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New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Raw and Untamed, a Paul Taylor Dance Gets a Second Chance
Bringing a dance back to life is detective work. Just what was on Paul Taylor's mind when he was choreographing 'Churchyard,' a work of angelic beauty and distorted horror, more than 50 years ago? Separated into two sections, 'Sacred' and 'Profane,' 'Churchyard' reflects Taylor's unsettling way of weaving together dark and light. Set to medieval-inspired music by Cosmos Savage, the dance becomes increasingly sinister, so much so that by the time 'Profane' rolls around, the dancers' unitards are filled with lumps. The Black Death is coming. Michael Novak, the artistic director of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, is determined to get the reconstruction of 'Churchyard' right. Or at least as right as he can make it. Part of the company's season at the Joyce Theater, which begins June 17, 'Churchyard' (1969) will return with another early revival, 'Tablet' (1960), a duet with design by the artist Ellsworth Kelly. Taylor, who died in 2018, had discussed reviving 'Churchyard,' but there was a problem: memory. Bettie de Jong, the statuesque centerpiece of the dance (and later, the company's rehearsal director), insisted that Nicholas Gunn, who joined the Taylor company the year 'Churchyard' was made, needed to be involved. 'Now I know why,' Novak said. 'Nick is kind of the key. It was the first dance he was ever in, and usually I have found, the first dance you go into, you remember it so well because you're so scared. You want to do a good job.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Ayodele Casel Links Tap to Her Hip-Hop Beginnings
Ayodele Casel knows how to pull viewers toward her when she's onstage. She's a magnet. 'There she is,' someone behind me whispered in excited awe as Casel casually stepped onto the stage of the Joyce Theater, dropping a backpack on the floor. Applause, the kind that often greets musicians, followed, which was correct: Casel makes music with her feet. 'What's up, y'all?' she said, flashing an irrepressible smile. With a feathery touch, Casel waved her hips and then caressed the floor with her feet as though strumming it. She is always pleasing to the ear and to the eye, but in 'Ayodele Casel: The Remix,' her latest evening of tap at the Joyce — a most impressive mood lifter — she has a new level of ease. She turns 50 next week, as she mentioned more than once, but she has never been more in her body than now. For all of its jubilance, 'The Remix' is a serious show, one that celebrates the intimacy of friendship and specifically artist friendships — here, among dancers and musicians. But it unspools with a casualness, too, mirroring Casel's mix of easygoing and grand. In 'The Remix,' directed and cocreated by Torya Beard, Casel shows that she can always be relied on to balance a light touch with heartfelt urgency. In this swift 70 minutes featuring her dances and those of others, she pays homage to a slice of time when she was finding her way. 'The Remix' is a trip back to the music, dance and soul of the 1990s, when Casel fell in love with tap and when it had a resurgence. During her early days, she practiced. And in those sessions, she was drawn to the music of the day, the music that she loved — the Fugees, Craig Mack, Nas. She experimented with finding, through tap, the groove and the swing in hip-hop. 'I wrote a poem, like the '90s,' Casel said in a nod to the poetry slams of the era while opening a notebook at the start of 'Q-Tap' (2025), a vivid introduction to her theme: 'I've got my backpack and everything.' The setting is laid-back, with the stage reimagined as something between a living room and a lounge, neither precious nor sleek. There are chairs and a sofa scattered along its sides; a television set has the title of the show drawn on its screen. There's even a piece, one of 13 numbers in the show, that leans into relaxation: Ryan K. Johnson's 'Sofa Vibes.' As she described her early days — rollerblading to Fazil's, the Times Square studio that shuttered in 2008 — she sang a few bars from Ahmad's 'Back in the Day,' which led into the story of how she found her path to dance, to her dance expression. 'Heavy D, Mary J., wanting to be a part of what I was hearing on the radio,' she said, 'but in my way.' As a 'Black and Puerto Rican kid raised on rhythm and rhyme,' she said, her dancing grew with her love of hip-hop, not despite it: 'It's a groove, it's a flow, sophisticated and bold.' She slipped in a lyric by the Notorious B.I.G.: 'If you don't know, now you know.' Throughout 'The Remix,' more of a living entity than a backward-looking retrospective, dancers mix and mingle with a poet, a freestyle artist and a pair of musicians along with Liberty Styles, a D.J. and dancer. Jared Alexander created the hip-hop-inflected score. As dancers cross the stage gliding in and out of formations, music references appear and disappear, giving the work the feel of a before times free-form radio station. As one piece slides into the next, bite-size dances build in complexity and elegance — Ginger Rogers was an early love, and that influence is present, too — to show Casel's lineage. For 'Push/Pull,' with choreography by Casel, John Manzari sings Cole Porter's 'Begin the Beguine' while Alexander, Naomi Funaki and Funmi Sofola cross the stage in airy unison. In 'Quicksand,' Quynn L. Johnson, its choreographer, starts by brushing her shoes in trails of sand. 'Little Things,' by Funaki and Caleb Teicher, is gentle and commanding, as Casel and Funaki dance with such lightness that it makes the floor seem like a cloud. In 'Unmuted,' Kate Louissaint delivers a rousing rendition of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' considered the Black national anthem, as dancers build a percussive wall that starts quietly but grows to match her towering voice. It was a political statement, but a subtle one: 'If you don't know, now you know.' Casel's 'Audrey,' a 20-year-old work set to Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, is understated and chic — an ode to Audrey Hepburn's grace, with punctuated finger snaps and the smooth swirl of a wrist. This led to a stirring finale, 'Speak Your Name,' which showed off the entire cast, buoyed by the ever-smiling Casel, into a vessel of swinging, swaying bodies. This remix is more than a look at the past, it's a promise of a future.
