Dwight Rhoden’s galvanizing protest rally of a ballet takes on topical issues, while bridging popular music with arguably the most conservative form of dance.
Joyce Theater
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Drag Ballerinas Spin Gender Roles into Farce
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo satirizes the clichéd gender conventions of dance, and the world at large, in technically superb takes on classical ballet.
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Conceptual Dance Lite: Jérôme Bel’s Elemental Choreography
For more than twenty years, the French choreographer has pioneered a kind of dance that highlights the biography and particularity of the performer.
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Restaging a 1979 Dance, Designed by Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg worked with dancers?
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Dancing Out Our Inner Demons
For dancers, the body is a surrogate for concepts and a tool for arranging shapes in the air.
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Transforming the Beauty of Ballet into Something Kafkaesque
The story of a man who wakes up transformed into a hideous insect isn’t exactly the showpiece you would imagine for a lithe principal of London’s Royal Ballet, but in The Metamorphosis dancer Edward Watson takes all the refined control of each muscle and transforms his body from grace into an image of the grotesque.
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The Emotive Musculature of Resurrection
Stephen Petronio has been a creative force in the dance world for nearly 30 years. The most compelling aspect of Petronio’s career, and most intriguing for me, is his desire to collaborate, inviting composers, musicians, and visual artists to take on an idea and expand it within and beyond the dance. For his current season at the Joyce, Petronio offers “Like Lazarus Did,” and with it heavy ideas of reincarnation and resurrection.
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Men Made of Marble
Every now and then, if lucky, you’ll encounter a mode of performance or an artwork that simultaneously requires and supplies a kind of attention that you didn’t even know existed. Sitting in an otherworldly, attentive, stupor, I had that experience watching marble white humans covered in a thin layer of dust on a stage that seemed to be both as empty as nothing at all and, at the same time, as full as a night sky.
As Sankai Juku begins their recent piece, TOBARI, everything melts into darkness and a lone human form materializes — bald, half-naked, monochrome; the dust looks like it’s marble or bone, maybe a thin layer of atomic ash, and it covers the body, which, for a while, is motionless; a quiet, lunar presence in a dark room.
