So now Baryshnikov and supermodel Kate Moss are making a ballet movie together. I know — all of these ballet movies! Moss is reportedly taking ballet lessons in preparation. The film is by Michael Clarke and shooting will begin in July in Marseilles. It’s not clear how widely the film is to be distributed but it’s to premiere at a fundraiser in England and later will be shown in galleries as a work of art.

Interesting: according to New York Magazine via British Vogue, Moss shouldn’t have too hard a time learning to dance on pointe since toe shoes aren’t that different from 6-inch heels. Toe shoes even include padding. What do we think about that one?

Above image from Leibovitz gallery on PBS.org.

In honor of his 62nd birthday (which occurred last week), the British website The Arts Desk is posting a two-part series of interviews that Daily Telegraph writer Ismene Brown conducted with Mikhail Baryshnikov over the years, covering everything from his youth and Kirov training, to his defection, to his relationship with Nureyev and some of his ballerina partners (including Gelsey Kirkland).

Here is the first part. They’ve got a couple of old videos there too — do check it out!

Above photo taken from the article.

The luckiest dancers in the world, I swear, are those in Alvin Ailey. That company seems to tour more cities in more countries every year than any other performing arts troupe. It’s like, become a dancer and see the world! Anyway, they began their current U.S.-wide tour last night in Washington DC, where the Vice President and Dr. Biden hosted a celebration in their honor. Vice Pres Biden apparently admitted he was never a fan of ballet until he and his wife witnessed Mikhail Baryshnikov years ago. Read more at Sister to Sister Magazine.  And go here for AAADT’s tour schedule.

Photo of Judith Jamison’s Divining by Nan Melville.

Annie Liebovitz’s latest Louis Vuitton ad features the photog herself along with her longtime friend, Mikhail Baryshnikov. I love how his pants legs are rolled up and his well-worked feet are visible — I love how he’s not really making a dancerly pose, yet you can still tell. And I love how young he looks!

Visit the NYTimes blog to see an early video of their working together (a fuller one will apparently be available February 11th).

I love it — crossover between my passion and favorite pastime! Derek Jeter was just named New Yorker of the year by the New York Daily News, who said:

“Throughout Jeter has conducted himself with grace, balletic grace in movement, a gentleman’s grace in life.”

And I recently found this on ebay.

(Derek Jeter photo taken from here.)

Last night In-I, the collaboration between French actress Juliette Binoche and British dancer / choreographer Akram Khan, opened at BAM, and of course I was there. She’s one of my favorite actresses and I’d been wanting to see this since it premiered at Sadlers Wells in London a year ago. New York is the last stop on their tour.

I loved it, despite its imperfections (and I largely agree with Judith Mackrell’s early review). But I loved it, partly because I just love her period, and partly because, for me, it ended up creating a new respect for both interpretive art forms, dance and acting.

This collaboration (Binoche has virtually no dance training and Khan no acting) made me remember back when, what seems like light years ago now, Baryshnikov and Mark Morris founded their company, White Oak Dance Project. For opening night they were collaborating with Yo-Yo Ma and I really wanted to go. I tried to use this as a selling point in convincing my friend, who loved classical music, to go with me. I’ve always had this stupid habit of stating the over-obvious and, in elaborating, I said to her, “Baryshnikov will be dancing and Yo-Yo Ma will be playing the cello.” She burst out laughing. “Well I hope it’s not the other way around!” she said. Then we got to joking around about how entertaining it would be if Yo-Yo Ma danced and Baryshnikov played the cello. I said I’d actually really like to see that. She said she wouldn’t — it may be a fun experiment for them to do in a garage or something, but to put before an audience?…

I still wonder how that would come off — Baryshnikov bending over a cello and Ma jumping around a stage.

Anyway, I thought this collaboration (hard to know what to call it; it was mostly dance with some spoken word –the two talk to each other onstage and address the audience in monologues, so maybe it’s “dance-theater”) was more than an experiment in two artists from different worlds trying on each others’ shoes. It had a storyline; it was about the life of a relationship — from youthful fantasizing evolving into mature passion, getting sick of each others’ bad habits (there’s a very funny scene where he keeps leaving the toilet seat down and getting it all wet when he pees and she wants to kill him over it), fighting, misunderstanding, eventually accepting and even learning to delight in the difficulty of it all, as part of life. I have to say I understood the through-line of the drama through her. She gave the piece its emotional core.

He is a brilliant dancer and I loved watching him move. It was apparent she has very little dance training — she doesn’t have the expansiveness and breadth in her movement or the precision and sharpness of a lifelong professional dancer — but I love her for trying, because I think it shows how blasted hard dance is no matter how hard you work at it (and you can tell she worked very very hard). And I love that she was not a very skilled dancer, the piece was mainly dance, and still so much of what I understood and got out of it was due to her performance.

