Category Archives: Dance
Some things are unacceptable
The performance tonight of The Rite of Spring by a troupe of West African dancers was plagued by lighting and other technical issues. At first, the visual, documentary-style accompaniment wouldn’t work. Two dancers took their positions, the house lights went up, and a technician walk on stage while the dancers were still there. Later, the [...]
Black rites
The Rite of Spring
Without a doubt, the most anticipated dance performance of this year’s Spoleto Festival is Heddy Maalem’s reinterpretation of The Rite of Spring, the iconic ballet set to the music of Igor Stravinsky. The choreography was so primal that it sent throngs of genteel Parisians of La Belle Époque into the streets to [...]
Your moment(s) of Zen
John Kennedy must have a thing for stillness. For inner peace. For serenity. Many of the new works in his series Music in Time (the last of which is Tuesday at 5 p.m.) have reflected a longing for being in the moment, for “living in the sound,” as he said of Somei Satoh’s Glimmering Darkness.
Glimmering [...]
Criticism takes guts
I had a nice conversation with a delightful woman at the intermission of Friday night’s opening performance by Donna Uchizono’s modern dance company. The choreographer presented two works. One is called State of Heads. The other is Low. The former came first and it left my new friend speechless. In a bad way.
“I like to [...]
Cuban block party
Thousands of people came to dance and drink and sing Saturday night at Piccolo Spoleto’s Cuban Dance Party in Marion Square. Some people told me they’d never seen so many people there. Here’s some video of Nathan Koci’s band Fernando Rivas’ band. That’s Ron Wiltrout on drums. Nathan Koci is in the hat behind him.
Jorma’s tutus
At the beginning of the Boston Ballet’s performance of Brake the Eyes, created by Jorma Elo, the resident choreographer and current It Boy among ballet companies, I was in awe.
The choreography seemed to draw from street dancing (break-dancing and krumping) and traditional dance (as from India and Bali) as much as it was rooted in [...]
The source of the universe
We don’t talk about the Truth much anymore, the source of being, the primal essence that energizes existence, that ineffable something that makes somethingness out of nothingness, the metaphysics beyond the veil of physics that Plato made clear in his Cave of Shadows. In our post-colonial, post-industrial, postmodern world, we talk about truth but not [...]
Boston Ballet in the news
While the Boston Ballet was gearing up for its performance at Spoleto, news broke out that the company would be forced to “downsize” its corps by nine dancers. Some wondered if that would have any bearing on BB’s Spoleto performance. Jill Bahr, of the Charleston Ballet Theatre, took the time to tell me not [...]
The end is near
This would seem to be it.
Yesterday’s Piccolo Finale was a sweat-soaked circus of blanketed picnickers who tried bravely to ignore the heat, but they may as well have tried to ignore the pull of gravity. Ninety-six degrees hung over Hampton Park like Hell’s own furnace turned on us, and in the end even the lure [...]
Getting forensic on Spoleto 2007
The 31st Spoleto Festival USA is officially in the past tense. It’s now time to get forensic on the thing. But that’s less easy than it sounds. Part of the difficulty in summing up the festival after the fact lies in its nature; as Mayor Riley noted during the mid-festival tribute to founder Gian Carlo [...]