Category: Dance
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How to Dance out of the Past and into the Present in Bill T. Jones Still/Here.
Dances are rarely historicized. They exist instead as ephemeral events, never repeated exactly as they were once performed. When a piece of dance is staged again in a new context, it appears as a product of its present, rather than the moment it was first choreographed. Bill T. Jones’s 1994 multi-media dance piece Still/Here,…
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Toying with Irony in Volta Collective’s SALT
In SALT, a semi-interactive dance-theater work by Los Angeles-based Volta Collective, director-choreographer Mamie Green and writers Sammy Loren and Ellington Wells take on Euripides’s Medea. But, instead of featuring a vengeful enchantress and her Argonaut husband, SALT depicts two cynical artists exploiting each other to fulfill both emotional and financial desires. Jason (George Olesky) is…
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Performing the Palimpsest: Electric Blue and Naked Vanguard at La MaMa Moves!
Some performances can bring back the dead. Through references and recordings, through revivals and reenactments, they channel the spirit of the artists and choreography they cite and call upon the stage. Though the ontological nature of performance is rooted in its disappearance – once the dance is over, we no longer have access to…
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Binging to Bliss in “Bodhisattva Beer Run”
A golden age is brewing for AAPI contemporary performance[i] with Glenn Potter-Takata and evan ray suzuki serving as crafty “kodama” (木霊, 木魂 or 木魅) leading us through the forest to refreshing springs of compositional bliss.
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Pioneers Go East Collective at Judson: Queer Artists Make Big Sounds in A Big Room In A Church.
For two nights, Judson Church hosted the Crossroads Series with varied programming each evening. On Tuesday, April 23rd, three very different performances were presented by Pioneers Go East Collective, a self-identified ‘radical queer laboratory collective of performing and visual artists dedicated to dance-theater and video art to empower the LGBTQ experience.’ The curated performances highlighted…
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Attention, Salvation, and Celebration: Three Emerging Choreographers of La MaMa Moves!
There is a moment in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot that I return to whenever I think about the relationship between dance and language. It’s an often misquoted scene, but it happens when the traveling Estragon and Vladimir ask Lucky to dance: ESTRAGON: Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards, if it isn’t too…
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Ancestral cycles in Alethea Pace’s “between wave and water”
Alethea Pace’s “between wave and water,” presented recently at BAAD!, honors the memory of the ancestors buried there in a potent passage of works that resist the urge to erase America’s history of slavery. It is a purposeful, hefty juxtaposition of care-fully crafted encounters, movement through space as memorial practice, memorial practice as malleable time…
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READY, SET // A response to Esmé Boyce Dance’s creation of The Humbling or Chapter of Mama: Part 1
Racing with the gravity of children, the adults ricochet around this room built for great art, cackling. A narrow dodge. Cori’s it. A swipe across the belly. MAMA I’M GOING TO CATCH YOU Glorious MAMA defeat. Becoming ‘it’ and ‘not it’ faster than the patter…
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NDT’s Sound of Silence // Where Movement Tells The Story.
By Emma Schneider What does one come to see at a dance performance? There are components of productions that help to create a whole—costumes, lighting, music, etc.—yet, it would be difficult to argue that dance companies should prioritize anything above the quality of the dance itself, the simple fact of their dancers moving through…
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An Evening of Rhythm and Double Consciousness With Nimbus Dance
Currently mounted at Nimbus’s Firmament Gallery + Boutique is “Sometimes I Wander…” an exhibit displaying the photography of Life Magazine’s first Black photographer, Gordon Parks, and staff photographer at The Source, Chi Modu. The gallery, which regularly features local and Black art, showcases images of Blackness, Americana, and Community: Hip Hop.
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Annie Wang’s “had my mouth” Offers Self-Protection Through Lyrical Movement
Were they bearing their teeth in preparation to kill? Screaming silently in agony? Conjuring lost joy of their youth?
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January roundup – Mina Nishimura, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Yasuko Yokoshi, and Motus
So, while trying to strictly manage the pervasive NYC version of Arts Presenters-infected “festival fomo,” I still accumulated enough exposure to the spores of a range of performances in the January flurry to wander into a compost pile of considerations on what is doggedly sprouting among us in the age of extinction.