Category: dance

Many German critics consider Sasha Waltz the “most significant German modern-dance choreographer to emerge in the generation after Pina Bausch.” Her new piece involves dancers and audience walking through the performance space. “Twenty dancers and 10 musicians will move within many rooms as well as pose in boxes resembling display cases or cupboards, as 200 audience members also wander through the eccentric theater.”

The financially-ailing Colorado Ballet gets the largest grant in its history to help see it through the next season. “The ballet ended its 2002-03 season with a $200,000 deficit, which it is addressing this year with an annual budget cut from $5.6 million to $4.9 million. The reduction also reflects a 34 percent drop in performances, because the company cannot use the Auditorium Theatre, which is closed for renovation.”

On September 11, 2001 the dancers of American Ballet Theatre were in Kansas City. They decided to perform anyway. “They begin to move. Each step they take is a step that dancers have taken for 300 years. Every step binds them to centuries of tradition and, by extension, to all the women and all the men who struggled to create what is lovely. At the close of the nation’s most dreadful day, they give us a stay against reality; in the wake of devastation they give us Order. In the wake of brutality they give us Grace. In the wake of horror they give us Beauty. In the face of senselessness they give us meaning. These wraithlike creatures are spiritual warriors. What the terrorists sought to take from our world is precisely what they return to it.”

A thick new book illuminates the history of dance. “No Fixed Points takes its title from Albert Einstein and, in its trove of new and recycled information and sophisticated analysis, brings together generations of thinking and commentary by critics, historians, artists, and impresarios. Decades in the making, it’s the work of two scholars who have both performed.”

Mark Morris is a choreographic master. But has he lost a step or two? “There’s a good reason the press can’t stop talking about Morris’s musicality: When dance is a bastard of music and motion, it makes the spirit flesh, like God did.”

A collaboration by choreographer Trisha Brown and baritone Simon Keenleyside reinterprets Schubert’s classic “Die Winterriese” song cycle. “The real revelation of the Winterreise experiment is the effect it has on Schubert’s music, which is flung into unusual and arresting contexts. Brown had feared that it might enrage musicologists: ‘I worried that it might be irreverent to Schubert. In the rehearsal room, when we first made it, I said to the dancers that I’m thinking of Simon, who is going to lie down now. He’s delusional and dreaming and you put your knees up and your hands up and catch him to stop him from falling off. On one level, it couldn’t be simpler. But on another level it’s so totally absurd and surreal and radical. In fact, the new setting, and the vocal effect it creates, paradoxically manages to serve the score in a way that a conventional performance never could.”

Eric Bogosian remembers Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane and their early days at The Kitchen in New York. “They brought to the dance works grace and intelligence. But they also brought aggression, something that interested me. They brought stillness. And they weren’t happy just moving around. Language had to be part of it, and has been ever since. Sexual politics, race politics, tremendous movement, a surreal soulfulness all were thrown into the mix.”

“Can China develop its own indigenous ballet? After decades of imitative versions of Swan Lake and Giselle, interspersed with heavy-handed Maoist ideological productions, can China finally modernize its ballet with innovative contemporary works that reflect its own culture?”

The fringe Festival of Independent Dance Artists (fFIDA)is the largest dance gathering in Canada. “Throughout fFIDA’s history, one can track the climate of the times. In the early years, Canadian choreographers had a much more feminist and/or political and/or humorous bent. In today’s ‘retreat into yourself’ mentality, the home crowd seems to be angst-driven or navel-gazing or obliquely abstract, with a considerable number of the solos depicting women in distress.”

Christopher Wheeldon is the most acclaimed choreographer of his generation. “Now 30, Wheeldon has 12 works in New York City Ballet’s repertory, and is besieged by commissions from elsewhere. Over the next couple of months, new pieces by him are being performed in London by the George Piper Dances and the Royal Ballet. And next week, at the specific request of the Edinburgh festival, San Francisco Ballet is devoting an entire programme to his work. This is an extraordinary coup for such a young choreographer.”