"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...
"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...
"Together and Apart: Nugent + Matteson get mysterious, enjoy block shoes"
"Jennifer Nugent and Paul Matteson are nothing like the sleek couples of ballet who often look as though they'd been bred to channel petty royalty. Nugent is a strong, long-bodied space-eater who moves with a lavish plasticity. Matteson--slim, loose, and wily--can articulate a shoulder, a hip, his head in innumerable slippery ways. He's syrup; she's honey." 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...
"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...
"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...
"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...
"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...
"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...
""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...
"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...
"Voguish, Mysterious and Visually Enthralling: Shen Wei Dance Arts at the Guggenheim"
"Early last week I saw Shen Wei Dance Arts...This was my first time seeing this company, although I briefly saw Mr. Shen in David Michalek's Slow Dancing Films... I know this company has performed at many festivals around the world, and is a favorite of the Lincoln Center Festival, and after seeing their New York premiere of "Behind Resonance," I know why." 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...
"People ambulating, zombie-like around the stage, bursting into spasms of American pre-postmodern dance - side falls, stag leaps, and barrel turns - flashed this viewer's memory back to "happenings" of the Judson-era 1960s. But this was "Ship in a View," a sprawling, 95-minute movement-based theater piece that marked the BAM debut of Japanese dance-theater company Pappa Tarahumara - part of the 25th Next Wave Festival, November 28 to December 1." Read review...
"Inspired by travels along the backroads of Southern California, C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) introduces us to two wild, mysterious women who, through their movements, live and on video, come to channel the formidably strong and violent forces of the natural (rocks, lake, sea) and artificial (highway) environment around them." Read review...
"Space Flights: Two imaginative young choreographers test boundaries"
"In their shared program, Beth Gill and Daniel Linehan force us to experience space--its emptiness, its fullness-- both visually and sensually, and to feel the weight and passage of time. Both have been choreographing for only a few years, but the intelligence and daring with which they explore their ideas make a lot of the dances that we see today look unconsidered." Read review...
"Choreography team robbinschilds are known for creating acutely visual works that explore the intersection of human movement and architecture, be it natural or manmade. C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) seamlessly combines a movement-based video with an acutely visual live dance performance and an original score performed live by Seattle rock band Kinski."
"I love this dance company so much. And I love Alvin Ailey's work in particular. AAADT artistic director Judith Jamison quotes Ailey as having said that his choreography is the result of his "blood memory" of his southern boyhood. He said the greatest works of art are the most personal, come from the deepest-rooted place. Nothing could be more true." Read review...
"Going Nowhere Beautifully: Do you always have to understand what you see?"
"Hiroshi Koike named his company Pappa Tarahumara after a Mexican Indian tribe. He has made dance-theater works based on Chekhov's The Three Sisters and a Gabriel García Márquez story, but his Ship in a View is anchored only in his own imagination and his seaside hometown in Japan." Read review...
"Esse Aficionado is led by three Purchase College graduates who are...passionate devotees of dance. Formed in 1999 by Veronica De La Rosa, Gina Graham and Maki Morinoue, the group didn't stray far from its collegiate roots at the Joyce SoHo on Friday. For all the directors' youthful exuberance, the dances suggested academic exercises brought to life with costumes and lights." Read review...
"Bejart's Spandex `Firebird' Gets Demure With Ailey: Tobi Tobias"
"Seeing the late Maurice Bejart's ``Firebird,'' the centerpiece of the gala that opened the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's five-week season at the New York City Center on Nov. 28, you'd never guess that the French choreographer was celebrated and reviled for works that were spectacular and scandalous." Read review...
Streb Slam Show X
Streb Laboratory for Action Mechanics
November 30 - December 16, 2007
"Gravity May Eventually Triumph, but Not Without a Fight"
"...its minimalism is an echo of Ms. Streb's roots in experimental dance. She has long been a pioneer in blending gymnastics, dance, acrobatics and sheer daredevil insanity, and many have seen her work as an exhibition of pure dance energy...If her work is about anything, it's about action, not aesthetics." Read review...