The best parts I thought were where each performer was in his / her own element. Judith Mackrell (link above) likes the beginning, where Binoche’s character is sitting in a movie theater and sees Khan, he dances about and she becomes infatuated with him. That scene works well because she’s sitting and watching him, while telling the audience how she feels about him, and he’s moving. There’s another scene later on – -my favorite in the whole thing — where they’ve just gotten into a vicious fight. She stomps off behind the back screen and he begins this really riveting solo where he writhes on the ground, gets up and contorts his body, flings arms, head and torso every which way in utter emotional agony, then does a deep back arch, literally bending over backward to please her. About halfway through the solo she walks back out onstage and sees him. As she approaches him, her expression changes; she slowly realizes how much their fight has tormented him and she feels remorse. You can see all that on her face alone. His movement and her facial expression compellingly conveyed each character’s inner turmoil.

There’s another part where he delivers a monologue to the audience. He just stands at the edge of the stage and talks to us, telling us about a youthful romance he had in which he fell in love with a girl who was not the same religion as he. He tells his priest and the priest withdraws a huge knife and holds it against his throat, telling him having the girl means his soul will die and asking him if that’s what he wants. Khan spoke too fast and sometimes jumbled his lines but at one point he started punching the air with his right fist when he spoke in the voice of the priest, and he started pointing shakily toward the audience with his other hand when he talked in what I felt was the inner voice of his boyhood self. Sometimes these motions were back to back — the fist violently but with a dancer’s control punching the air, then the trembling index finger. Once he kind of got into a groove with it, it was really mesmerizing — especially when combined with his extreme sideways leans when confronted with the imaginary knife at the neck. He was expressing himself far better with his arms and neck than with his words and I kind of wished at that point, he would just have had a voice-over do all of his spoken word so that he could focus on using his body to express himself.

Conversely, I kind of wished for her that she didn’t have so much movement so she could have focused on her words and her facial expressions and wordless gestures (actors obviously do use their bodies as instruments of expression, but it’s to create subtext — little ticks that a normal person would do that show that person’s character; totally different from dance). You can tell how hard she worked if you’ve tried to learn dance as an adult. She had several very difficult things — a couple of high lifts, fast travelling chaine turns. You can see how she worked to get those turns right — her spotting was very good and she held her body steady and balanced with her footing while still trying to get sufficient speed. The fact that she was still able to chaine toward him, into him, with meaning, with intention (she often laughed, sometimes playfully, sometimes tauntingly) while focusing on getting difficult movement right was really amazing. But if she didn’t have those crazy spins to contend with in the first place, how much more depth she could have conveyed. And ditto for a lift, where he sits her atop his shoulder and walks along the back screen. She stretches out her arms and closes her eyes and traces the screen with her shoulders and hands, a look of ecstasy crossing her lips. But she has to worry about maintaining position atop his small shoulder, of tightening her muscles so she can hold herself up there, limiting, I felt, how far she could go emotionally.

Anyway, I could think of more things to say but I think I should stop, at least for now — particularly since it’s now evening and my allotted time for me to work on my novel. Suffice it to say, this collaboration really made me think how, similarities aside, fundamentally different the two art forms are, and made me respect each more. I do think dancers could highly benefit from more acting classes because I think for many theater-goers, that’s ultimately what moves them — body movement alone doesn’t always make complete sense. But more on this later…

In-I continues at BAM through September 20th.

Photos above by Jack Vartoogian.

I think this is pretty funny. Fall For Dance tickets go on sale this Sunday, September 13th, at 11:00 a.m. In the past crowds have been known to line up beginning at 4 a.m. (this festival is popular), and the line’s been known to wend its way practically all around midtown. Well, this year, festival participant Monica Bill Barnes (above, on the left), a modern / experimental dancer and choreographer, is going to entertain the queued-up crowd from 10-11 Sunday morn. She and her dancers can be rather amusing.

These pics are from a site-specific performance of hers I saw last summer downtown and wrote about here.

Also, during the festival there will be three free, open-to-the-public talks in City Center’s Studio 5 (which is upstairs, I think on the 5th floor). All three talks will be about the legacy of the Ballets Russes (in honor of their centenary this year).

The first, on September 23rd at 6:30 p.m. will be a discussion with three original members of the legendary troupe: Frederic Franklin, Raven Wilkinson and Eleanor D’Antuono and will be moderated by Robert Greskovic, author and dance critic for the Wall Street Journal.

The second, on Sept. 25th, same time, will be about how BR’s collaborations with clothes designers, painters, and musicians of the day created lasting change for the dance world. Panelists include Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky, Juliet Bellow and Simon Morrison and the moderator is Lynn Garafola, a dance historian at Barnard.

The third, on October 3rd, same time, will be about BR’s influence on today’s choreography. Panelists are choreographers Nicholas Leichter, Robert Johnson, Mark Dendy, and Virginia Johnson and the moderator is Wendy Perron, the editor-in-chief of Dance Magazine.

