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Jill Johnston's Theatre of Life

The Essential Jill Johnston Reader

Edited by Clare Croft

Duke University Press, 2024

 

--By Tom Phillips

 

Everyone knows that post-modern dance began at Judson Memorial Church in the early 1960s, but few people today remember what actually happened there. Luckily, the Village Voice was on the story, and sent its most daring critic to cover it. Jill Johnston’s columns of the 1960s and 70s have now been collected in a book, an invaluable chronicle of dance in the context of a social/sexual/political sea change.   

Vangeline's Story

-- By Tom Phillips 

Butoh began in the ruins of post-war Japan as the "dance of utter darkness."  Today it is performed and taught all over the world, and increasingly influential in other techniques and styles. No one is more responsible for this than Vangeline, founder and director of the New York Butoh Institute, which marks its 20th anniversary in 2023. After many years on the margins of the dance world, this year she is flooded in fellowships – including a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to study the brain waves of Butoh dancers. 

Vangeline was born in 1970 in France, and came to New York in 1992. She told us her life story recently while sitting and stretching on the floor of her dance studio, near the banks of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.     

            Vangeline Theatre in "The Slowest Wave"  Photo: Michael Blase                         

Isadora in the 21st Century: Interview with Lori Belilove

--  By Tom Phillips 

Isadora Duncan was and is an outlier -- 100 years ago, a rebel against the academic dance establishment, and now, a pure classicist in a free-wheeling, eclectic dance environment.  Today, no one embodies Isadora’s life and work more than Lori Belilove, director of the Isadora Duncan Dance Company and Foundation.  Working out of a loft-studio in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, she has spent decades as a dancer, teacher, and choreographer, re-inventing Duncan Dance for the 21st Century.  I talked with her over the last year, most recently on the last day of summer, 2022. 

The Isadora Duncan Dance Company: L to R: Carolyn Yamada, Samantha Mercado, Hayley Rose, Diana Uribe,  Emily D'Angelo

Something out of Nothing

"For a Dance Never Choreographed"
A film by Luca Veggetti
Text from notes by Martha Graham
Voice: Chen-Wei Lee
Cinematography: Stefano Croci
Music: Paolo Aralla

--By Tom Phillips 
Copyright 2022 by Tom Phillips 

Still from For a Dance Never Choreographed, 2021. Photo: Stefano Croci.

For artists and introverts, the Pandemic of 2020-22 was a window of opportunity -- a chance to observe the world in the absence of normal human activity.  During lockdown and quarantine periods, walking deserted streets or sitting in empty public spaces, we could suddenly see form without function --- the structure of civilization without its uses.   

Italian artist-choreographer Luca Veggetti found himself stuck in his hometown of Bologna, Italy, when the pandemic struck in 2020.  So he made something out of nothing.  

 

Womanspreading: Re-defining Butoh

 "Eternity 123"
Vangeline 
Triskelion Arts, Brooklyn 
October 30, 2021

--   By Tom Phillips 
Copyright 20231 by Tom Phillips

Butoh queen Vangeline describes her solo "Eternity 123" as a "symbolic journey of women's liberation across time."  I tossed the program note aside and watched the show with an open mind, with which the artist proceeded to play. 

Photo by Bryan Kwon

Resurrection Time

Denishawn
Dances by Ruth St. Denis & Ted Shawn 
The Theatre at St. Jean's, New York  
October 2, 2021

-- By Tom Phillips 
Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis are known as the "mother and father of American Modern Dance,"  but the works they choreographed and performed have been lost for years.  All that remained were dusty photographs and flickering, black-and-white films.  It was a case study in the ephemeral nature of dance--- until it all began again. 

Edge of the Universe

Kyle Marshall Choreography
"Stellar" 
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York
June 7-21, 2021 (online) 

-- By Tom Phillips
Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips  

Which comes first, music or dance?  In Kyle Marshall's choreography, it's neither.  Music and dance are two sides of one art form, improvising against each other.  Friction, ignition, liftoff, jazz.  Marshall's new  "Stellar" knits together city streets with the loneliness of deep space, and grounds them in the earth of Mother Africa.  All in little more than twenty minutes.  

Pleasure and the Pandemic: LaMama Moves! Outdoors

Shared Program: LaMama Moves! Dance Festival 2021
Jasmine Hearn/ Songs from Pleasure Memory
Sugar Vendil/ Test Sites
Outdoors at Downtown Art/Alpha Omega, New York City
May 23, 2021

-- By Tom Phillips 
Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

Jasmine Hearn Photo by Steven Pisano

Sixty years after the Sixties, The East Village can still feel like the most sensuous part of New York.  Like their spiritual forebears, people in this low-rise, low-rent district live for pleasure – erotic, psychedelic and aesthetic.  So it felt right that a graffiti-scarred vacant lot on East 3^rd Street was the scene for a revival of live experimental theater in the dying days of the pandemic. 

Pits of the Pandemic

Kolonial 
Stefanie Batten Bland, choreographer 
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York (online) 
May 3-17, 2021

by Tom Phillips
copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips  

Photo by Maria Baranova

America is starting to emerge from 14 months of viral living, but like all traumas, this pandemic year will live on in mind and body. Reams of research and acres of art will record how we lived and died with the coronavirus, and how it changed us.  Ahead of the game, the Baryshnikov Arts Center of New York is already out with the first fruits of an ugly season --- a piece created and performed during the pandemic, under medically-prescribed COVID health and safety protocols. 

Plastic Fantastic Planet

"Plastic Harvest" Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance
"healing/trying" jillsigman/thinkdance
"Wake up and Smell the Coffee" Vangeline Theater 
Earth Day, New York City 
April 24, 2021

by Tom Phillips 
copyright © 2021 by Tom Phillips 

 

One problem in dealing with the world’s environ- mental crisis is that it’s composed of so many separate problems, most of them difficult to picture. Science does a lousy job of dramatizing climate change – so by the time people are forced to recognize it, their homes may be gone and their lives in danger.  So it falls to the arts to show us what business-as-usual is doing to us.  And Earth Day is an annual opportunity to seize the outdoor stage.   

Queering Ballet

#QueertheBallet
Adriana Pierce, choreographer
Bridge Street Theatre, Catskill, New York
February 25, 2021
Streaming on Youtube, February 25-March 11

by Tom Phillips 
Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

The art form of ballet is overdue for a queering – i.e. expanding its repertoire of meaning beyond the traditional binary codes of gender and sex.  Adriana Pierce, an alumna of George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet and Miami City Ballet, went into a recent residency with a clear goal in mind: “to create a duet for two women which honors their movement styles, physique, emotionality, and connection in a way that is not harnessed by ballet’s traditional technical ideals.  I also feel it’s imperative that audiences get to see genuine and thoughtful queer stories and relationships.”  By the end of the residency she was well begun, maybe halfway done.  But next comes the hard part. 

 L. to R. Sierra Armstrong, Remy Young