The 2008 season is over. The debates continue about everything we saw…
Cue the credits: This is our last scheduled post for 2008. We’ll still be around to screen, post and reply to your comments — to me and to each other — in the days and weeks ahead, so keep ‘em coming. But for now, let’s go out with one last question:
Who do you want to see at the 2009 ADF?
Volley for serve — and respond, please, in comments, below.
What threatened to be “a year-long Festival of the Feet” when it was announced in March turned out better than we’d feared.
For the most part.
With some exceptions.
This version of our comprehensive season wrap is verifiably our last word on ADF Season 2008. With 1,100 more words than the story in our print edition (including our views on Meredith Monk, Maguy Marin, the Japanese Festival and Acts to Follow), this report has all the juicy stuff we couldn’t cram onto the pages of this week’s copy of the Independent Weekly.
Buy the ticket — click on “more” — and read the verdicts (in this and the next two posts). Then leave your reactions in Comments, below. As always, your replies won’t appear immediately, since we have to screen for spam. But all legitimate responses will be posted.
Part II of the 2008 Season Review is here.
In this section: Reconstructions: Donald McKayle’s Games and Past/Forward’s showings of Laura Dean, Hanya Holm and Erick Hawkins; a girlchild education of a different sort by Jiri Kylian; Maguy Marin’s umwelt; plus the new stuff — good, bad and ugly — by Mark Dendy, Larry Keigwin, Robert Battle. Oh, and Paul Taylor. Among others.
Press more to read on.
The chilling finale of the 2008 Season Review is here.
Considered in this section: Japanese Festival performances by Natural Dance Theatre and Dance Theatre LUDENS; strong work by ADF dance students; the Acts to Follow series devoted to North Carolina dance artists; and that jump to the left, coming up — when ADF moves some of its performances to the Durham Performing Arts Center in 2009. Among other topics…
Press more to read on.
. . . until her unprofessional conduct made her its momentary focal point.
You know, I really prefer reviewing dance to reviewing members of the audience. Unfortunately, Miller’s left me little choice, given her own poorly improvised solo during an ADF MFA student’s thesis performance last Friday afternoon.
A dance professional should have known — and done — better. Contretemps ahoy, after the break.
Click ‘more’ for the lowdown.
Our final views — for now — on the ADF 2008 Season will run in next week’s print edition of the Independent Weekly.
But if you just can’t wait that long. . .
. . . check back here Monday afternoon.
P.S.: If you want to put your thoughts in on the best — and less — of the 2008 season, click here.
See you soon.
The headline says it all: exclusive footage of the new world premieres by Muramatsu’s Kochuten and Maro’s Dai Rakuda Kan at the American Dance Festival. Their final performance here: Thursday, July 17.
Video produced for www.indyweek.com by Noreen Fagan.
Exclusive video footage from the world premiere of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s Another Evening: Serenade/The Proposition, at the 2008 American Dance Festival.
Video produced for www.indyweek.com by Noreen Fagan.
Okay, let’s take stock for a moment. We’ve seen dozens of works by hundreds of performers over seven full weeks of modern dance.
One thing’s for certain: It’s not all going to fit into that suitcase.
So as we start to pack up the 2008 ADF Season, we’ve got to think for a second.
1. What are the works and moments you plan to keep? The best, the most insightful, entertaining, or instructive?
2. Which are you going to leave behind? The distinctly less than best, less useful, and the thanks-I-did-(or- saw)-it-once-and-that-will-do things?
3. And which of this season’s experiences are going to give you the hardest time choosing?
We’ll have our thoughts on these in our ADF Wrap, next week on the website and in the print edition of the Independent Weekly. But right now, it’s your turn.
What’s already in your famous blue suitcase? What’s going in? What can’t you decide on? Post your thoughts in Comments, below.
We have to moderate the replies due to spam, so your entry won’t show instantly. Don’t worry; all legitimate responses will be posted.
One by one, the bodies fell down those three platforms to earth at the start of gosh, I am alive… Then Butoh gradually infested a stageful of people in the opening to Secrets of Mankind.
But what did you make of the two world premieres from Dai Rakuda Kan and Kochuten at Page Auditorium? How do you interpret the costumes? The makeup? The quality of their movement?
