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On We Struggle

“Leap into the New Year”                                                                                                                                                             San Francisco Ballet                                                                                                                                                                  Streaming                                                                                                                                                                                                                     January 14,2021
                                                                                                                                                                                by Rita Felciano
copyright © Rita Felciano 2021

Rarely has the life-giving part of live performances, whether music, theater or dance, been more clearly demonstrated than San Francisco Ballet’s on-line Gala “Leap Into the New Year” on January 14, 2021.  Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson, who will retire in June 2022, assembled an intriguing program with excerpts from four upcoming world premieres, two duets from the repertoire, and three Pas de Deux from the classics. Well balanced, well performed, with the help San Francisco’s fine SFBallet Orchestra, thankfully still under the baton of Martin West, it should have been a glorious evening instead it turned out to be an honest leap into the new season.

LaMama Moves Online

LaMama Moves/Online 
Annabella Lenzu & Kari Hoaas 
January 20, 2021

By Tom Phillips 
Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

Inauguration Day and the Pandemic both played into the hands of artists at LaMama's annual festival of dance, this year on video instead of downtown in New York.  Norwegian choreographer Kari Hoaas and Argentine-American Annabella Lenzu had to adapt work originally meant for LaMama's theater space.  And while their creative solutions narrowed the scope of their pieces, they may also have sharpened their focus. 

                    Ida Haugen in "Rise" -- Photo: Marius Hauge 

The Unbearable Weight of Impermanence

Margaret Jenkins Dance Company
"Breathing at the Boundaries"
December 29, 2020
on YouTube

by Rita Felciano
copyright © 2020 by Rita Felciano                                                                                                                                                                                   

The last few months, looking at one more piece of choreography on screen made me wonder whether it might not be preferable to wait till the dancers could come back for live audiences. With few exceptions, despite honest efforts, the screen had offered few encouraging examples of vivid imaginations getting a handle on dance on screen. With “Cooped” Jamar Roberts created one of those outliers. That short solo communicated power and fragmentation but stirred the soul. But just before the end of the depressing 2020, on December 26, the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company defied the odds with an original full evening, multi-cast screen dance. Its truth resonated way beyond its fifty-five minutes.

To Everything There is a Season

“Suite Donuts,” “The Moor’s Pavane,” “There is a Time”
José Limón Company
Streamed Live at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park
Tivoli, NY
December 19, 2020

by Martha Sherman
copyright © 2020 by Martha Sherman

As the José Limón Company began “There is a Time,” the final piece in their live- streamed perform- ance at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, the dancers swept into the circle of time that Limón created in this 1956 classic. Based on the biblical wisdom of Ecclesiastes (“for every time, there is a season,”)  the twelve dancers swayed, knees bent, and wove like interconnected threads. The simple elegance of a grapevine step brought the past into the present. In this time, where connection is most missed, the gift of seeing dancers unmasked and safely touching, it was a  reminder of the timelessness of Limón’s finest choreography.

 

José Limón Company in rehearsal for "There is a Time." Photo © Kelly Puleio.

Magician and Muses

Magician and Muses

"Balanchine's Mozartiana - The Making of a Masterpiece"

 by Robert Maiorano and Valerie Brooks

 Freundlich Books, New York, 1985

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2020 by George Jackson  

 

Not new, this book about the making of a ballet remains an important item of danced literature. Its principal author, Robert Maiorano, was a dancer with New York City Ballet for 15 years, beginning in 1961. For the company's Tchaikovsky Festival in 1981, Maiorano asked Balanchine's permission to attend rehearsals for his announced new "Mozartiana" that would be premiered at the  festival's opening. Balanchine gave his consent. Maiorano, although he had written on his own previously, enlisted journalist Valerie Brooks as co-author. They wrote not for each other but together. As a dancer, Maiorano had a dash of Edward Villella's drive and a drop of Helgi Tomasson's elegant finish as part of his observant, efficient manner. Relating what went on at the Mozartiana rehearsals and premiere, the authors give us description, explanation, suspicions and some fascinating asides. 