"Hiroshi Koike, Artistic Director of Pappa Tarahumara and creator of "Ship in a View," appears to be a member of the "if it's inscrutable, it must be good" club. Koike's ninety-five minute reflection on Hitachi City, the provincial industrial town where he grew up in 1960's Japan, is often beautiful, but heavily laden with suggested psychodrama that verges on the irritating." Read review...
"The distances in Gina Gibney's hour-long "The Distance Between Us" are usually quite small, though measured in the nuanced micrometers of women's relationships, they probably span a large emotional range. The entire piece stays on one note, but varied partnerings and synergetic set, lighting, costumes and hypnotic music give that note beauty." Read review...
"Just the sight of 10 members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater dressed in colorful costumes (designed by Ann Hould Ward) for the world premiere of Fredrick Earl Mosley's "Saddle Up!" Friday night was improbable enough to instantly spark the audience's funny bone." Read review...
"After Six Decades, a Jane Bowles Puppet Play Takes Flight"
"Bill T. Jones's new "Quarreling Pair" may surprise those familiar with his work over the last 20 years. There are no overarching social themes or emotions. The tone is relaxed and instinctual." Read review...
"Moving Between Cool Style and Broadway-Flash Pizazz"
"The Alvin Ailey season's first three performances were completely different in repertory, except that all three ended with Ailey's 1960 classic, "Revelations." There was no doubt that the audience was happy about that. People don't applaud just what happens in this piece; they applaud some of it before it even starts to happen." Read review...
""A Quarreling Pair," Jones' brilliant, new dance-theater work, which received its premiere Friday at Montclair State University's Alexander Kasser Theater, is based upon a stylized puppet script with an existentialist theme." Read review...
"The sudden alliance between Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the recently deceased French choreographer Maurice Béjart has left some fans scratching their heads in bewilderment. Why would the Ailey, which favors the athletic torsion of American modern dance, turn to Béjart for a season premiere?" Read review...
"The Distance Between Us--the new piece by Gina Gibney...looks very much like a short story filled with characters engaged in shifting relationships. I can't tell you exactly what those relationships are, but this is the sort of work that asks a watcher to tilt forward and read into it whatever is in the watcher's experience and soul." Read review...
"If the terms "sluffing," "rolling point" or "high table" mean anything to you than you will understand the vocabulary of Gina Gibney's new work The Distance Between Us. If those words mean nothing to you than the movement of the piece will seem wild and spatially invasive." Read review...
"Silence is one of the greatest pleasures of dance. No campaign sound bites, no Britney bulletins, just profound messages communicated by powerfully articulate bodies. But disappointment was in store for those who attended the first performance of the Movement Research Fall Festival, devoted to improvisational dance, on Thursday at the Danspace Project." Read review...
"My body is buzzing. A strange electrical current runs through. I've seen and experienced a very full and alive evening of dance....Beth Gill's Eleanor & Eleanor and Daniel Linehan's Not About Everything take me on a physical journey during their split bill performance at DTW." Read review...
"Reveling in the Stillness, Puzzling Over the Self"
"In "Eleanor & Eleanor," which opened a split bill at Dance Theater Workshop on Wednesday, Ms. Gill framed the back of the stage with delicate white arches, forming a space within a space. Everything reverberated in this hushed room, variously occupied by three women and a man. When Eleanor Hullihan and Danielle Goldman turned on their sides, offering the audience their backs and hips, the deliberateness of the action had the familiar resonance of turning away from a lover." Read review...
"Gina Gibney's distinctive choreographic voice has made her one of the most intellectually stimulating of New York dance artists. There is nothing particularly brainy about her dances. She does not play mind games. Instead, quietly, she deals in abstractions, making them do the work of expression for her." Read review...
