Comments on: Final Thoughts on The Nothing Festival With a Focus on Luciana Achugar

By: Swan Lake Samba Girl » Blog Archive » Postmodern Dance Can Be Fun!: “States and Resemblance” Near the East River Piers | Tonya Plank | Writer, Dancer and Public Interest Lawyer

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 04:10:18 +0000

[...] Well, I’m not entirely sure what to make of the piece, so I’ll describe it. The performance began in the lawn area, with Moss and Mishima running and jumping around playfully. I’d seen an earlier draft of this at the Nothing Festival at Dance Theater Workshop a few months ago, and there the men were naked. Here, they were nearly so, wearing only resplendent white dance belts, which, because of their sheen, were actually rather beautiful. [...]

By: Swan Lake Samba Girl » Blog Archive » Don’t Listen to Alastair Macaulay! Or, Rather, Do Listen to Him, But Listen To Everyone Else As Well!!! | Tonya Plank | Writer, Dancer and Public Interest Lawyer

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 21:15:18 +0000

[...] I don’t know if this is normal in the arts, but I recently attended two panel discussions that really floored me. The first was The Nothing Festival, which I blogged about earlier, and which was organized by choreographer Tere O’Connor and was supposed to deal with the creative process and the process of grant application writing. Instead, it very quickly devolved into a discussion, all choreographers both on the panel and in the audience in agreement, of how much the press basically sucks — how horrible the writers are, how they don’t know what to look for in a dance performance, how dance is totally devalued in the Times and on TV, how there are no good dance critics like (film critic) Pauline Kael, how dance criticism is awful compared to other arts criticism, etc. etc. etc. It was really actually very interesting for me as a newcomer to the dance scene, and I’m very glad I attended, and, toward the end of the four hours, we were actually beginning to get somewhere productive, but then it ended. [...]

By: Swan Lake Samba Girl » Blog Archive » “Writing (Or Scribbling Messily) in the Dark,” “The Nightingale and the Rose,” and My Sleeping Beauties | Tonya Plank | Writer, Dancer and Public Interest Lawyer

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 23:34:30 +0000

[...] Above picture is of my crazy notes, hehe. After attending a marathon post-modern dance panel discussion, about which I previously blogged, and hearing a small consensus of choreographers name Arlene Croce a good (former) critic, I’ve been flipping through her book, “Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker” (which is a lot of fun by the way — reads almost like a novel or memoir of going to the ballet practically nightly in New York for two and a half decades and makes the NYC dance scene look like THE place to be from the seventies through early nineties — which, with the likes of Barsyhnikov and Suzanne Farrell and Merce Cunningham and all, it WAS … but, hey, it still is, just with different people!) Anyway, she talks up front about her method of note-taking, by which she carries a pad and pen to the performance, then jots things down, or sometimes — more often actually — gets so carried away by the performance that she forgets to write anything down at all, then is forced to rely on memory, which didn’t always work for small details like colors of costumes, etc., which is not a good thing when on deadline. Still, she concludes minimal notetaking is best: “it is the afterimage of the dance rather than the dance itself which is the true subject of the review,” she says, and in order “[t]o let an afterimage form, one has to give the stage one’s full attention, without the distraction of notes” (pg. 6). When Apollinaire Scherr invited me to NYCB to see one of the “Romeo”’s, I noticed she did the same thing — had a small notepad and pen. I don’t think she wrote anything down though — it’s hard – you don’t want to take your eyes off of that stage! Anyway, I often forget small details like costume colors and minor props and sometimes even the exact sequence of events, so, I figured I’d try to be like a ‘real writer’ and actually jot down deets. Well, suffice it to say, it didn’t go too well — I was writing while looking at the stage, my scribbling is so sloppy I can barely read a word, some sentences are completely atop others, and some run off the page and into the open Playbill, where they’re now superimposed over pictures of dancers rehearsing, etc. Oh well, I tried… Anyway, here are my “afterimages”: [...]

By: tonya

tonya — Wed, 09 May 2007 19:45:32 +0000

Hi Gray, thanks for reading my blog!

That’s so cool you worked with Walter — he seemed like a really nice guy during the panel discussion and post-performance talk. This issue of clothes is interesting to me too; there is a lot of nudity in contemporary dance these days and sometimes I’m not always sure what to make of it…

There is a lot going on here, dance-wise, I think, though a lot of people say the dance scene was so much more exciting in the 70s and 80s, etc., and nothing much is going on now. I think there’s a lot going on, so I’m glad to know at least we dance bloggers make it look that way!

By: Gray

Gray — Wed, 09 May 2007 19:17:15 +0000

Tonya,

Thanks for this review! Aside from really appreciating your words about the clothing (and lack thereof), which is something that has always been a sticking point for me in dance in general, I also was really glad to see you mention Walter. I got to work with him on a show at St. Mark’s a few years ago with the Li Chiao-Ping dance company, and agree with you – great dancer, and more than that, really amazingly nice guy.

Between you and Doug, I’m thinking I need to move to NYC just so we can go to dance pieces together!