Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Tiler Peck

    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…

  • Antigona

    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…

  • Congregata

    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…

  • MalPaso Dance Company

    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…

  • Then, 1000 Years of Peace

    Then, 1000 Years of Peace

    You can never read all of the books, or see all of the films, or visit all of the places, or speak all of the languages, or see all of the theatre and the dance and the opera, or listen to all of the songs, or sing them, or embrace every lover, or wonder at…

  • World Economics, Danced

    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

    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…

  • Untrained

    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…

  • Crazy Horse

    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…

  • White Box Project

    White Box Project

    I went through the Black and White Gallery in Williamsburg (manifestly in its white phase) beyond the white curtains into the white and off-white cinderblock courtyard to watch, hear, feel and participate in the WHITE BOX PROJECT by Noémie Lafrance. In the white-walled patio a crowd collected, slowly, of performers and guests, distinguishable only by…