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.
Continue reading "Edge of the Universe " »
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.
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
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 3rd Street was the scene for a revival of live experimental theater in the dying days of the pandemic.
Continue reading "Pleasure and the Pandemic: LaMama Moves! Outdoors " »
Kolonial
Stefanie Batten Bland, choreographer
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York (online)
May 3-17, 2021
by Tom Phillips
copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips
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 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.
#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
LaMama Moves/Online
Tamar Rogoff with Merri Milwe
"Wonder About Merri"
Kevin Augustine/Lone Wolf Tribe
"Body Concert"
Tamar Rogoff with Mei Yamanaka
"The Yamanakas at Home"
January 27, 2021
by Tom Phillips
Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips
It's not that often that three disparate dance pieces fit together so well that they seem to be subtly referring and comment- ing on each other -- but last night's trio of experiments from LaMama seemed to have been made with each other in mind. The bookends were two short pieces by Tamar Rogoff -- one set in downtown Manhattan, the other in a residential neighborhood of Tokyo -- with entirely different characters and themes, but a single groove -- a Motown beat that gets you on your feet, and won't let you do anything but dance.
The Yamanakas at Home -- Photo by Mei Yamanaka
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
"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"
Lori Belilove and the Isadora Duncan Dance Company
Lori Belilove, Artistic Director
Hayley Rose, Emily D'Angelo, Faith Kimberling, Caroline Yamada
Untermyer Gardens, Yonkers NY
September 26, 2020
By Tom Phillips
-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips
A flock of Monarch butterflies –- stopping for the night in the Hudson Valley on their way to Mexico -- greeted early arrivals Saturday in Untermyer Park and Gardens, high above the river in Yonkers. Their visit was unscheduled, but no more an accident than the gust of wind which an hour later lifted the silken wings of three dancers to Chopin’s “Butterfly Etude,” nor the shaft of light from the setting sun that illumined Gluck’s “Bacchanal.” Isadora planned it that way.
Emily D'Angelo, Hayley Rose and Faith Kimberling in "Butterfly Etude." Photo: John Link
"The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood"
Written and Directed by Suguru Yamamoto
Wataru Kitao, Performer
Japan Society, New York
January 10, 2020
-- By Tom Phillips
Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips
Mayday! Mayday! Is a cry that comes up repeatedly in Suguru Yamamoto’s dance/drama “The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood.” It means “help me” in French, but it seems to fall on deaf ears in Tokyo, the setting for this theater piece by and for a new generation of Japanese artists.
Despairing dramas about alienated people were a staple of the last century. What makes this fresh is that it suggests alienation is only the other side of human community. We feel disconnected because we are connected.
Photograph by Ayumi Sakamoto