New York Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: At Gibney, a New Lucinda Childs Stands Out (No Surprise)
Gibney Company puts on dances, as its company director recently said, that deal with what it means to be human. That's true of any dance — a moving body is alive and therefore human — but as the group's program at the Joyce Theater showed, there are different ways to convey it. Dances can have feelings, but feelings are not dances. Unfortunately at this company, led by the founder and artistic director Gina Gibney and the director Gilbert T. Small II, too much repertory champions emotions born from gesture. Its latest program of three world premieres was heavier on feeling and manic movement than on rejuvenating choreographic content. The exception, unsurprisingly, came from the program's last piece, 'Three Dances (Prepared Piano) John Cage' by Lucinda Childs, who never randomly arranges dancers on a stage, but moves them with formal, mathematical precision. Here, the dancers — or artistic associates, as they are called at Gibney — were transformed as they entered the sleek dance universe of Childs, a revered postmodernist known for her minimal aesthetic. Choreographing to a John Cage composition, Childs interacts with the music in subtle, playful ways. There even seem to be fleeting nods to Merce Cunningham (Cage's artistic and personal partner), with whom Childs studied.
New York Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Trisha Brown's Unstable, Liquid Structures
The dances of Trisha Brown slide past the eye. The dancers — molecules in the atom of the dance — are in constant motion, limbs swinging, hips angling, bodies caught in the crosscurrents of motion, propelled ineluctably through space. It was good to be reminded of the utter distinctiveness of that style in the Trisha Brown Dance Company's program at the Joyce Theater, which continues through Sunday. The program offers two notable pieces by Brown, who died in 2017. 'Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503' (1980) and 'Son of Gone Fishin'' (1981) come from the period that Brown called 'Unstable Molecular Structures,' in which complex compositional systems underpinned the liquid, silky movement. Now headed by Carolyn Lucas, the Brown's company has also begun to commission new work, as do other heritage troupes (Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Tanztheater Wuppertal among them). This season, 'Time Again,' a work by the Australian choreographer Lee Serle, has its premiere. Serle is in many ways an obvious choice: He was Brown's mentee in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Initiative in 2010-11 and performed with the company for several years after that. Perhaps he was too obvious a choice. 'Time Again' has choreography credited to Serle in collaboration with the dancers, and much of the non sequitur, limbs-flung-out movement looks a lot like Brown's. The dance is visually striking, opening with bird sounds and a tableau of four dancers, sitting on their own little lawns of green rectangles, which are soon lifted off the floor and revealed to be woven panels that variously form doorways, huts and walls. (The ingenious set design and the costumes are by Mateo Lopez, another Rolex mentee, with atmospheric lighting by Jennifer Tipton.) The dancers bunch and separate, form interlinked groups and fragment into individual sequences as intermittent rhythms and electronic washes of sound surround them. (The score is by Alisdair Macindoe.)The tall Burr Johnson is often a loner in this group, gesturing and prancing, then suddenly swirling into larger-scale motion. There are moments of coalescence and patterning in 'Time Again,' which Serle describes in a program note as an exploration of 'the cycles of time, the repetition of life events.' But the piece feels structurally vague. Physically it may look a lot like Brown's choreography, but the precise intention that underpins much of her work seems absent. That intention is felt from the opening moments of 'Opal Loop,' in which four dancers perform against a backdrop of shimmering mist, an ever-changing cloud sculpture created by Fujiko Nakaya through machines that shoot water droplets into the air. (The music is credited as 'sound of water passing through high-pressure nozzles.') The dancers at first appear to be moving in entirely individual ways. But soon their quick, loose movements, in which swinging arms often whipsaw the whole body in unpredictable directions, start to align. Little through-body ripples, hops and hitches of the knee are echoed and synchronized, only to break apart just as you notice them. Like the billowing, mutating cloud behind them, the dancers keep forming group and individual shapes, no sooner glimpsed than dissolved. The end comes unexpectedly, but somehow perfectly, vanished but imprinted on the eye. 'Son of Gone Fishin'' was Brown's first proscenium work created to music, a soundscape score for computerized organ by Robert Ashley. (She was tired of hearing the audience coughing.) The original set design of ascending and descending blue and green panels is by Donald Judd; since these don't fit on the Joyce stage, lighting in these same colors saturates the backdrop. This piece is a marvel of interlocking physical complexity, motored by a complex system of reversed and inversed movement that Brown once described as like the cross-section of a tree trunk. It's impossible to grasp on a single viewing, but who needs to? The six dancers in bright blues and greens (a seventh, originally Brown, appears at the beginning and the end) ripple and squiggle through space, intersecting and occasionally aligning, ricocheting and weaving. They are all marvelous performers, but more homogenous, less idiosyncratic movers than an earlier era of Brown dancers. They form a field of dance, a torrent of tiny moments of brilliance as a knee lifts, a torso undulates, a head flicks sharply. You see Brown's mastery of structure as duos and solos transmute into quartets or sudden group unison; several times they cohere into a circle and revolve briefly before dissipating into individual motion. When the seventh dancer returns at the end, she performs her opening sequence in reverse. The dance has completed itself.
