Accent on Youth
As summer creeps to a close, I thank the stars for the Shins: look beneath the mind-bending time signatures of this pop group and you’ll find a neo-folk style that straddles eras as well as genres. Its easy evocation of coltish youth suits Trey McIntyre’s choreography for the Shins-titled Oh, Inverted World, part of the...
How Deep is Your Love: Robin Gibb 1948-2012
First Donna Summer, now this. Curious, though, about the album he released this spring, his first toe-dip into classical music called Titanic Requiem. RIP, thanks for enhancing the soundtrack of my youth…
Birthday Suits
Sometimes a demurral speaks volumes, as I discovered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this weekend. Me and my spouse dropped in to catch Naked Before the Camera, a pocket-sized exhibition of photographic nudes culled from the Met’s own holdings. The show is smart and informative, combining names from the arts canon (Eakins,...
Why my heart doesn’t go dancing
Is April the kindest, or the cruelest month? The party line affirms the first: it’s the time of rebirth when saucer magnolias pop their tragic blooms, crocuses and tulips sprout, warm weather hints and Easter descends, toting tales of resurrection. I’m not feeling it, which makes me wonder if I ever have. Chocolate bunnies excepted,...
Firsts: Don Cornelius 1936-2012, Camilla Williams 1919-2012, Ben Gazzara 1930-2012
You turned on the TV on Saturday afternoon and there he was, the envy of every black boy on the block. It was his high style and aspirational exhortations that drew us each week, mirrored more youthfully by the Soul Train dancers, whose moves we copied for use on our own dance floors: street corners,...
Pleasures By Parsons
With Manhattan now plunged into tundra-nipping temps, no one could be blamed for falling into the contagious warmth that emanates from the Joyce Theater in Chelsea. Now through the 22nd, Parsons Dance is weaving its spell of virtuosic imagination that since 1985 has only deepened in its ingenuity and delights. Would that every company instilled...
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Season’s Dreams
A reason for the seasons was what I got when, in grade school, I was taught the myth of Demeter and Persephone; the idea that a spell could be cast to wither grass and leaves made a stronger impression than the myth’s true focus: a mother’s longing for a daughter she could only see six...
Of Reliquaries and Retrospects
The mournful qualities of fall—all those dying leaves whose color mimics that of dried blood—complement the inaugural season at New York LiveArts, the still-young merger between Dance Theater Workshop and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Dance Company. With evergreen works by Jones and John Kelly being remounted, how intriguing that so far the theater unfolding in the...
Mourning Songs for a Theater, in a City Still Reeling
This week in Manhattan, Ground Zero isn’t the only repository of grief and longing. At the Marriott Marquis Theater in midtown, you’ll find a different kind of mourning going on. Before the curtain rises on the current revival of Follies, Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 elegiac musical, the audience is treated to a scene familiar to that...
Gladys Horton, lead singer of the Marvelettes, 1945-2011
Link: See them sing “Don’t Mess with Bill.” the-marvelettes-don-mess-with-1vwvs_2ey2h_.html They-Were-Great-Once Dept: the day Gladys Horton cajoled a few girlfriends into starting a singing group ultimately called the Marvelettes, they couldn’t have foreseen how happy they’d make a bunch of black kids growing up in Ohio. Their snappy, sexy melodies propelled a street-corner symphony heard around the...
Winter Storms on the Great White Way
Published in Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine, Winter 2011 2010 ends as the country strives to dig itself out of snowstorms that clobbered both the Eastern and Western regions of our nation. The weather feels an apt metaphor for a multiplicity of woes beyond airport delays and unplowed streets—think, for instance, of the snow job visited...
