The collection of wonderful photographs, now online, chronicles the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from 1961 to 1994.
modern dance
Posted inBooks
A Memoir that Makes Us Love Merce Cunningham More
Cunningham is centered in the book by Marianne Preger-Simon, which approaches her subject multiple times attempting to catch him off guard or see through his professional demeanor.
Posted inArt
Isadora Duncan in Watercolor, by the Artist Who Painted Her Thousands of Times
At the Paris studio of Auguste Rodin in 1906, Siberia-born American painter Abraham Walkowitz met modern dancer Isadora Duncan.
Posted inArt
Artist Plants a Digital Dance Intervention at MoMA
Art museums and performing artists have a complicated relationship. Though to some they may seem like a natural pairing, or at least a reasonable one, there’s an inherent tension.
Posted inArt
Taking Immersive Theater on the Road with Retro Americana
Third Rail Projects has performed their visually creative pieces in the middle of lunch hour at the World Financial Center, in a former hospital in Brooklyn, and in an opera house in upstate New York, bringing modern dance to an audience who might not usually seek it. Now the New York-based performance group is going on a road trip, with a vintage Coleman pop-up camper decked out in 1970s style. Roadside Attraction is a nostalgia-tinged traveling spectacle rolling out this summer that is a tribute to long-haul family excursions.
Posted inPerformance
Happily Tangled Webs
On my way to the Joyce SoHo last Wednesday, while thinking about David Gordon’s 50th anniversary — and realizing that, while he has been making work for five decades, I would be seeing it live for the first time that night — I got to wondering: What does Gordon, renowned for resisting any sort of tidy classification, think about these tidy little landmarks called anniversaries?
Posted inPerformance
Dancing with Jack
Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson met in 2008. Both grew up in rural America, both are queer, both have created imaginary worlds. Two Alike, which premiered at The Kitchen last weekend, is their first collaboration, in which Swanson provides the setting for Ferver’s dreams and nightmares.
Posted inPerformance
Ashes to Ashes, Words to Dance
The program for Rashaun Mitchell’s Nox contains a lone explanatory note: “When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get.” The words belong to the poet Anne Carson, and they come from the back cover of her eponymous book, published in 2010. They make you wonder: Is what we’re about to see a replica of that book, in the form of a dance, as close as the artists could get? A replica of a replica?
Posted inNews
Your Chance to See One of William Wegman’s Dogs Dance
If you’ve ever wanted to see a dancing dog — and not just any dog, but one of William Wegman’s Weimaraners — you’re about to get your chance. Choreographer Karole Armitage has teamed up with a handful of visual artists, including Wegman, Will Cotton, Kalup Linzy and Aïda Ruilova, for a dance-cum-performance-art show at the Abron Arts Center titled “Werk! The Armitage Gone Variety Show.”
Posted inArt
Dancing at the Whitney
When the list of the 2012 Whitney Biennial artists was made public, it included a very interesting trio of names, probably not immediately recognizable to most of the visual arts world: choreographers Sarah Michelson and Michael Clark, and theater director/playwright Richard Maxwell. All three are extremely well known in their respective fields, but how and why are they relevant to the Biennial audience? Hyperallergic asked me to write a series of articles looking at performing arts, not performance art, in the museum context, and whether it’s an important, or completely arbitrary, shift in visual arts programming.
Posted inPerformance
On Black Dance: Shifting Movement, Words, Identities
I am watching a black man gyrate in front of me in a thong over gray briefs. A tuft of synthetic, orange hair peeks out from the front of the triangular fabric. His nearly-shaven head glistens as beads of sweat trickle down his face. His dark eyes stare intensely at us.
Posted inArt
The End of the Legacy: Merce Cunningham’s Final Performances Begin Tonight
With a final series of performances beginning tonight and continuing through New Year’s Eve at the Park Avenue Armory, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company will close, ending nearly sixty years in operation.