Speaking of Ballets Russes, one final reminder: if you haven’t yet seen the fantastic exhibit at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center, you only have until September 12th to do so. They’ve got videos of Baryshnikov dancing Balanchine’s Prodigal Son, of Anna Pavlova, of Fokine’s Les Sylphides, of Branislava Nijinska’s Les Noces, of original BR choreographer Leonid Massine instructing Joffrey dancers on reconstructing his Parade, they’ve got original costumes and poster designs by Picasso, letters and diary entries by Diaghlev, etc. etc. etc. Definitely worth seeing.

The LA Times’s Lewis Segal gives Baryshnikov — and Benjamin Millepied — a very favorable review.

Photo of Baryshnikov and Ana Laguna from LA Times.

Mikhail Baryshnikov and Ana Laguna are in Santa Monica where they’re beginning a U.S. tour. Program includes choreography by Mats Ek (Laguna’s husband), Alexei Ratmansky, and Benjamin Millepied’s Years Later, which consists of a solo for Barysh juxtaposed with movie clips of his younger self dancing. Critics say it “should bring a new respect to middle-age dance performances.”

I’m excited to see the Millepied as well as the Ek piece. Here are some clips from another of Ek’s dances for the pair. Baryshnikov still looks like Baryshnikov — the way he moved in White Nights, the way he danced Tharp’s Push Comes to Shove…

(top photo from Hawaiitheater.com)

My friend Deborah just alerted me to this horrible news. One of the world’s great pioneer choreographers has just died (last night; the news was released this morning). We all knew this was coming at some point; he was 90 (and still choreographing, often from his bed). But I think many thought he was one of those who’d make it to 100 or past. This on the heels of news of Pina Bausch is devastating to the dance world. So, his recent program at BAM is his last…

Cunningham’s work was groundbreaking in its use of technology, its questioning whether dance needs music (he collaborated with music pioneer John Cage and his works were often danced to silence or to sound that the dancers heard for the first time during the first performance), its questioning of what “performance” is (he would often use chance encounters), and in creating an original (and sometimes controversial) movement language.

But others, like NY Times chief critic Alastair Macaulay, knew his work much better than I (Macaulay was a great admirer of Cunningham, as was Mikhail Baryshnikov), so I’ll await his full Times obituary.

How awful.

Above image taken from Great Dance.

(photo of Gonzalo Garcia by Chris Hardy, taken from the NYSun)

Those are my friend, Judy’s terms in the title, by the way! Friday night at New York City Ballet was one of the most exciting in recent memory. The dancers were all excellent, the ballets fun, the audience pumped (okay, a little over-pumped in places!) It was just one of those nights to remember. It was an all-Robbins program, consisting of four of his most diverse, but liveliest dances: Glass Pieces, The Cage, Other Dances, and The Concert.

First, of all, Wendy Whelan appears to be out with a minor injury, so it was announced before curtain rose that Janie Taylor would be dancing the lead in The Cage. If anyone heard some psycho girl shout “Yay!!!” — sorry. Didn’t mean for it to echo like that…

Glass Pieces is always enjoyable with that rhythmic music, especially in the first and last sections with the intense strings and pulsating drums respectively, the dancers in the first walking across stage as “normal people,” every once in a while a “dancer” appearing and turning and /or jumping ‘dancer-like’ across stage — the most visible of whom is Tyler Angle. I can watch this ballet endless times just to see him in that first section. He’s beautiful in that golden unitard, and always breathtaking no matter what he’s doing.

(headshot of Tyler Angle, by Paul Kolnik, from NYCB site; all headshots by Kolnik, from NYCB)

The second, adagio section, was danced by Maria Kowroski and Philip Neal. Maria nailed this section like I’ve never seen anyone do before. Her body is of course so long and thin and she’s got such spidery limbs, she can really make wicked lines. I don’t know what the dance means, but every form she made was so pronounced and so full of intent, she was just mesmerizing.

(Maria Kowroski and Philip Neal in Glass Pieces, photo by Paul Kolnik, taken from Roberta on the Arts)

Then, Janie’s Cage! Sometimes you just know that no matter who’s done the role in the past — Tanaquil Le Clercq — whoever — this is just the best; no one’s ever going to outdo that and no one no how has done better before. That’s how I felt Friday night watching Janie. It’s like this role was made for her, even though literally it wasn’t. It’s like she’s very mindful of how each shape she’s making is going to look from every vantage point in the house. You can tell how much she worked at this and thought about it. Maybe it comes from being a visual artist as well (she’s a cartoonist and a costume designer).

