"Alas, the curtain had scarcely risen Tuesday on Part 1 when Argentine bitchiness was on full display, with most of the company's five female dancers pouting, preening, gasping in fake indignation and pushing one another out of the way in the effort to grab the right partner center stage. Too often "Tango Fire" tries to suggest that the tango will be rendered more enjoyable by shows of flashy temperament, obvious sexiness or sheer tartiness." Read review...
"On Tuesday night at City Center, the troupe honored [Associate Artistic Director Masazumi Chaya] on his 35th anniversary at Ailey, with film and reminiscences from the stage by colleagues including Judith Jamison, the 1970s Ailey star who directs the company." Read review...
"I'm actually surprised...that this performance was only the 2,000th...to those of us who have watched good stagings of plays, ballets and operas crumble after only a very few performances...the evergreen freshness of the Balanchine "Nutcracker" is cause for wonder...I regret that I have seen only 1 percent of its performances to date, the more so as I still find new felicities of drama and construction at each viewing." Read review...
"Dance: Juilliard's Composers and Choeographers Plus"
"You probably don't know about this ill-publicized free event...Apparently, at the end of term, the dance division... puts on a show at the not-to-be-sneezed-at Peter Jay Sharpe Theater, where the students showcase their work: created by students, and performed by students...This is such an awesome thing. As a whole, the work is far more creative, innovative, interesting, and new than what you'll see at, say, Juilliard's December Dance Creations (review to soon follow), or at a lot of professional dance venues." Read review...
"A Dream that Needs All the Love You Can Give: Doug Elkins' "Fraulein Maria" works over a classic musical"
"I believe dance-makers create rites of passage to find the right ways to transform themselves through movement, with audience as witness and participant. In Fraulein Maria's "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," Doug Elkins, downtown-wunderkind-grown-older-and-wiser, was a shaman in his own rite, channeling his past to embark on the future." Read review...
Molissa Fenley Celebrates 30 Years of Nonstop Dancing"
"When Molissa Fenley formed a small company in 1977, many people had taken to jogging in a big way, as if they wanted to be fit enough to outrun enemy attacks, natural disasters, and the aging of their own bodies. Fenley's patterned, repetitive, aerobically paced dances responded to that image of a fit human being. When she began to focus entirely on solos, she slowed her pulse to track more introspective paths, yet remained tireless." Read review...
"Same Differently for Alan Good's Omnibus: Now you see it, now you see it again"
"I've always been impressed by choreographers who not only want us to experience dancing in an unusual way, but want us to understand how that new vision is coming about. Without being didactic, they nudge us with subliminal instructions, like "Watch what happens when I repeat this to different music, when I run it backward, when I have the dancers face a different direction, when I change the audience-performer relationship, when I create a picture too complex for you to grasp in its entirety."" Read review...
""Area 51," a new dance by Yvonne Meier and Aki Sasamoto, was a wittily imaginative exploration of how much can be communicated almost entirely by movement. The 50-minute piece ran out of steam about two-thirds of the way through, but until then, it was delicious." Read review...
"New York City Ballet likes to take some performances at its annual "Nutcracker" season and chock them full of more debuts than raisins in a Christmas fruitcake. That was the case Saturday afternoon at the New York State Theater, when the second-act divertissements in the Kingdom of Sweets were largely populated by first-timers." Read review...
"People-watching is among this city's most popular forms of entertainment. Spotting an eyebrow-raising stunt or marveling at a fashion statement, the city dweller finds amusement reliably in the bustle of the street...Editing that colorful parade for the stage can be risky, however. In "The Groove to Nobody's Business," a new dance the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater presents this season at New York City Center, choreographer Camille A. Brown assembles a lively cast of characters in prime locations for people-watching." Read review...
"Revivals, more than premieres, are proving to be the more noteworthy aspect of the current Ailey season. Several works that strongly evoke the particular moment in which they were created are providing these dancers with meaty interpretive challenges, while the two novelties tailor-made for these versatile and indefatigable performers have turned out to be once-over-lightly efforts that are amiable, mildly flavorful character studies weak on craft and focus -- and offering little evidence of any galvanizing purpose." Read review...
