Taylor Season
Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance is at the Koch through March 29. My review of two programs is here.
Happy Nymphs and Happy Swains
As part of the Mostly Mozart Festival, the Mark Morris Dance Group is performing Morris’s production of Handel’s opera “Acis and Galatea,” in which dancers and singers share the same sylvan world onstage. In the pit, Nicholas McGegan conducts the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale. Here’s my review of last night’s performance, for DanceTabs.
A short excerpt:
“Unlike his Dido and Aeneas (1989) and L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (1988), in Acis Morris places the four soloists…onstage among the dancers. The chorus is down below, with the players. (Morris also took this approach in his delightfully zany staging of Purcell’s King Arthur, staged at New York City Opera in 2008.) Here, the singers and dancers share the same world, in relative harmony.”
And a couple of images from the production:
Just Because…
It’s too late to put in my review of Concerto Barocco at the New York City Ballet, but here is a photo from that performance, on opening night of the winter season, featuring Maria Kowroski (on the left) and Sara Mearns (on the right). Beautifully captured by Paul Kolnik.
Go for Barocco
My first review of New York City Ballet’s winter season is out today on DanceTabs. It’s never a bad idea to start of a season with an all-Balanchine program, especially if it includes “Concerto Barocco,” a microcosm of musicality and modernity. The company seems to be in good form. Here’s a short excerpt from the review:
“We see and hear each of its moving parts, understand the transitions, and notice the way certain phrases, like a repeated hop on pointe followed by a small bow, or a courtly Baroque dance step, return from one movement to the next, leading to a logical, almost inevitable conclusion….And yet, for all its concern with structure, the ballet reads as pure, sublimated meaning and emotion.”
Ballets about Ballet: Les Sylphides and Theme and Variations at ABT
At the Saturday matinee, ABT presented a program consisting of Fokine’s Les Sylphides, Stanton Welch’s Clear, and Balanchine’s Theme and Variations. The most interesting aspect was seeing the contrast between Sylphides and Theme. Two sumptuous works about the nature of ballet itself. I reviewed the show here.
A short excerpt: “In many ways these two works illustrate what we think about when we think about ballet. The first is a vaporous homage to the aura of mid-nineteenth century works like La Sylphide and Giselle. The latter, a luminous affirmation of the classical style, specifically the high classicism of the Russian Silver Age and its exemplary ballet, Sleeping Beauty.”
ABT Brings Back Twyla’s “Bach Partita”
American Ballet Theatre is bringing back Twyla Tharp’s “Bach Partita,” this week, at Lincoln Center. For this advance piece, I spoke with Susan Jones (the ballet mistress who is doing the staging), a couple of dancers, and Charles Yang (the violinist) about the revival of what Arlene Croce described as an “enormous, whirling, weightless ballet”
Taylor’s Tales
On March 13, I saw a Paul Taylor program consisting of: Cascade, To Make Crops Grow, and Beloved Renegade. Here is my review for DanceTabs.
And a short excerpt:
“This year’s premières are like a negative image of what came before. Perpetual Dawn, which opened last week, is a happy couples dance, set to generically upbeat music by the German baroque composer, Johann David Heinichen. Lovers frolic, embrace, chase after each another in a bucolic setting. Even the lone single girl (Michelle Fleet) eventually finds a man. Then there is To Make Crops Grow, which I saw for the first time last night. It turns out to be a rather creepy fable about society’s willingness to sacrifice one of its own to satisfy some sort of higher law – order, convention?”
Paul Taylor, Back at Lincoln Center
The Paul Taylor Dance Company opened its second season at Lincoln Center with a gala performance. For once it wasn’t the usual “best-of” compilation, but a typically eccentric Paul Taylor quadruple bill. You can read my review here.
And here is a short excerpt:
“The surprise of the evening (for me) was the closer, Offenbach Overtures (1995). The last time I saw this dance, several years back, it struck me as forced and cartoonish. This time it won me over completely. Has it changed or have I? Set to appealing Offenbach polkas and waltzes and costumed (by Loquasto) in simplified versions of soldier uniforms (including mustaches) and chorine outfits straight out of Toulouse Lautrec (all red), the piece pokes fun at ballet, at puffed-up nineteenth-century European conventions, at operetta, at heterosexual coupling.”
Dancing Around 