa Barak’s new one-act ballet about Bugsy Siegel, is as luxe a production as the famously glamour–obsessed gangster could have wanted. Santiago Calatrava’s backdrops—tall, graceful palm trees soaked in glowing shades of purple and indigo and luminous desert mountains rippling against a bright blue sky—are both simple and simply stunning. Fashion designer Gilles Mendel’s 40’s–inflected chiffon dresses, chic tweed ensembles, and sharp chalk-stripe suits are beautifully cut, beyond gorgeous, and partly underwritten by Bergdorf’s. Jay Greenberg’s newly–commissioned score (“Neon Refracted”) has the handsome, professional sheen of a top-drawer Hollywood soundtrack. The big cast of 31 dancers has been chosen from among the company’s top talent. But for all its glamorous trappings, “Call Me Ben” is a disappointing—if valiant—misfire: Barak, still a young choreographer, doesn’t yet know how to tell a story through dance.

Vintage

“#3,” “MiddleSexGorge,” “Love Me Tender,” “Foreign Import,” and “Ghostown”
Stephen Petronio Dance Company
The Joyce Theater
New York
April 27, 2010

by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell
   
Stephen Petronio—now wrapping up his company’s 25th anniversary season with a week of performances at the Joyce—is utterly indifferent to the sober, lo-fi aesthetic of the more earnest precincts of post-post art. He’s often labeled a “downtown” choreographer, but his downtown is as much that of storied dance clubs and protest theater as it is of raw loft space. Not that his style looks anything like club dancing. In “MiddleSexGorge,” one of the vintage works on the program, it looks like the adorably bratty love child of Trisha Brown and William Forsythe talking smack. But its trappings—music and costumes by “it” bands and edgy designers—are the apotheosis of club theater: the brash art of arriving at the right party in the right clothes with a bevy of fabulous friends in tow.

Hot Prospects

1.2.3 Festival Opening Night
Taylor 2 | ABT II | Ailey II
The Joyce Theater
New York
April 13, 2010

by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2010 by Kathleen O’Connell

On the road and out of town for many months of the year, ABT II, Ailey II, and Taylor 2 perform a signal service for the arts by bringing live dance to cities and schools across the U.S. They’re back home for while and in rotation at the Joyce, where each will present its own evening–length program during the 1.2.3 Festival (April 14—April 29). The Festival’s opening night presented a one–time–only opportunity to sample all three companies on the same program. There was a world premiere, a new production, and a chance to see an alternate take on a repertory staple. Ho–hum. Whatever. The real reason to go, of course, was to scout out the new talent and be the first on your block to see a star in the making.