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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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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…
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D.I.S.P.L.A.Y.E.D.
Heidi Latsky’s D.I.S.P.L.A.Y.E.D. is reached through several stories of descending stairway (or elevator), balcony, and lobby. On each level are encountered living sculptures, sometimes still as stone and other times in stylized motion. They evoke both classical sculpture and avant-garde fashion, draped in white but wearing 3-D geometric adornments, wires and corners contrasting the flow…
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The Taming of the Shrew
People forget that Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew starts with an induction in which a drunken vagabond is to be regaled with a theatrical performance of what is sometimes mistaken for the whole play. The Kate-Petruchio shenanigans is, in short, a play-within-a-play, an imagined world of sex-play and power relations, perhaps challenging to, but…
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Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord‘s LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME, now at the Lincoln Center Festival, matches high style with a ragamuffin disdain for it. Molière’s send-up of social snobbery under the reign of Louis XIV, in which the petit bourgeois M. Jourdain aspires to aristocratic status, veers from mannered satire to a savage buffoonery. All manner…
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Our Last Tango
The Wim Wenders produced OUR LAST TANGO, by German Kral, reconciles art with life and narrative cinema with documentary. The lives are those of María Nieves Rego and Juan Carlos Copes, probably the longest enduring couple in Argentine tango as a performing art. I am careful how I put that, because there are social dance…
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Antigona
Noche Flamenca’s ANTIGONA presents Sophocles’ tragedy using the conventions of flamenco dance, music and song. It connects the original theme, of a sister seeking to bury a disgraced brother against the dictates of the city state of Thebes, with recent efforts to exhume, identify and respectfully re-inter victims of the Franco regime in Spain. In…
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Congregata
So, I saw CONGREGATA by FKA twigs. There were three back-to-back sold-out shows at the Brooklyn Hangar, of which I availed myself of an opportunity to see the last one. I was in pretty good company, not just of the exceptionally well turned-out twentyoneoroversomethings who dominated the crowd, but, at least for a while, the…
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Havana Rakatan
After the intermission, HAVANA RAKATAN moves inside, from the streets and waterfront locations evoked in the first act to a scenography of nightclubs and theatrical shows. It seems, suddenly and counter-intuitively, more authentic than it did before. Colorfully dressed farmers and urban workers, dancing in celebration of weddings, harvests, fiestas, might seem, on the surface,…