"Some theatrical pieces inspire a vague and intermittent boredom as they are performed, yet feel worthwhile by the time you emerge, blinking, into the theater lobby. Such was "Ship in a View," a work performed by the Japanese dance-theater company Pappa Tarahumara..." Read review...
"When the company toured Maurice Béjart's version of The Firebird this year, the choreographer was very much alive. It was poignant that less than a week after he died, his Firebird should head the opening of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater winter season, unavoidably turning it into a kind of requiem." Read review...
Judith Jamison, artistic director and grande doyenne of the company, paid tribute to Maurice Bejart, who died in Switzerland on Thanksgiving at age 80...She called him, with considerable justice, "one of the great voices of contemporary dance," and, by coincidence, the season was scheduled to open with the company's first performance in New York of his "Firebird." Read review...
"After the curtain came down on "Revelations" at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's season opening Wednesday night, the City Center audience cheered so long that the performers finally returned the applause. At Ailey, the audience and performers are on the most cozy and comfortable of terms -- never more so than on its gala opening nights in New York, and never more so than during and after "Revelations." Read review...
"The Alvin Ailey troupe's rendition of [Maurice] Béjart's "Firebird"...Before an elegant gala crowd that included hip-hop impresario and born-again Buddhist Russell Simmons stumping for the company...was gentle, not dull; inflected with the rhythms and stances of Indian classical dance, not Orientalist; touchingly vulnerable, not unctuously sexual...As the first U.S. company to stage a complete Béjart ballet, the Ailey dancers did better by the choreographer than his own classically trained troupe has - and just in time for us to mourn him. Béjart died last week, at the age of 80." Read review...
"Resurrecting a 'Firebird' and Transcending a Choreographer in a Single Bound"
"The dancing began with a company premiere ("Firebird," by the late Maurice Béjart) and ended with a performance of "Revelations," Ailey's best-loved work, which featured sensationally good live musical accompaniment. This was a gala that was introduced as a special event; the Ailey dancers then fulfilled all expectations, though I suspect it is their hallmark that they perform this way at all performances and not just galas." Read review...
"Duped! Beth Gill experiments with transcendent body doubles"
"Beth Gill began her meticulous new quartet, Eleanor & Eleanor, by carefully considering the space it would inhabit: the cavernous, boxy stage of Dance Theater Workshop, where, as she noted after a recent rehearsal, the pitched angle of the audience to the stage theatricalizes everything--like it or not." Read preview...
"Rite in Progress: Yvonne Rainer Jumps Over Two Sets of Decades"
"RoS Indexical, commissioned by Performa 07 for its three-week art fest, is a double palimpsest rooted in Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, as choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Rainer focuses on the 1913 Paris premiere, during which spectators scandalized by Stravinsky's dissonances and Nijinsky's primitivism yelled their disapproval and were shushed, even punched, by partisans." Read review...
"He's not a newcomer, but dancer Clifton Brown will receive a trial by fire of sorts when the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater begins its month-long season at City Center on Wednesday. Mr. Brown, 27, will perform in nearly every work on the company's schedule, and will be featured in the season's three major premieres, including Maurice Béjart's "Firebird" and Camille A. Brown's raucous "The Groove to Nobody's Business."" Read review...
"Being an out and proud lesbian is one thing; directing a non-lesbian all female dance troupe is another. Maintaining a top-tier dance company while simultaneously engaging in substantial local community outreach activities is pretty much unheard of - unless you are the indefatigable (and really nice) Gina Gibney." Read preview...
"Naharin's piece Three at BAM was so beautiful I could almost not bear it. Simple and complex, soft and powerful, giddy and solemn, it was the kind of piece you want to linger over." Read review...
"I've followed Dunn's work for a long time, admiring his inventiveness, his intelligence, his daring, and his wit. He's a magnificent maverick...Nothing Further elegantly conveys the range of his imagination and craft." Read review...