Anyway, The Cage is the heartwarming (not) story of a colony of female ants – or some kind of insect — who, like black widows, kill their male counterparts, after mating. (Where did Robbins get the idea? Ballet’s from 1951. Hmmm.) Janie was absolute wicked splendid perfection; she just looked like a spidery-limbed little arachnid as her tiny waify body descended on poor big muscly Sebastien, digging her tentacles into his sides, slapping and clawing him all about. And the way she’d flick her wrists and make those insect-like shapes with her hands at such speed and with such perfect definition, it looked like she was metamorphosing into some creaturely other right before your eyes. It was really rather terrifying.

At one point — either she’s on top of him or him on her, I think it’s the former since she’s killing him — their bodies each curve out from the other to make this big hollow O shape, and it looks like one of those human limb-eating plants (what’s the name?…) Crazy beautifully creepy! Of course the drama is that Janie’s the “novice” here and she doesn’t want to eat this man because she kind of falls for him, but she has to for group acceptance. The way she shows that, wanting to reject the rites, by caving in from her center, collapsing into herself, then rolling herself into a ball and letting the male bug hold her — is stunning as well.

Teresa Reichlin is the ideal Madame of the colony, or whatever you want to call her. Her long legs just beat the air on those battemants, like she is the queen and you don’t question her. I can’t find many pictures, but here is Wendy Whelan talking about the ballet, with some clips of it.

(photo of Wendy Whelan and Sebastien Marcovici, by Paul Kolnik, from Roberta on the Arts)

Then was Other Dances, starring (really, a very apt word) Tiler Peck and Gonzalo Garcia. This is a gorgeous ballet, full of sweetness and romance and virtuosic dancing with high leaps and jumps and spins and all, originally made for Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova. I can’t imagine this one being done better either. Both dancers have such endearing stage presences. Tiler Peck is really growing on me — her obvious love for the music, her playful phrasing, her sweetness and freshness and innocent charm. She was beautiful on those overhead lifts where she lay on her side, her arm behind her head, looking down at him. And Gonzalo’s in love with his audience, and you can tell. He says in this article that he’s naturally shy, but he’s also a natural performer. As I said on Twitter, at the beginning of his second solo, two girls screamed “I love you!” Very very unusual for NYCB! “What is he, a rock star?” Judy asked me. Apparently. Gonzalo is turning NYCB into ABT What is it about these Spanish men?…

The pair in another ballet, photo by Paul Kolnik, from Dancing Perfectly Free)

Tiler and Gonzalo work very well together. There was some weirdness between him and Ana Sophia Scheller, but these two are a very good partnership. I think they’re friends too — I see them together on the street sometimes. They danced the virtuosic leads in Donizetti Variations two days earlier and were equally stellar. I’m told he had a big fan base in San Francisco, where he came from. Well, he’s won me over. Ariel, who came with me on Donizetti day (and who comes with me to NYCB rather frequently), took one look at the program and said, “Wow, they have Gonzalo dancing a lot these days.” I said, “Yeah, particularly when I happen to have tickets. Funny that.”

And the evening ended with the comical The Concert, which Judy loved, as I knew she would. It’s cute and funny and no one does up the humor like Sterling Hyltin as the sweetly goofy music lover who can’t dance her way out of a paper bag, and Andrew Veyette and Gwyneth Muller as the cutely warring husband and wife. Andrew even took curtain calls with his ‘obnoxious husband’s’ pipe gripped firmly between his teeth.

The other highlight of the week to me was Balanchine’s Stravinsky Violin Concerto, danced spectacularly by Robert Fairchild, who I’m positive I will never ever tire of seeing. He’s got to be one of the hardest working young men in ballet these days and it really shows. He’s becoming a real David Hallberg. His movements are so precise and everything is so well-articulated. He bends from the waist more than anyone else (that I can see) and that gives him so much breadth and expansiveness. And he’s always making some sort of statement, even in abstract ballets, particularly in abstract ballets.

I love this Stravinsky choreography as well. There are so many stand-out moments, you just can’t mention them all. I love the part where the man of the first couple (here, the aforesaid Robert the spectacular) stands over the ballerina and turns her, or rolls her. She bends underneath him so he looks like her shadow. If this is the same ballet, I felt like Robert leaned in closer to her before and held his arms around her waist, held her more closely, and almost put his head on her back, and it looked so romantic, so tender and loving. It just melted me. He didn’t do that either night I saw him dance this this week. He still turned (or rolled her — don’t know what to call it) brilliantly, but I feel like someone told him not to lean in and make it tender like that. But I want him to do that again! Unless it’s another ballet I’m thinking of … is it? Does anyone know what I’m talking about??

I also love the rather acrobatic choreography for the second couple — first night I saw it danced by Maria Kowroski and Sebastien Marcovici, second night by Amar Ramasar and Kaitlyn Gilliland (filling in — and doing very well — for Wendy Whelan and Albert Evans). I love how she does backbends and handstands over and around him and he just looks at her with amazement, and follows.