New York Times
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: From Kyle Abraham, Saxophones and Sculptural Shapes
The baritone saxophone is hulking instrument, a tube of brass so long it extends down past a player's knees. It makes burly, reedy sounds, deep growls and wails. Kyle Abraham's new dance '2x4' opens intriguingly with only a baritone saxophonist onstage, honking and stomping. That soloist provides the dance's music — until a second baritone saxophonist arrives. This unusual musical choice — Guy Dellecave and Thomas Giles playing two compositions by Shelley Washington — is also a theatrical one. It helps make '2x4,' Abraham's sole choreographic contribution to a program of New York premieres, the freshest part of his company's run at the Joyce Theater this week. This '2x4' is the opposite of wooden. In addition to the two musicians, there are four dancers (hence the title), whom Abraham often divides into pairs, sometimes with two loosely orbiting the twin-star gravity of the other two. The style is signature Abraham, with sculptural shapes and balletic line offset by soft suggestions of hip-hop and playfully mincing, swishy-armed walks from vogue ballrooms. A tilted balance might be punctuated with sharp air-guitar strumming. Washington's first composition strays into folk song territory before downshifting back into a Charles Mingus-like groove. Her double-saxophone duet ('Big Talk') has a rude, ricocheting intensity that she has described as an incensed response to catcalling. Abraham's dance, characteristically, enacts tender support, the dancers arching over one another elegantly. Like its backdrop — a Devin B. Johnson painting like a Turner seascape in concrete and rust — '2x4' is a beautiful abstraction. Coming third on the program, '2x4,' with its friction between Abraham's and Washington's sensibilities, provides a needed jolt. The opener, 'Shell of a Shell of the Shell' by Rena Butler, a former company member who has become a sought-after choreographer, is not much more than a shell of a dance. Dan Scully's lighting design, subtle for Abraham's piece, is hyperactive here: silhouetting the performers, repelling them from the exits, implicating the audience. It's lighting in place of choreographic ideas. Or rather in support of a single idea: a hazily sci-fi dystopian atmosphere in which twitchy dancers are isolated in spotlights or illuminated as if in a below-ground cell. Darryl J. Hoffman's score moves from sounds of children at play, reversed, into booms and monster growls then back into the innocent laughter the right way around. At one point, a woman's voice asks, 'Where are we?' The unspoken answer: in a contemporary cliché. 'Just Your Two Wrists,' a solo choreographed by Paul Singh, is a palette cleanser, short and pretty. The music is a 5-minute excerpt from a David Lang composition based on the 'Songs of Songs' (recently used by Pam Tanowitz in her 'Song of Songs.') The soloist unspools a satiny thread of motion periodically broken with stumbles, buckling, collapse. On opening night, Amari Frazier was supple and exact in all the right places. After intermission, Andrea Miller's 'Year' starts off as a promising closer. Fred Despierre's score has some techno thump, and Miller, creating in collaboration with Abraham's dancers, seems to be meeting them on the common ground of the club. Set against white panels and costumed (by Orly Anan Studio) in unitards printed with eyes and red-lipped mouths, the work has an engagingly visceral tribal energy. That energy dissipates, though, as pretension and sappiness seep in and the sexiness coagulates into pseudo-sexy clumps of writhing bodies. Eventually, two dancers end up on their backs, and one is lifted to spear another as in whaling. Throughout 'Year' — throughout the whole program — the excellence of the dancers shines through. In an opening solo, Faith Joy Mondesire is a marvel of every-which-way bodily control. The company veteran Donovan Reid is so amazing he earns applause before the dance is over. Even in 'Shell,' William Okajima catches the eye and holds it. This is a stellar group in a less-than-stellar program.
