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Tiler Peck
Everything that Tiler Peck presented last weekend at City Center, as dancer, choreographer, and curator, was a first of one sort or another, two New York premieres, one live premiere, and a world premiere. She is brilliant, and the achievement was exhilarating. The world premiere of Time Spell was the crowd-pleaser, a mad mix-and-match of…
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This is Me Eating
This is Me Eating, performed by Et Alia Theater, was uncommonly elegant. The soft gray gowns worn by the women of the company had the flow of classical statuary, and the grace of the wearers recalled the Living Pictures of the 19th century, the Attitudes of Lady Hamilton, Lily Bart in The House of Mirth,…
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Tatiana Eva-Marie
Tatiana Eva-Marie sings in overlapping genres, with a touch of the surreal in how they mix and match and where they take you—French jazz, swing (especially Zazou), old time folk, gypsy, Balkan, Klezmer, New Orleans, occasional standards, and, recently, holiday. The heart of her art is French; where her talents would have gone but for…
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MAC BETH
In Red Bull Theater’s MAC BETH, seven young women play schoolgirls acting out Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Their uniforms look Scottish; a pocket insignia can’t be read from the house, but the mind fills in a Scots name. The stockings and pleated skirts evoke kilts, and so, despite the tragedy, the cross-dressing women of comedies like As…
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Beatriz Nunes
The pairing of an innovative but sensitive guitarist with a singer who works and explores the voice is a bracing, all-too-rare format. Raül Refree perfected it with both Sílvia Pérez Cruz and Rosalía, to stunning effect. The Portuguese singer Beatriz Nunes and the guitarist André Silva, whom I saw Friday night at Drom, are of…
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Hurricane Sleep
I hesitate to say that HURRICANE SLEEP comes on like an approaching storm, but that, in truth, is what happens. Andrea Goldman’s play (co-directed by Julia Watt) starts slow, builds, and sweeps through in bands, with an eye at the center. There’s the first band, when we’re introduced to Ome (Neysa Lozano), holed up in…
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Distant Constellation
When the producer Shelly Grizim mentioned in a Q&A following Shevaun Mizrahi’s DISTANT CONSTELLATION that only two shots in it used a moving camera, I started. It was something I hadn’t noticed, so alive and full of motion the film had been. There is nothing static about this most unusual of documentaries: its very stillness…
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Last Life
It is particularly true of Shakespeare that his individual works both feed off and nourish an entire body-of-work. Hamlet is the richer for Macbeth, Twelfth Night for King Lear, the comedies for the tragedies, Falstaff for Toby Belch, Viola for Sonnet 121 and even for Iago. In LAST LIFE: A Shakespeare Play by Sara Fay…
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Monsieur Periné
I don’t know when last I was so invigorated by a group of live musicians as I was by the Colombian band Monsieur Periné at the Highline Ballroom on Saturday night. Their sound is as fresh and varied as it gets, with a repertory that blends Latin and tropical, swing, New Orleans, gypsy, Parisian jazz,…
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Kianí Del Valle
Kianí Del Valle emerges, in the first part of Catacoustic Flesh, like a pupa discarding the chrysalis or a crab molting its shell. But there is something odd in the armature: it is more plasticine than organic and has a metallic sheen. It is seamed and riveted and too steely to let loose a thing…