We were the first audience to see gosh, I am alive… and Secrets of Mankind. The questions: What stories do they tell us? What do they ultimately say?
Respond in Comments, below. We have to screen replies due to spam, so your responses won’t post immediately. Not to worry: all non-spam comments will be published.
This time out, Janet Wong’s striking video designs provide an appropriate metaphor for Bill T. Jones’ new work, which “searches deeply for connections” through our individual histories and American history, as it parses the tensions between the ideals of inclusion and unity and the social, cultural and political realities of identity. These in a work in progress containing both flaws and “abundant energy and lyricism.”
Read the rest of critic Byron Woods’ analysis of Another Evening: Serenade/The Proposition, taken from this week’s print edition of The Independent Weekly.
…after seeing Another Evening: Serenade/The Proposition?
Bill T. Jones’ latest work lets us look in on his deliberative process for an upcoming piece (with the working title A Good Man!/A Good Man? ) that will deal with issues in American history and culture touching on the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln.
The thematic landscape is large enough to get lost in. Thus the question: what do we know about Serenade/The Proposition: the movement, the music, the visuals, the set, the choreography? The themes about Young America, the melting pot, and cultural intersections (or the lack thereof)?
Critical first responders: join in, in Comments, below. We have to screen replies for spam, but we’ll print all legitimate responses.
Feel like taking out the want ad above after seeing last night’s performance of Meredith Monk’s Solo from Education of the Girlchild ? Or are you one of the ones who have it all figured out now?
Weigh in with your decryptions, translations, speculative anthropology and just plain opinions in Comments, below. We’ll screen all responses — have to, due to spam — but we will publish every non-spam reply.
No petroglyphs, please.
It was the only reason associate artistic director Janet Wong mentioned in a March post-show talkback in Durham when asked why Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s production of Chapel/Chapter gave the gruesome details of real-life murder victims — while it changed or deleted all mention of their names on stage.
Though the piece was built on the murders of the Otero Family in Kansas and Nixzmary Brown in New York City, the company erased the victims’ identities — from the show on stage, the program notes and discussion about the work.
Our March review inquired into the ethics of a dance work that aestheticized their murders – while performing identity theft on the victims themselves.
Particularly given the graphic testimony in the piece’s script, how exactly were the victims’ names supposed to “preoccupy” us? Did the choice to blank them out attempt to diagnose a problem already in place — or merely create a new problem?
One last question: Did it actually help the dance?
Here’s the link to our March 26 review.
We’ve seen — and reviewed and interviewed — them before. If you missed our coverage and analysis of previous major regional and ADF performances by Doug Varone and Dancers and Ronald K. Brown/ EVIDENCE, here’s a list with links — all on the record — below.
Doug Varone & Dancers:
Boats Leaving: 2006 ADF World Premiere. Review. Season summary.
Ballet Mechanique. 2002 ADF World Premiere. Review. Season summary.
Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE
One-Shot: March 2008 performance at Duke University. Review.
Redemption. 2004 ADF World Premiere. Review (with Come Ye ). Interview.
Come Ye. November 2003 performance at Hayti Heritage Center. Preview and Interview.
“Intentionally or otherwise, it was this season’s clearest example thus far of curation as critique—in which one dance work magnified the shortcomings in another simply by being placed next to it in a concert setting.”
Uh-oh. Who’s getting drubbed in critic Byron Woods’ review from this week’s print edition of The Independent Weekly? Read on, and respond in Comments.
The other (pointe) shoe droppeth:
For the answers to these and others, the last part of our 2008 Season Preview lurks below.
Right. So these two choreographers walk into a barre…
You were there. You saw comedian Larry Keigwan plus company make with the waterworks, before flying on and off the handle.
That was before Robert Battle’s folks got mighty reel (time), after a Promenade through 
what looked like an over-caffeinated version of the psycho ward where Blanche DuBois might have wound up after A Streetcar Named Desire.
Then you saw the curious ways both of them came up with to honor their elders — Gus Solomons, Jr. and Carmen deLavallade – in the world premieres of Mirror Mirror and Two Redux.
As they used to say in vaudeville, These are the jokes, folks.
