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Faust: A Love Story
In retrospect, it is not that surprising how easily the Faust story adapts as a Christmas play. It’s just that it had never occurred to me as it did to the Vesturport and Reykjavík City Theatres of Iceland whose FAUST: A LOVE STORY is playing – in English – this weekend at BAM. Poinsettias greet…
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Untrained
UNTRAINED is a piece by the Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin that pairs two trained professional dancers with two untrained non-dancers. The latter are auditioned and swapped out with new non-dancers every so often, so as not to let their fish-out-of-water qualities dissipate with experience. The dancers, for reasons unclear to me, are all male; perhaps…
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Donka
DONKA: A LETTER TO CHEKHOV is penned and posted in the language of circus. Jugglers, clowns, aerialists, and acrobats are its author. In their writing of it, the director Daniele Finzi Pasca tells us in the program, they “give shape to the silences” in Chekhov’s notes, diaries, and letters. This is not, in other words,…
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Astoria Tango Club
On my first visit to Buenos Aires, an expatriate American that I became acquainted with said to me that the city had a “theme”, which he smartly suggested to me was “nostalgia”. He pointed to the Kennedy-era cars on every block, the coffeehouses with their bow-tied waiters, the grand Parisian architecture, and, although he scarcely…
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Como el musguito…
I think that there is no other person who has been mentioned so often as muse and inspiration by the dance and theater people I know as the late Pina Bausch. That she was one of the signal theatrical artists of our time is beyond dispute, and so is the fact that it took me…
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Tango Conspiracy
On a late Wednesday night in the Malbec Room at Novecento, I listened for the first time to Tango Conspiracy, a band fronted by the guitarist-singer Jimena Fama whose music is self-described as “Electro Dub,” “Funk,” “Tango,” “Lounge,” and “Bassa Nova.” My prejudices for dancing tango bend toward the traditional repertory, but I must say…
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8cho Aerial Tango
What the Brenda Angiel Aerial Dance Company of Argentina does in 8CHO AERIAL TANGO at the New Victory Theater is not easy. There are multiple movement vocabularies in play, a variety from the aerial arts and a huge number of steps and figures from stage and social tango. The obvious tension to be exploited is…
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Tango Connection: Love Stories
Act I of TANGO CONNECTION: LOVE STORIES by Mariela Franganillo , currently playing at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts, exposes the private relationships of several couples through theatrical dance, song and music. Act II portrays the public face of those relationships in the context of a social dance event. Hence the private lives that…
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Tango Argentino (Revisited)
This – the article reproduced above – is what I thought of tango long before I started to dance it socially and engage with its history and culture on a deeper and more personal level. I have wanted to track down this clipping, from the Boulder Daily Camera, without knowing where it was that I…
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Crazy Horse
Frederick Wiseman‘s documentary about a Parisian erotic dance club, which I went to upon hearing of its profound sociological content from the New York Times, is every bit as engrossing as promised. I did not need to be sold on its central premise, that nude, or partially nude, dancing can be seriously artistic. That has…