"When "Tango Fire" toured Germany and England last year, audience members showed their approval by wildly stamping their feet. In Korea, they yelled and raised their arms. In China they didn't make much of a ruckus at the curtain calls, but afterward crowds gathered at the stage door for autographs." Read preview...
"You have to respect a choreographer who takes on C. S. Lewis and Dante in one evening. A longtime veteran of the Limon Company, Jonathan Riedel brought his young company to Joyce Soho to present new works inspired by the two authors." Read review...
"You have to feel favorably disposed toward Andrew Dinwiddie and Jeff Larson, the curators of the well-liked Catch performance series. Not only do they make the safety announcements themselves ("the exits are, um, over there"), they are also endearingly enthusiastic about their offerings. And they managed to get Singha beer as a sponsor for Catch 27, a mini-festival that features a bunch of talented artists over two weekends at Performance Space 122." Read review...
"Saturday December 15, 2007 matinee - This was the New York City Ballet NUTCRACKER performance with so many young dancers taking on new roles, chief among them being Kathryn Morgan's debut as the Sugar Plum Fairy. Since I'm sure everyone will want to know how Ms. Morgan did, I will say immediately she was truly gorgeous in the role from start to finish." Read review...
"Unlike many tango groups that pass through New York, the charming Estampas Porteñas (the words mean, roughly, stamp or mark and people born in Buenos Aires) is a tightknit company that never sacrifices spontaneity or Ms. Soler's sprightly sense of theater for a star turn." Read review...
"Connections and Origins: Rebecca Stenn Company uses live music and narrative to personalize a space"
"How can we connect deeply in this age of fragmented attention and quick paced encounters? How does where we come from confine or define who we are? By acknowledging the past, can we become more authentically ourselves? Myriad questions simmer to the surface in Rebecca Stenn's latest evening of work only to be drawn back into the metaphorical soup." Read review...
"The project, conceived by Mason, intends to challenge the boundaries traditionally placed upon black choreographers--that Black Dance is "based in the Ailey tradition or Horton technique, as African dance, or as Negro Spirituals." Segments of recurring documentary video instruct the audience in this concept, book-ending most of the pieces. Though informative, this created a somewhat stifling pedagogical overlay that felt more like a seminar than an augmentation of the dance." Read review...
""When you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything." Most everybody knows the timeless lesson meted out by Julie Andrews in "The Sound of Music." It's a phrase worth keeping in mind during many endeavors, including dance making, as proven by Doug Elkins on Wednesday night in "Fräulein Maria," his delightful, wink-filled ode to that classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical." Read review...
"Maurice Béjart's "Firebird," abstract and spiritual, is about a strong and magical male, a phoenix character that comes up from the ashes. Considering the uplifting Alvin Ailey American Dance style and its incredible contingent of male dancers, selecting it for one of this season's company premiers must have been a no-brainer for director Judith Jamison." Read review...
"Paul Matteson and Jennifer Nugent, two of the most appealing dancers on the postmodern scene, who were indelibly memorable as part of David Dorfman's Company, are now a team. In the four new dances on their concert "Pieced Apart" at Danspace Project, December 6-8, relaxed momentum, generated by canny application of energy and weight, produces rigorously structured, emotionally resonant, and personal kinetic encounters." Read review...
"Fame's Demands, and the Flights of Fancy to Escape"
"Alvin Ailey had a love-hate relationship with fame. He began his career in dance as a take-charge young artist whose performing and fledgling choreography were fueled more by apparent self-confidence than by deep knowledge of the art form." Read review...
"Many dancers have walked slowly across many stages, their faces bathed in a slanting light, their eyes focused on a middle distance...The choreographer Molissa Fenley took such a walk on Tuesday night at the Joyce Theater, where her company is celebrating 30 years of existence with two programs this week." Read review...
"Fortunately, there is nothing new to report about the NYCB production of "The Nutcracker". It continues weaving its magic, unexaggerated and unchanged, its glorious details intact." Read review...
