-
World Economics, Danced
Pascal Rambert’s A (MICRO) HISTORY OF WORLD ECONOMICS, DANCED is, I gather, a work of some fluidity, as it incorporates the stories of a changing array of dancers, many of them local to the space in which it is presented, in the context of a world changed by the crisis of 2008. All artworks change…
-
Sider
SIDER is a dance performed to the soundtrack of a film of an unspecified Elizabethan tragedy that the dancers hear through earpieces but that the audience does not. There is other sound and musical accompaniment that we do hear, including vocalizations, which do not seem to me to be in a particular language, although I…
-
Voces del tango
Amidst the exceptional diversity of tango – orchestras, dance shows, milongas, club tango – it is easy to forget the tango song. I do not just mean those singers who front full bands or the passionate and accomplished amateurism of the tango bar. I am also thinking of the tango canción as a sort of…
-
New York Opera Alliance
The New York Opera Alliance, a consortium of 29 of the smaller operatic entities in New York, presented a wonderful showcase of the city’s talent on Sunday afternoon at (le) poisson rouge. A wide selection of work was sampled, mostly contemporary and in English, often giving voice to subjects or communities that tend to be…
-
Neko Case
I think it was around 13 years ago that I saw Neko Case perform in a narrow, smoke-filled dive in downtown Albuquerque. The sound system was bad, the drinks were worse, the bar food even more so. I squeezed up the stairway to nab a stool with a good sightline, and brushed shoulders with a…
-
Kaas Chante Piaf
There is something triumphal about pop at its best, when it seems that talent has conquered all, and it passes, to accept its laurels, under arches erected, if only for a day, by a public seized with desire and eager already for another victory. That is, if you think about it, the structure of most…
-
Nellie McKay
Let us now praise Nellie McKay, the walking definition of one-of-a-kind, defier of genres and categories, contemporizer of the old-fashioned, nostalgizer of the new, wittifier of the tragic, and profundizer of the trivial. There is no one cleverer, or more likable, words like “talented” were invented in the vain hope that they might describe her.…
-
Arguendo
May it please the Court, and for the sake of argument, the Elevator Repair Service has clear and unambiguous standing in the matter of the transformation of non-theatrical texts into performed drama, as evidenced by Exhibit A, Gatz, which brought every word of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby to the stage, and Exhibit B, The Select (The Sun…
-
Hopper Drawing
There is much greatness in the visual art of the United States, but in the end I always settle on Hopper. I went away from Modern Life, the Whitney Museum of American Art‘s 2013 retrospective, thinking his paintings, which teeter on the line between the beauty of solitude and the pangs of loneliness, to be…
-
Una Noche
Lucy Mulloy’s UNA NOCHE is exquisitely edited. There are maybe two or three clichéd shots, which stand out precisely because the film as a whole is so fluent and sure handed in its visual rhythms. It is, broadly speaking, divided into two sections, both as a film and as a story: the second, which centers…