Two questions: Which things amused you the most during the concert by Keigwin + Company, Battleworks Dance, and Paradigm?
And, by chance, was there anything on stage you found not funny at all?
Comments, please, below. We have to moderate your replies because of the truly unamusing amounts of spam we get — but all legitimate responses will be posted.
“While three choreographers lured us into their dystopias last week,” writes critic Byron Woods, “one—Aydin Teker’s aKabi—was so overtly like [Kurt] Vonnegut['s work] that the title of a specific short story came to mind in the middle of the performance.”
Could this possibly be a good sign? Read on to find out: the pre-publication of the dance review from this week’s Independent Weekly follows.
Exclusive footage of the world premiere of Robert Battle’s Reel Time, as performed by Battleworks Dance Company, this week at ADF.
[ Editor's note: Paradigm Dance Company gave us permission to post this video only during their performance dates at the 2008 ADF, June 30-July 2.
After their performance dates, the video was removed. ]
ADF’s silly season continues with choreographer Robert Battle’s new work for Carmen deLavallade and Gus Solomons, Jr. Here’s footage from the world premiere.
You heard about the Doug Varone performance – this weekend, in Chapel Hill — right? [Editor's note: This performance closed Sunday, June 29. Varone's company performs at the ADF next Monday-Wednesday, July 7-9, In Reynolds Theater. ]
The Long Leaf Opera Festival is restaging his production of the 2005 Ricky Ian Gordon opera Orpheus and Euridice, with the original leads — soprano Elizabeth Futral as Euridice, clarinetist Todd Palmer as Orpheus, and Varone’s dancers — as the final offering in their 2008 festival. The one remaining performance: Sunday, June 29, at 2 pm, in UNC’s Memorial Hall.
No, the dance snobs weren’t terribly impressed with the 2005 Lincoln Center premiere. (Perhaps they missed the news that Gordon’s AIDS-era libretto was inspired by the film Black Orpheus, and not earlier operatic masterpieces by Gluck or Monteverdi.) But others clearly were.
The Long Leafs have a long history in the region. They’ve consistently had the most adventurous programming of the handful of regional opera groups.
The down side? Their community-level orchestras and vocalists and fluctuating direction and sets and costumes haven’t always matched their stated ambition to stage professional-grade productions of English-based opera.
But since Varone is directing his original performers — and the work is for three solo musicians, without orchestra — most of the usual variables seem to have been taken out of the mix here. The one remaining question mark: the pianist in this three-musician ensemble — the one role not identified anywhere in the extensive publicity on the festival’s website.
Ticket information, here.
Excerpts in this video preview from Martha Graham Dance Company’s performance of Steps in the Streets at the 2008 ADF. The opening introduction is by the company’s artistic director, Janet Eilber.
It is an easy — and a thoroughly useless — thing to be intimidated into silence or critical complicity by a “masterpiece.”
New audiences and critics may be mindful of the meanings an artwork has been given in the past. But if they’re encouraged, by anyone, to stop there — if someone convinces them that they have nothing new of value to say to a masterpiece, or no right to say it (without the appropriate advanced academic degrees) — they are swindled of their birthright, which is this: to determine, for themselves, what meanings an artwork has to them, now.
Why is this a birthright? Meanings — and aesthetics — change in a culture, over time.
Let’s consider the theater for a moment. In a space far less than the 72 years since the premiere of Martha Graham’s Chronicle, a bombastic, declamatory aesthetic once considered the apex of live theater was replaced by something very different. What’s now viewed as the artifice of the elocutionary movement was once valued as something else.
At some tipping point, a gesture on stage that once conveyed the height of drama is read by new audiences as communicating melodrama instead.
Where does the tipping point occur? The dance and theater historians don’t decide. The audiences do, at every single performance. They did it last evening in Page Auditorium. They’re doing it again, tonight.
Martha Graham’s work has said much to many people over the years. But the all too avoidable question under the circumstances also happens to be the primary critical question:
” What does this work say to us, now ? “
Could we have identified Steps in the Streets‘ “clear political message” without Janet Eilber’s pre-show explication ? ( Come to think of it, can we identify it even with it? ) Would we have known anything of what the work was “about” without those words?