Finally, I really liked Liebslieder Walzer earlier this week, which I wrote shortly about here. I know some think it’s slow, and it wasn’t very popular when Balanchine first showed it in 1960, but I really prefer the choreography here to that in his more popular Vienna Waltzes, which is mainly straight ballroom. The choreography is more complex here, and revealing of character. One man (the night I saw it, it was Jared Angle –who looked sharper and more gentlemanly than ever to me) circles around his lady and she circles the opposite way on the inside of him. It’s a lovely effect and I think it shows they are going in opposite directions, not meeting mentally. The couple danced by Sebastien and Janie seemed the most romantic, at one point approaching one another while making expansive circles with their arms as they entered into an embrace. I do agree with Sir Alastair, though, that the couples need to work on their differentiation from one another in order to amp up the drama. It’s choreographically beautiful though and I hope they keep doing it in future seasons – -maybe not with the equally slow and somber Les Noces though!

(By the way, that program — Liebeslieder and Noces – program 8 — is showing twice more this week and I found it not really to be a program for newcomers to ballet. I brought my friend, Jonathan (who I haven’t seen since law school, don’t want to say how many years ago now ) and if he wasn’t an opera fan who could latch onto the chorals (which feature heavily in both dances on the program), I fear he might have been bored. I think you have to really be into the intricacies of choreography to appreciate it. If you’re new to ballet, or bringing someone new, see Programs 9 and 10 this week — both containing more dramatic, lively dances.)

(photo of Robert Fairchild and Wendy Whelan in Opus 19 / The Dreamer by Henry Leutwyler taken from High 5.)

I spent all of Saturday at New York City Ballet, watching both matinee and evening performances like the obsessive I am Highlight of the daytime performance was Jerome Robbins’s 1979 ballet, Opus 19 / The Dreamer in which Robert Fairchild and Janie Taylor made their NYC debuts in the lead roles. This is only my second time seeing this ballet — the first was a season or two ago when the main parts were danced by Gonzalo Garcia and Wendy Whelan. (Robbins created the ballet on Baryshnikov and Patricia McBride). My research has revealed that critics don’t consider this to be a major Robbins ballet; Arlene Croce seems not to have written a word about it. Audiences seem to adore it though, me included.

Funny but the first time I saw it, I thought the main male character was a “dreamer” in the sense of being an idealist. Wendy seemed to represent Gonzalo’s ideal. And there often seems to be a kind of charmingly airy, carefree, “head in the clouds” quality to Gonzalo’s dance persona.

Robert was more solid and sharp and weighty than Gonzalo. In his beginning solo, he’d slice through the air with his arms and legs, stretch an arm out, hand bent up, as if to be pushing out against something, or stopping something from getting too close to him. What that something is isn’t entirely clear. It seemed more like he was a literal dreamer, someone lost in a dream that was neither entirely pleasant nor unpleasant, something he kind of wanted to escape from but was drawn to as well. And Janie — I love her! — was all tantalizing, bewitching, taunting little mischief-maker haunting his subconscious, not leaving his psyche a moment’s peace. Whenever she was onstage, she completely captivated — both him and us. Even when she’d collapse in his arms, he’d struggle to straighten her up again. He’d lovingly wrap his arms around her; she’d be out of them in a split second. It was very different from the way Wendy danced, if I remember correctly. I wonder how Patricia McBride did it.

I read a review of a dancer who performed the male lead in the 80s. The writer — Jack Anderson — said the dancer — Jeffrey Edwards — looked like a thinker, very introspective. I always love watching Robert — I think he is one of the most fascinating movers around. I’m not sure if what I saw here was introspection or more like inner turmoil. He was definitely lost in himself — he doesn’t even seem to notice all the lavender-clothed dancers flitting about him, didn’t seem to notice anyone until Janie came darting by and commanded his attention. I guess it seemed more like he was lost in his own angst, haunted by his dreams, than lost in his thoughts or his art. But it would be hard, I’d think, to embody introspection.

They don’t seem to be performing this ballet a lot, but I’d love to see Tyler Angle dance the part as well.

Also during the day was Chaconne, which I’m growing to love more and more — particularly the first pas de deux where the man lifts the ballerina and she has her arms out to the sides and does these large, sweeping steps forward, every few beats lightly tickling the floor with one toe shoe, and it looks like she is flying — and Vienna Waltzes, which, probably ridiculously for me since I’m a ballroom dancer, honestly just kind of bores me. The choreography’s not very intricate or compelling (odd for Balanchine) — it’s mostly straight-forward waltzing, which I can only watch for so long. There’s a middle section composed of high-energy allegro ballet which was danced very theatrically by Yvonne Borree and Benjamin Millepied. That section seriously kept me from falling asleep.

