BY KATHRYN STOMSVIK | On June 6 at 7pm, a lively crowd of hundreds gathered on blankets across the lawn of Pier 63, to see the Hudson River Dance Festival. Sponsored by The Joyce Theater Foundation, this year’s event featured some of New York’s most prominent voices in the dance community. As a tugboat passed […]
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 […]
BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER | For years, Jennifer Muller/The Works has curated a spring festival of edgy female choreographers in Muller’s Chelsea loft. This month, an expanded version of the project (Women / Create!—A Festival of Dance) moves down the block into the spacious environs of New York Live Arts, and features, in addition to Muller’s […]
BY TRAV S.D. | Today, June 5, is the birthday of Paul Swan (1883-1972). How fitting that it falls during PRIDE month! Swan was one of the most remarkable artists of the 20th century: painter, sculptor, model, dancer, choreographer, poet, movie actor, set and costume designer, and—for a few weeks in 1914–vaudevillian. Furthermore, he functioned […]
BY MAX BURBANK | On Thursday, May 23, President Donald Trump made an unannounced trip to Arlington National Cemetery, where he and first lady Melania Trump planted flags almost certainly made in China at the graves of U.S. service members. Observant calendar enthusiasts will note, Thursday, May 23 is not Memorial Day, which took place […]
BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER | Chelsea teems with historic dance in late May, including five days of performances by the venerable Limón Dance Company at the Joyce, and six shows, curated by Sans Limites Dance, at the Hudson Guild Theater, featuring work by close to 50 different choreographers from around the globe. Performing with the Limón […]
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | Who needs snark when you have an abundance of sweetness? Who needs to be cocky when carry yourself with such confidence? RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 9 contestant Shea Couleé slayed at West 42nd Street’s Laurie Beechman Theatre last night, with a candid bio show that “RuVealed” intimate details on growing up, […]
BY CHARLES BATTERSBY | “I didn’t know that make up could be a job,” said makeup artist James Vincent, at a preview of The Makeup Show. Mr. Vincent is the Director of Education and Artist Relations at The Makeup Show, an industry convention which took up four floors of the Metropolitan Pavilion, (125 W. 18th […]
Before there were the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, or Abbott and Costello, there was Weber and Fields—the largely forgotten comedy team who made all of them, and many others, possible. The famous roughhousing German dialect comedians were not only the most popular funny men in the country at the turn of […]