What, if anything, does this suggest about the artwork’s current ability to communicate on its own terms — without someone having to speak for it?
Were there actually three couples – or just three female leads — in Diversions of Angels ? What characterizations differentiated the three women from one another, and just how deep did those characterizations go?
Now, apply the same questions to their male partners — if, that is, we can actually remember them. Weren’t they merely universal donors — interchangeable ciphers? What, if anything, is suggested by the fact that none of the men’s costumes were different — and that the one non-couple male was dressed the same as the others?
What do the qualities of movement in these works communicate to us — not 60 or 70 years ago, but now?
The floor is yours. Take the stand, and respond in comments. We have to moderate responses, due to spam, but all non-spam comments will be posted.
[Ed. note: Brian Howe, a widely ranging culture critic and reporter, writes frequently for the Independent Weekly and other publications. He joins us today as a guest blogger.]
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…
—W.B. Yeats
ADF, June 25, Reynolds Auditorium. Featured Works: Rapture by Khadija Marcia Radin; aKabi by Aydin Teker; Umwelt by Compagnie Maguy Marin.
These three dances could hardly be more different, yet taken together and in sequence, they seem to comprise a narrative of spiritual disintegration—Yeats’ prophecy made manifest.
The center and the gyre were established in the first piece, the Sufi whirling dance Rapture by Khadija Marcia Radin. On a stage cast in cool blue, as a narrator recited the truth-seeking poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi, Radin drew us into a comforting maze of ritual. She twirled in one place, first slowly and with great restraint, then faster, with accumulating gesture and inflection, as if caught up in the great eddies of the music’s yawning vowels. Eventually, she broke free from her stable axis to twirl in ellipses around the center she’d abandoned. At the time it felt like freedom, although later, after the two subsequent pieces developed the narrative, it would feel like a symbolic prelude to deracination—the center’s breaking point. The gyre that Radin widened would soon fly apart, accelerating like the cosmos itself.
Actually, we’re not asking if you could walk a mile in Ayden Teker’s shoes. Instead, today’s challenge is (simply) this:
If you had to put what Teker’s aKabi was ultimately about into one sentence (and not a page), could you do it?
Okay. Now how about Maguy Marin’s umwelt ?
As always, we have to screen responses due to spam, but all legit replies will be posted. Send your best shots to comments, below.
The woman spun.
The dancers clomped.
The winds blew.
The audience bailed. (Well, some of them, at any rate.)
Yep, looks like we’re in for another one of those “Is that dance?” nights.
Your thoughts, please, on Khadija Marcia Radin’s Rapture, Aydin Teker’s aKabi, and Maguy Marin’s umwelt, in comments, below. (Due to spam, we have to moderate incoming responses, but all legitimate replies will be posted.)
Darkness & Light world premiere
Razor:Mirror, Symbiosis, Lanterna Magica, Nocturna
The raging debate on whether Pilobolus’ new work, Darkness and Light, is actually a dance at all takes us back . . . all the way to Plato’s cave. (Um, would someone alert Dr. Gerry Myers, ADF’s perennial philosopher-in-residence? He’s needed, just now.)
Until the good doctor weighs in, critic Byron Woods asks the symposium these pointed questions: Are Pilobolus’ recent Oscar and Oprah appearances really art? Is Darkness and Light? Or did its world premiere just present “the shadow of modern dance—but not the thing itself?”
The answers may surprise you. Tomorrow’s headlines today, just below; click to read on.
Maybe all the talk about Darkness and Light is actually beside the point. What do you think was the strongest work of the night?
Respond in comments, here. We have to moderate responses due to spam; all non-spam replies will be posted here within hours.
There were differences in opinion in the talkback after Thursday’s world premiere of Pilobolus‘ Darkness and Light.
Some gushed over the live shadow-and-color-play projected on the Page Auditorium screen.
But then there were those thinly-veiled suggestions that it wasn’t even dance, that the dancers did their best to counter. (Which, actually, is more than we can say for Pilobolean choreographers Robby Barnett and Jonathan Wolken, who were missing in action when collaborator and master puppeteer Basil Twist and their dancers were on stage, taking part in the lively post-performance discussion.)