Highlights from the evening program were Peter Martins’s Hallelujah Junction, Joaquin De Luz in Donizetti Variations, and Sebastien Marcovici’s debut as Prince Siegfried in Balanchine’s Swan Lake. I hadn’t seen this cast of Hallelujah before — it was Sterling Hyltin, Gonzalo Garcia, and Daniel Ulbricht. This cast wasn’t so dramatic, so romantic, so intent on telling a little story, as other I saw (Marcovici, Taylor, Veyette), but seemed more focused on simply making the music visual — and they did so to fascinating effect. I greatly enjoyed just sitting back and watching all that brilliantly fast-paced, razor-sharp movement — Gonzalo with his sexy impish bouyancy (he’s not really a small man but somehow he seems like he’s always airborne; I think he’d make a great Sleeping Beauty Bluebird), Sterling with her Russian ballerina-high extensions that she does with incredible speed, and Daniel for his intense precision. This is the best I think I’ve ever liked Daniel Ulbrich before. He didn’t just jump inhumanly high; he really nailed very difficult-looking, intricate footwork and he did so with such sharpness and tautness. If he’d only be given more than just jumping guys parts, he can show that he can actually dance extremely well.

Sebastien danced Siegfried with great passion, expectedly. Balanchine really eviscerated the man’s part in his version of the ballet but Sebastien went as far as he possibly could with it. At one point, one of the corps swans in the back row fell and of course the audience had to go “ooooooohhhhhhh,” but he didn’t let it faze him as his Siegfried searched desperately among the swans for his beloved Odette. He had a minor flub on one of the many traveling turn jump thingys but no big deal. It was heartbreaking when Wendy bourreed back away from him and he reached out to her like she was taking his life with him as she went. Also, I love the black and white plastic swans swimming in the little stream at the beginning and end, but the people working them should just make sure the white swan appears at the right time! One time Wendy wasn’t fully into the wings yet when her swan form began sailing across the stage and Charles Askegard’s Prince Sig didn’t know where to run — the swan or Wendy. This time it was a little late and Sebastien kind of had to go searching upstream for her

Balanchine’s Donizetti Variations was danced brilliantly by Joaquin De Luz and Megan Fairchild. But what I really love about Joaquin isn’t his bravura dancing but his dramatic abilities — how he interacts with the other dancers. Even when dancing a storyless ballet, he’ll look at the others as they do their thing, shoot them a cocky grin — or a genuine smile — and do his thing, his steps a clever or comical response to theirs.

Also on this program was the newish ballet by Melissa Barak, A Simple Symphony – -my second viewing of that. She does borrow from Balanchine, but her choreography also has its own wit, which you notice on multiple viewings. Like Balanchine, the drama is in the actual choreography — every little flex or softening of the wrist meaning something. At one point, the ensemble of ballerinas all turn their hands and flex their wrists, and it looks like they’re cutely shrugging their shoulders. It’s such a pretty ballet with such mellifluous music though, sometimes you don’t want to focus on the choreography; you just want to sit back and enjoy the loveliness of it all.

(Mikhail Baryshnikov, Merce Cunningham, and photographer Mark Seliger at a celebration last year for Baryshnikov’s series of photographs, Merce My Way, photo taken from here)

So, this weekend marked choreographer Merce Cunningham’s 90th birthday, with celebrations and performances of his latest work — Nearly Ninety– at BAM. Unfortunately I was unable to go — and Apollinaire reminds me just how much I missed — but I decided to compile a list of some reviews since this was such a momentous occasion (many consider Cunningham to be the greatest living choreographer, or the greatest living American choreographer; some consider him to be the last left of the greats):

Macaulay goes even farther and calls Cunningham “the greatest living artist since the death of Samuel Beckett”;

Tobi Tobias hails the choreographer, but critiques Nearly Ninety as well as the decision to let famed dancer Holley Farmer go;

Leigh Witchel describes Nearly Ninety as “dreamlike” in the NY Post;

Blogger Evan Namerow of Dancing Perfectly Free talks about the role of chance operations in NN;

Aynsley Vandenbrouke says NN is Merce’s “ode to his dancers”;

Jordan Hruska calls NN “Bionic Theater” in the Times Magazine’s blog;

New York Magazine’s Daily Intel blog blurbs mainly on the wheelchair-bound curtain call, etc.;

WWDLifestyle has a short list of some celebs who attended the post-performance party on Thursday night;

and here’s a YouTube performance clip from ArtRavels;

And, here are a couple of pre-performance overviews, from NYTimes and NY Magazine.

Apparently, NN will now travel to Madrid.

UPDATE: Also, here is Apollinaire Scherr’s review in the Financial Times. (I’m very happy to see, by the way, that she is now the dance critic for FT!) And here are more of her thoughts on the program and the Cunningham dancers on her Foot in Mouth blog.

And Eva Yaa Asantewaa in Dance Magazine.

Please let me know if I missed anyone.