Junk Dances 2020

"Plastic Harvest" 
Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance 
The Center at West Park, New York
Streamed Live December 15, 2020

by Tom Phillips 
copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips 

In the early 1960s, choreo- grapher Murray Louis took a ride up the escalator at Macy’s, the world’s largest store.

 ''I looked at rooms and rooms … waves of coats and shirts,'' he told the New York Times. ''I thought, 'Who buys this?' And suddenly I had an image of excess as a theme.''  Shortly after, Louis attended a country auction where he bought a bundle of old umbrellas. He opened them up: ''They were all completely eaten away. It was wonderful.”  He had one thought: “It all turns to junk.”  

Anika Hunter in "Plastic Harvest"

Live--Almost but not Quite

Smuin Contemporary Ballet
2020/2021 Virtual Fall Season                  
Program Program A, Nov. 18, 2020. 4:30 pm  
Program Program B, Nov. 11, 2020. 7.30 pm  
                                                         
by Rita Felciano
copyright Rita Felciano ©2020

Watching dance on screen is not exactly new, but it took a global catastrophe for those of us who cherish live performance to realize that sitting in front of a screen might become the new normal. There may be hundreds of dancers who have created works on themselves in the kitchen, a balcony or, as Alonzo King Lines dancers did, in the wilds of nature. Each one worked on her or himself but, surely, often wished for a partnerIn the last six months, I have seen my share of these brave efforts to keep bodies in tune and spirits alive.

Undressed or Corseted

“Naked Truth – Viennese Modernism and the Body”
by Alys X. George
University of Chicago Press, 2020

Reviewed by: George Jackson
(copyright 2020 by George Jackson)

Look carefully at the picture on the cover of this book. It shows a naked woman dancing. Her face is turned away so that only part of her profile appears. Her torso seems somewhat flattened, like that of an ancient Egyptian image. The arms and hands are held lightly away from  the body’s center of gravity. The lines of the long legs are bent slightly at the knees. She gives the impression of moving forward, to our left. Oddly, this woman is not even Viennese, but the German dancer Claire Bauroff (1895-1984). Still, the author is trying to make a point: that the body in its totalities was focal in Vienna from ca. 1870 to 1938. Bodies included cadavers that were being dissected at Vienna’s famous medical school and lively ones dancing at the city’s ballrooms and cafes. Vienna’s professional ballet dancers elegantly arched their feet, the women wearing pointe shoes and, for classwork, transparent white socks over the toe shoes so that the teacher could readily spot and correct cramped stances. Under their costumes or practice garb, the ballet women wore corsets or girdles. Bauroff is barefoot on the book’s cover, yet my guess is that her delicate toes have had pointework training. The imprint of such instruments as corsets and toe shoes isn’t easily erased from the flesh.  

To Feast, Perchance to Dream

“Who Cares?” (excerpts), “to be seen,” “Concerto Six Twenty-Two” (duet), “Lady Swings the Blues”
Fall for Dance Festival – Program 2
New York City Center (Pre-recorded Digital Broadcast)
New York, NY
October 26, 2020

by Marianne Adams
copyright © 2020 by Marianne Adams

There may not have been many good news for the dance world this year, but the enduring holding of the Fall for Dance Festival, even if in an abbreviated, digital format, was certainly one of them.  Admittedly, in these trying times the starved audience would have been content with mere fresh performances of old works on a real stage (not that all those recordings of dancers in non-conventional places have been unwelcome!), but the Festival did one better. Rather than taking some old faithfuls out of the refrigerator and reheating them for our delights, it presented some brand new concoctions, and those dishes, along with their execution and presentation, were of the finest flavor.

Photo of Calvin Royal III in “to be seen.”  Photo © by by Christopher Duggan

Hybrid

"Out Loud, a Memoir"

by Mark Morris and Wesley Stace
Penguin Press, New York, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright George Jackson 2020

 

This book is a cross between an autobiography by dancer, choreographer, dance company director and opera stager Morris and a biography of Morris by novelist and recording artist Stace. I am fairly familiar with Morris's work but had not before encountered any of Stace's. The writing took place when Morris (born 29 August 1956) was 62 years old - mature but, presumably, not at career's end.