A performance by Monica Bill Barnes puts strange thoughts into my head. Do I want to take her home and sit her on a sofa so her big eyes can follow me around and keep my life from feeling humdrum? Read review...
"Xavier Le Roy's The Rite of Spring & Yvonne Rainer's RoS Indexical"
"The stronger of the two works, Xavier Le Roy's The Rite of Spring, presented at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, is heavy on the concept and light on the execution." Read review...
"All the Rite moves: Xavier Le Roy faces the music (and sort of dances)"
"[Xavier] Le Roy, who returns to New York for the first time since 2002, offers something completely different with Le sacre du printemps, in which he studies the relationship between gesture and music." Read review...
"Choreographic Challenge: Another Dive Into the Enduring Mystery of 'Rite of Spring'"
"[Yvonne Rainer] recently returned to choreography after several decades as a filmmaker, and heading into "RoS Indexical," it was possible to hope that a confrontation of such foreign sensibilities would yield rich results. But alas, neither semiotics nor historical street cred could save her." Read review...
"Examining the Many Hues That Create Black and White"
"What is "black dance"? The question, usually asked by white dance writers, tends to be greeted by groans from black choreographers, company directors and performers. But Gesel Mason, herself a black dancer and choreographer, plunged headlong into the subject on Friday night at Joyce SoHo..." Read review...
"Naharin and Batsheva, at the Guggenheim's Works & Process Series"
"Before the event began, there were two dancers on stage with no music, going through movements that looked fluid and intensional, but in a free sort of way. That flow is achieved through a highly defined movement language, developed by Naharin and called GAGA...The result is interestingly human in an unexpected way." Read review...
"At almost exactly the same time I started "Ranting Details", I became obsessed with a certain man in the dance world known as Ohad Naharin...Explaining his work is always a challenge for me because the excitement it provokes from my body while I'm sitting in my seat is unlike any other art I've seen. At moments it transcends dance into absolute euphoria and I'm constantly in awe of his unique movement and the way he fits it to his bizarre choices of music." Read review...
"This is the mercurial, shape-shifting world of Ohad Naharin's Batsheva Dance Company. Dancers inhabit a vacillating physicality that takes them from human, to dancer, to animal, to machine, all in one phrase. It is a highly disorienting, potentially nauseating transfiguration of the body, and it is genius." Read review...
"They're introspective and sensuous, hunkering down to sway torso and pelvis as if they were so many waves in the sea, or recumbent, stretching and folding their legs like languid odalisques." Read review...
"Ohad Naharin's "Three," at the BAM Opera House through Saturday, is what people like to call a "pure movement piece." It's an annoying expression in any case, as movement can never be wiped clean of history and metaphor (and why would you want it to be?), but it's especially off when applied to Naharin's gestural idiom." Read review...
"It is a performance of a conversation between two men and two cultures, a live documentary on forms of dance and dance making. The men, and the performance itself, ask questions about the nature of performance and the role of art in 2007." Read review...
"David Neumann's "feedforward" at Dance Theater Workshop is curious about big life dramas: human triumph and downfall. Neumann takes them on by looking at micro-moments, and shows the grace of success and the agony of failure bumping up against each other in small, particular interactions and affectations, over and over, in tangled loops and knotting." Read review...
"...shamelessly...big, fat tears...a knockout performance by Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass in Barnes's Suddenly Summer Somewhere, premiered this past week at Dancespace Project. From their first appearance at the karaoke mics--barefoot and dressed nearly alike in old-style springtime coats--these two gifted performers had me firmly in their grip and never turned me loose." Read review...
"Their dance is a kind you have not seen before, that comes out of a way of working that you have not seen before, and that I now desperately want to study ...This... method...now known as GAGA, involves a seemingly semi-intuitive exploration of the physical self based on certain guiding...images...regarding movement centers in the body. If this description sounds searching and tenuous, that is because it is, and this way of working the body is that way as well." Read review...