…For their May 11th “ballroom” showcase at the Danny Kaye Playhouse. I put ballroom in parenthesis because, though the studio specializes in Latin / Ballroom instruction (and is the studio where I took lessons with Pasha), it seems that they are really expanding, at least for their biannual showcases, which used to be student-oriented and are increasingly centering on pro performances — and pros of all kinds, not just ballroom.

The May 11th show will feature, in addition to Pasha and Anya (!); David Parsons Dance Company performing Caught (regular readers of this blog know how I feel about that dance ); Sabra Johnson, Travis Wall and Twitch from So You Think You Can Dance; the Mark Stuart Eckstein Dance Company (which I don’t know of); choreographer Tricia Brouke’s OtherShore; opera star Aprile Millo; and for ballroom, the EXCELLENT Eugene Katsevman and Maria Manusova, top American Smooth contenders J.T. Thomas and Tomas Mielnicki, and (the very good, very sexy) former Latin junior champs Manuel Favilla and Karolina Paliwoda.

Expected guest attendees include Baryshnikov (!), Desmond Richardson (!), Edie Falco, Susan Sarandon, Cynthia Nixon, Mickey Rourke, Barbara Walters, Antonio Banderas, Harvey Keitel, John Turturro, and more — including judges and choreographers from SYTYCD (which DTS studio owners Tony Meredith and Melanie LaPatin choreograph for as well).

I’m happily stunned that my ballroom studio has become kind of this major outlet for popular concert dance in the city!

There’s also an after-party at the studio, as well as a pre-show reception at the Danny Kaye Playhouse for Angel on a Leash, which the program is benefitting. Angel on a Leash sponsors rehabilitative dogs (for people with seeing, hearing disabilities, etc.)  Go here for more info.

Last night at Barnes & Noble, Lincoln Square, Mikhail Baryshnikov talked briefly with New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella about his new book of photos of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Merce My Way. (I love the title, by the way).

The talk was brief (about half an hour) but pretty good. But, honestly, I had a very hard time getting over my anger at Barnes & Noble. I arrived early in order to get a good seat up front, knowing (hoping at least) it would be crowded. But on my way in, I was stopped by a B&N employee. She said they were giving “preference” to people who purchased his book, which cost $36. She pointed me to the cash register, set up, conveniently, right next to the entrance.

I was so mad. There was such a crowd already, it was pretty clear “preference” meant that unless you were buying a book, you weren’t getting in. And in this economy, $40 is a lot to spend when you’re not expecting it. Honestly, I found it a really sleazy, unfair corporate practice to take advantage of his fame like that to sell books. A lot of people must have come from a ways away to see him, and you’re not really going to walk away if you’ve traveled. People were standing around looking like they didn’t know what to do, hesitantly withdrawing their wallets and picking up a book. “We’re a couple, can we get in on one book?” I heard someone ask the people at the door.

I mean, this was advertised as a regular talk / author reading event, which are always free. Nothing in the adverts (at least the ones I saw) said anything about having to purchase a book. As Ron Hogan (of the pub / book blogs Galley Cat and Beatrice) tweeted me (and damn, was I a mad tweeter last night), “seriously. if bookstores want to pull that crap, let them charge $40 IN ADVANCE and include the book w/admission.”

Just as I was getting mad about missing Bill T. Jones (who was giving a talk downtown) for this b.s., I saw my friend Monica Wellington (who I met through Philip). They’d agreed to let her buy the Joan Acocella book instead, which was less expensive. She told them at the door we were together, so they let me in. Thank you thank you, Monica!!

Anyway, the talk was pretty good, albeit short (about half an hour). I’d never heard him speak before, other than giving a brief sound byte on a pre-recorded interview. He is, as expected, charming and smart, though he talks very slowly, thinks hard about his words as if he’s always too far ahead of himself, struggles with English, and digresses frequently. None of which were a big deal, and his digressions often led to entertaining little tidbits.

Continue reading ‘BARYSHNIKOV TALK GOOD BUT I AM PISSED AT BARNES & NOBLE’

Please excuse the blurry photo; I took it on the escalator last night at Barnes and Noble, where I went after Paul Taylor (review soon!) Thankfully I decided to visit the bookstore; I hadn’t known about this, even though I’m on B&N’s events mailing list…

So, this Tuesday, March 10th, Joan Acocella (New Yorker dance critic) will be in conversation with Mikhail Baryshnikov at Barnes & Noble, Lincoln Square (66th and Broadway) to discuss Baryshnikov’s new book of photos of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Merce My Way.

But same night same time, Bill T. Jones is giving a talk at Skirball. Now what?