Where do you come down on this?
Is Darkness and Light dance?
If it isn’t, what is it?
Would it have been if we could have actually seen the dancers?
Fourth and final question: Does it matter if it is or not?
Respond in comments. We’ll be moderating responses (have to, due to spam); all legitimate replies will be posted here.
John Jasperse Company’s “Pure”
“If Pure kids us, it’s to get us to stop kidding ourselves,” says critic Byron Woods in his analysis of John Jasperse’s world premiere. The central questions the new work poses? “What exactly is ‘pure’ movement, ‘pure’ dance? Is such a thing possible? And if so, is it actually desirable?”
Read the reprint from this week’s Independent Weekly, below.
ZviDance’s “Les Noces”
Video produced by Noreen Fagan.
This video preview gives us a taste of what choreographer Zvi Goethiner sees when he hears the stark Russian folk songs and jagged polyrhythms of the work Stravinsky originally composed for the Ballets Russes…
Video produced by Noreen Fagan.
Exclusive footage of the world premiere, in this video preview of John Jasperse Company’s Pure, this week at the American Dance Festival.
Video produced by Noreen Fagan.
… this performance by the Nikolais Dance Theater is either the one you should — or the one you won’t need to…”
Why does Nikolais’ work (under the artistic direction of Murray Louis and Alberto del Saz, performed by the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company) have dance critic Byron Woods thinking about drinking the electric kool-aid? Check this video preview and see.
[Ed. note: Brian Howe, a widely ranging culture critic and reporter, writes frequently for the Independent Weekly and other publications. He joins us today as a guest blogger, and responds to the current mainstage offerings of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company and Trisha Brown Dance Company.]
Thursday night’s eclectic showcase, which continues tonight and Saturday, June 14, peaked early for me, with Alwin Nikolais’ incredible Crucible, performed admirably by the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company of Salt Lake City. The dancers stood behind a waist-high, mirrored plane that slanted down toward the audience, so that every visible movement was paralleled by a quivering reflection. The lighting spilled from red to blue to stripes, always tight on the dancers, so they appeared to be hovering holograms in a dark field. Along with the lighting, the fantastic sound design (which featured all the texture and rupture of a Nico Muhly composition) impressed different auras on the spectacle: kaleidoscopic, aquatic, insectile.
We look at exclusive footage from Accumulations, Spanish Dance, and PRESENT TENSE in this video preview of Trisha Brown Dance Company’s ADF performance. The company appears, with the Nikolais Dance Theater, performed by Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, through Saturday night in Page Auditorium.
Video produced by Noreen Fagan.
Okay, maybe it was drama’s night out at the ADF when the Limon Company and DCDC took the Page stage Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. By evening’s end we’d seen, among other things, homicidal suspicion, jealousy and murder in The Moor’s Pavane and sexual angst, pathological parenting and suicide (with maybe just a touch of Joan Crawford in the mix?) in Las Desenamoradas.
So why am I stuck feeling that Jiri Kylian’s Evening Songs was actually the creepiest work of the night?
I’m not going to have time to explore this until tonight at the earliest. But it’s bugging me now, so I’m going to go ahead and throw it out there. Did Evening Songs give anyone else in the theater a case of the creeps — even when compared to the other horror shows on the menu?
I’m just asking.
In the June 10 edition of the Independent Weekly, we ask, “Have second thoughts improved Shen Wei’s Connect Transfer?
Read on for the answer…
Our video preview of ADF’s second “Split Scenes” concert for the 2008 season. Exclusive footage of Eleo Pomare’s Las Desenamoradas by Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, and discussion of the Limon Company’s offerings, through Tuesday night at Page Auditorium.
Video produced by Noreen Fagan.
Critic Byron Woods will be weighing in shortly on Ailey II’s Revelations, David Parson’s Caught, and the new version of Shen Wei’s Connect Transfer.
But right now, it’s your turn.
It’s one of the things that makes our blog just a little different from the other sites. We publish your views (and reviews) on ADF mainstage shows before — and after — the professional critics.
After all, everyone sees something different when they’re looking at a work of art. What did you see during the opening weekend performances? Have your say. Tell us all, in comments, below.
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