"No description or video can prepare you for Elizabeth Streb's SLAM Show X. They may inform you about what you will see, but they cannot convey the power and danger that you will witness during the show. Long known for her Hollywood stunt-style performances, Ms. Streb's tenth work-in-process showing continues the trend." Read review...
"The Thrills Are Alive: Alert Julie Andrews! Doug Elkins brings Fraulein Maria back to Joe's Pub"
"New Yorkers are going to be very happy when Fraulein Maria, polished up and with additional recruits, returns to Joe's Pub on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday (and again on January 12). A couple of years ago, when Elkins was coping with the breakup of his marriage and the dissolution of his dance company, he popped in a DVD and watched The Sound of Music with his son Liam." Read review...
"James Thiérrée's Au Revoir Parapluie: Seeking a missing lover through dream countries"
"As demonstrated in his magical Au Revoir Parapluie, James Thiérrée's imagination is tethered to reality only by the frailest of golden threads. This brilliant director, dancer, mime, acrobat, and musician has barely touched down on the Orpheus legend." Read review...
"Flaming Creatures: If it's Christmas, it must be Ailey time"
"In many ways, Béjart's ultra-clear choreographic patterns remind me of early modern dance. In a close phalanx, moving as one, the nine dancers (both male and female) shift directions suddenly to gaze into threatening darkness; leap, spin, and crawl into contrapuntal squads or solo outbursts; and thrust fists in the air. The male firebird has the flashy, more balletic dancing--the exalted jumps, the beating of feet together in the air." Read review...
"Everyone, ballet fan or not, has to see The Nutcracker at least once a holiday season, right! It's a requirement. This ballet -- particularly NYCB's Balanchine version (since that's the only one I've seen in adulthood) -- is always magic, especially after the party is over, Clara dozes off, and her little Nutcracker doll becomes a prince and whisks her off to the lands of live Snowflakes and dancing Sweets." Read review...
"This piece had me totally transfixed. admittedly, I'm a sucker for live music, and this was particularly captivating "shoe-gazer" dark, experimental music by Seattle rock band Kinski (where the bass guitarist at one point played her guitar with a bow, like an upright bass!), so it had me from the first note." Read review...
"The battle between live art and its more profitable, stationary counterpart is the subject of a new work by Moving Theater. In "Impermanent Collection," performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Friday, the group's co-artistic directors, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly, question the influence of a permanent collection on live art." Read review...
"Choreographers Stretch Visions in and Out of the Box"
"Showcases can be deadly, but the selection of choreographers for the NuDance Festival on Saturday night at Theater of the Riverside Church was unusually good. The artists came from a wide range of backgrounds, including Broadway, mainstream modern dance and hip-hop. Nearly everyone had something distinctively personal to say, for the most part stylistically." Read review...
"Diane Coburn Bruning, Artistic Director of the Chamber Dance Project, has some good ideas. Keeping a dance company small (six to eight dancers) so that musicians can be included in the permanent roster is a good idea...Presenting work created mostly by fledgling, in house choreographers may not be the best idea. This is because Bruning's flagrantly titled "dare to feel" program feels more like an evening of enjoyable music than an engaging dance concert. Even excellent live music cannot compensate for adequate choreography." Read review...
""Jump!" commanded one of the slithering sybarites populating Alvin Ailey's "Night Creature" on Friday night at City Center. "How high?" was the body-language response of one of the men who were in hot pursuit. Their exchange is the logical extension of the doggy-paw hand jive that swirls throughout the piece, an homage to the vocabulary of Broadway and Harlem routines of the sepia years." Read review...
"The Rhymthic Ebbing and Flowing of the Subway Riders of New York"
"Is the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater setting a trend? Both of its premieres this season are light and relatively frivolous. Fredrick Earl Mosely took on legends of the American West in his new and atypical "Saddle Up!," And Camille A. Brown celebrates the captive community of New York subway riders in her delicious "Groove to Nobody's Business," first performed by the Ailey company on Friday night at City Center." Read review...