(image from PBS)

Don’t miss — don’t fail to record so you have it forever — the Jerome Robbins documentary on PBS this Wednesday evening, February 18th at 9pm EST. It’s long — 2hours — and very extensive; includes discussion and excerpts of nearly all of his ballets and Broadway shows. There are interviews with many many people — Baryshnikov, Chita Rivera, Rita Moreno, Peter Martins, Violette Verdy (a former ballerina), Suzanne Farrell, Stephen Sondheim (who is not at all what I expected!), Jacques D’Amboise (who is quite the character!) writers Deborah Jowitt and Robert Gottlieb (the only two critics whose faces I’d never seen), and more — can’t even think of everyone who spoke. And there’s footage of interviews with Robbins himself both recently and further in the past.

He and others talk about his inspiration for and meaning of much of his work — The Cage, Fancy Free (one of my favorites, which was based on a Paul Cadmus painting, which I hadn’t known), Interplay, Dances at a Gathering, Glass Pieces, NY Export Opus Jazz, Afternoon of a Faun, West Side Story, Gyspy, the wonderful Fiddler on the Roof (Broadway) and Les Noces (a rather haunting ballet about a Russian wedding based on Fiddler, which I guess is kind of obvious, now that I know), Goldberg Variations, Watermill (lots of interviewees defending this pretty controversial work!), Suite of Dances, etc. etc. etc.

There’s brilliant footage of Tanaquil Le Clercq and Jacques D’Amboise dancing Afternoon of a Faun (and please tell me if you’ve ever seen anyone better than those two in those roles!), of Robbins himself dancing Fancy Free, of Barysh also dancing FF, Dances at a Gathering, and Other Dances (with Natalia Makarova), of Robbins and Balanchine dancing in a piece Robbins choreographed for the Stravinsky Festival, etc. etc. — there’s so much, I can’t remember it all, but I think they’ve got excepts of just about everything.

There’s also coverage of major events in his life — so upsetting when his ex-fiance talks about discovering one evening that he was in love with Montgomery Clift and was gay and trying hard to marry and be “normal”; his excruciatingly difficult decision that would forever haunt him to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee; his visits to Eastern Europe that resulted in the making of one of his masterpieces — Fiddler; the quite nasty things he did to a Gypsy actress who couldn’t remember some important actions in the play…

And dancers and actors talk about how Robbins rehearsed them, which I found extremely interesting. An actor from West Side Story says he always made people do their own character sketches, which they’d have to present to him — which I love! He was a hardass to put it mildly, but only in a certain respect. He worked the dancers hard mentally (similar to one of his tutors, Antony Tudor), but when it came to the physicalities of the dance, he’d ease up considerably, ask dancers why they were working so hard — the opposite of Balanchine. At then end, Peter Martins remarks that it was mentally challenging to work with Robbins but physically relatively easy; it was the complete opposite with Balanchine.

This is honestly one of the best PBS specials on dance that I’ve ever seen. It does get slow in some points — especially early on when there are all these people talking and you can’t read the subtitles quickly enough to figure out who everyone is — and Robbins was so prolific that the film moves quite quickly and sometimes you can’t figure out which dance the interviewee is even talking about. So, I’d highly recommend taping it so you can watch it again and again. Believe me, you’ll want to. Go here to check local listings. (Type in “Jerome  Robbins: Something to Dance About”).

Thursday night, Cedar Lake Dance had their winter season opening. As usual, they had a big celebration, serving free champagne and wine and inviting all the bloggers, critics, and choreographers. Philip, Taylor and I enjoyed standing around during intermission sipping champagne and people-watching; it was kind of a who’s who in the dance world, the most famous of the ‘who’s’ probably being Baryshnikov, who was looking rather tiny, but snazzy in a beret.

I went a little early to take in some of the Chelsea arts scene, which was extremely happening. Practically every gallery from 24th through 26th streets, 10th-11th Avenues, was having an opening. Roslyn Sulcas from the New York Times apparently had the same idea as me! Anyway, I had more than a few glasses of (free) wine by the time I got to Cedar Lake, mid-way down 26th Street…

They had three dances, two of which were premieres. One, memory/measure, was by Italian choreographer Luca Veggetti. The stage was minimalist, consisting only of a white mat. Two male and two female dancers took turns walking around its perimeter as the others danced duets in the middle. The soundtrack consisted of industrial sounds (a helicopter, clanking, etc.) and a voice-over telling a story. Unfortunately because I was so taken with the movement — complicated, emotionally intense partnering; stunning, difficult-looking deep plies on pointe by Acacia Schacte, I kept forgetting to listen to the words, so I didn’t get any “story.” One thing that struck me was how the dancers each moved so differently around the perimeter of the stage. One would kind of creep around cat-like, one would have more of a bravado to his strut, one kind of tiptoed. I’m not sure if it was intentional or simply different dancers having their own style.

(photo of Acacia Schachte and Jon Bond by Julieta Cervantes)

My favorite piece of the night was Dutch choreographer Didy Veldman’s “frame of view.”

Continue reading ‘“Frame of View” at Cedar Lake Dance’