BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER | Donald Byrd’s new Greenwood, a Rashomon-like dramatization of the cause and consequences of the 1921 attack by whites on an affluent black neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, drew me to one of Ailey’s “all-new” evenings—but it was the company premiere of Lar Lubovitch’s Fandango, first performed by his troupe in 1990, that […]
BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker | The ur-flake in the upcoming blizzard of Nutcrackers is Balanchine’s gargantuan holiday spectacular for New York City Ballet, featuring 90 dancers, 62 musicians, and over a 100 students (in two casts) from the School of American Ballet. The familiar Tchaikovsky score, gorgeous costumes by Karinska, and sets by […]
BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER | Spanish-speaking flamenco fans will find themselves in heaven at The Joyce. The 26-year-old ensemble Noche Flamenca, founded by Madrid-born Soledad Barrio and her husband, New Yorker Martín Santangelo, has settled in through Dec. 1 with dazzling guitarists, percussionists, singers, and a small cadre of dancers. The show is as much a […]
BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER | William Forsythe is arguably the smartest person working in dance today, and his current year-old touring show, William Forsythe: A Quiet Evening of Dance, just might be the best concert you’ll see this year. Forsythe, now pushing 70, has spent the bulk of his career in Germany, but is currently back […]
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | “Human and humane” is the apt description of Palissimo Company—artistic director Pavel Zuštiak’s dynamic, deeply affecting, 2004-founded collaborative platform for research, development, and production of live arts, whose exploration of the human condition captures the imagination and stirs the soul. Merging, they tell us, “the abstract aspects of dance with the […]
BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER | The first Joyce season designed by new Director of Programming Aaron Mattocks sparkles with remarkably diverse artists, all of whom present works featuring live music. Kicking off the new regime this week (Sept. 17-22) is Montreal’s RUBBERBAND, an ensemble of 10 dancers directed by Victor Quijada, whose resume includes a stint with […]
BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER | Dance connoisseurs look forward to August and the arrival in town of Drive East, a weeklong festival of South Asian music and dance by some of India’s brightest stars. Bijayini Satpathy opened the fest on Monday, with a brilliant demonstration of Odissi dance, comprised of exquisite shapes, colors, and sounds emanating […]
BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER | Unless you are a fish residing in the Hudson River, your journey to The Shed, site and producer of the world-premiere commission Maze, will be a schlep. The huge, flexible black box theater sits a few yards from 11th Ave. The best way for Chelsea residents to get there is on […]
BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER | Sasha Spielvogel knows what it’s like to feel “other.” Her father escaped Vienna, fleeing the Nazis; her grandfather languished in two concentration camps. A modern dance artist in her sixties, Spielvogel had friends who were bullied for being gay and/or died of AIDS, and she watched the community come together to […]
BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER | The second film about Rudolf Nureyev to hit the city this spring (the first being the The White Crow, a Ralph Fiennes-directed biopic), Jacqui and David Morris’s 2018 Nureyev is much the more powerful, entertaining, and affecting. A British production released abroad last September, it incorporates documentary film footage of the […]