"Diane Coburn Bruning's Chamber Dance Project clearly wants to bring ballet into the contemporary world. "No buns, no tights, no tutus," John Wright, "a classically trained urban vocal artist" (as his program biography states), said in his semi-rapped, slightly squirm-inducing introduction to the company on Thursday night at the Ailey Citigroup Theater." Read review...
"The outcome was "Fräulein Maria," Mr. Elkins's characteristically free-associative take on "The Sound of Music," which opens at Joe's Pub on Wednesday night in its second run, after its premiere there last December. Its return in expanded form is a bright light for those who have long admired Mr. Elkins's fabulous capacity for movement invention; his fun-house way of collapsing together, then teasing out different movement traditions; and his clever, funny physical references to choreographers from Martha Graham to Trisha Brown." Read review...
"When you hear that The Barnard Project is a collaboration between Barnard dance students and professional choreographers, if you are honest with yourself, you probably expect to see bland choreography that emphasizes classroom exercises executed by eager if not experienced dancers. If that is your expectation then Dance Theater Workshop's presentation is a delightful surprise." Read review...
"James Thierree's ``Au Revoir Parapluie'' (Goodbye, Umbrella), at the BAM Harvey Theater through Dec. 16, is a loosely joined performance of skits involving acrobatics, mime, magic tricks, aerial feats, a bit of singing and sundry aspects of dancing. Thierree was supposedly inspired by the Orpheus and Eurydice myth -- loss, search, death-defying retrieval -- but you'd never know that." Read review...
"Playing With Momentum in a Range of Physical Tests"
""Pieced Apart," their new collection of four works being performed at Danspace Project, seems to be an attempt to move beyond the myths, real or imagined, but it doesn't entirely succeed." Read review...
"Wearing an ever-changing, brightly hued selection of outfits that toe the line between hipster chic and matronly, the two women cavort on empty highways and do a strange, lunging walk-dance in a parking lot at night. Dressed in vibrant red, they pick their way through a lonely world of scrub and rock; the viewer sees them only intermittently, the way birds reward those watchers who are patient enough to wait." Read review...
"What happens when a good show doesn't know when to end?"
"Ship in a View, choreographed by Hiroshi Koike, ended with a powerful, glimmering image. A myriad of tiny revolving lights descended from the rafters, and one dancer, lying on a flat board, levitated up through this forest of lights. It was a beautiful, breathtaking ascension to heaven or a spiritual equivalent." Read review...
"The Groove to Nobody's Business and The Road of the Phoebe Snow"
"Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater recently premiered two new pieces: a brand new work by young choreographer Camille A. Brown called "The Groove to Nobody's Business," and a re-staging of Talley Beatty's 1959 "The Road of the Phoebe Snow." I loved both of them." Read review...
"Estampas Porteñas, the hottest Tango company in Buenos Aires, takes you on an irresistible journey through the dance form's history, while displaying a modern choreography edged with Argentina's contemporary sophistication."
"I always try to see Wendy Whelan's Sugar Plum Fairy each winter...Wendy and Philip then pulled out all the stops and gave us a really grand pas de deux that had the audience cheering. Opening the second act, Wendy seemed in a radiant mood, bedazzling the small angels with her smile. The solo was perfect; I've never been able to figure out just what it is about this woman's every step, gesture and expression that keeps me in a state of elation. I hope I never figure it out. I love watching her." Read review...
"Crisscrossing the Stage, Highly Charged Moves From Familiar Pieces"
"How easily the memory plays tricks. Or does it? The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater made a nearly abstract piece of Talley Beatty's classic "Road of the Phoebe Snow" on Wednesday night at City Center. And the company performed Ailey's "River" as if it were anything but the sometimes pallid-seeming exercise in choreographing for a ballet troupe." Read review...
"Despite stark content differences, structuralists and semiologists could equally love the works of Beth Gill and Daniel Linehan...For Gill's wholly fascinating quartet "Eleanor & Eleanor," the artist frames the space with two-and-a-half quasi-Islamic floating arches made of white electrical casing, designed by Jeff Larson...Daniel Linehan, on the other hand, employs incessant repetition as his choreographic anchor, tapping in to the sign of the circle self-placed at center." Read review...
