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Manon
I went to MANON to see Diana Vishneva, whom I have seen before, but too long ago and not often enough. This was her 10th season with the American Ballet Theatre, her second home along with the Mariinsky in Russia, and cause for great celebration at the weekend close. The ballet itself is of interest,…
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Midsummer Night’s Dream
George Balanchine’s balletic rendering of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (1962), in revival at the New York City Ballet, captures less the Shakespeare of the popular theater, and the modern nostalgia for it, than the Shakespeare of the court, the one associated with Blackfriars, Ben Jonson, and the masques of Inigo Jones. There is a great…
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Poe X 2
It was interesting, recently, to see two stage treatments of the works, and in one case the life, of Edgar Allan Poe. Interesting, that is, in the differences and similarities between them and in the fact of their synchronicity. Each was flawed, but memorable, both singly and, by fortuity, paired. Each set Poe’s poetry to…
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MalPaso Dance Company
I had certain impressions of the MalPaso Dance Company of Cuba at the Joyce, but none was stronger than that the dancers had not been trained into their bodies but in them. They are so present in their physical selves that they must surely have been there always; they would need to be trained out…
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The Killer
The Bérenger plays of Ionesco – in which an ordinary man finds himself in a variety of situations – are what they are, but it can be illuminating to consider them in terms of artistic and literary movements. I tend to agree that they don’t exactly qualify as existentialist or absurdist. It is, granted, pretty…
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Palo Alto
In Gia Coppola’s movie about high school in Southern California, from a collection of stories by the actor James Franco (who plays a coach in the film), adolescent life does not seem that different from anywhere else in the United States. Or, leaving aside a few technological changes, than it did in my own time.…
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Blues for Dixie
It should not have surprised me that Allison Moorer singing about the South brought tears to my eyes. Indiana, where I was born, and St. Louis, where I went to fourth grade, are more Southern than is obvious from the map. A strain of my ancestry runs through Virginia and Kentucky, and the nursery years…
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Young and Beautiful
You could sum up much of the French director François Ozon’s work as being about young people discovering sex and portraying it frankly. So it is not surprising if a capsule description of an Ozon film makes it sound titillating and exploitive. Swimming Pool, his most seen work in the U.S., told the story of…
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Only Lovers Left Alive
I have never been so admiring of Jim Jarmusch as have his acolytes, but he seemed the perfect choice to direct a vampire movie and had the good taste to include a scene of Yasmine Hamdan singing in a café, so I was drawn without resistance to ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE. There is a lot…
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Reconstructing the Universe
In the lexicon of critical clichés, “bracing” is the one I would choose to describe the Guggenheim’s ITALIAN FUTURISM, 1909–1944: RECONSTRUCTING THE UNIVERSE. I was startled, as if awakened, by its spiraling coherence and aesthetic range, and loved the byways down which it made me wander, including into the actorless kingdom of Futurist theater. I…