Dance & film co-mingle for a happy 2017

Dance · Film
We’re ringing in a Happy New Year with a movie friend, Rudolf Nureyev, who stars in the Ken Russell biopic, “Valentino” (1977). Nureyev looks smart, doesn’t he, in his tuxedo pictured (above) alongside his festooned co-star, actress Carol Kane. But I also enjoy seeing Rudi sans tux — casbah-style — putting the iron grip on ...

Thank you, New York!

Dance · Film · Theater
A big bravo to Manhattan, Mecca of the Arts, where I have been in residence since September — aka The Season! I joined the furious tour of the performing arts, hitting the ground running, while on a Fellowship from The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU. Forays to Lincoln Center, the Joyce Theater, Brooklyn ...

Seeking Jack Cole at the Rainbow Room

Architecture & Design · Dance · Music
It was a lovely holiday event, a swellegant affair. First Republic Bank of New York, generous supporters of myriad arts organizations, threw a reception at the Rainbow Room high atop Rockefeller Center. Rocking the Room were the Fat Afro Latin Jazz Cats, whose youthful big-band sound boomed beneath the clatter of cocktailers while the crazy ...

Busby Berkeley brings it to Bette Davis in ‘Fashions of 1934’

Dance · Film
A great dance movie starring Bette Davis. Who knew? Apparently Film Forum director of repertory programming, Bruce Goldstein, did. He programmed FASHIONS OF 1934, smart and smashing in a 35mm print and preserved by Library of Congress, as part of Film Forum’s recent nine-day Busby Berkeley festival. It’s a really good movie, well acted and ...

Very now, very Pam-Tan

Architecture & Design · Dance · Reviews
Watching it, it has the feeling of today: choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s “thunder rolling along afterward,” an emotionally fraught, 20-minute-long work fashioned for a sleek tribe of Juilliard School dance majors. Along with contributions by John Heginbotham, Katarzyna Skarpetowska, Matthew Neenan, Tanowitz’s “thunder” comprised the Juilliard School’s annual showcase, “New Dances: Edition 2016.” What is that ...

Horses for courses, from The Lucinda Childs Dance Company

Dance
My favorite work of the first program (“Lucinda Childs, A Portrait 1963-2016”) of a two-part Lucinda Childs retrospective now on at the Joyce Theater was Radial Courses (1976), a hugely fun, tongue-in-cheek, pretzel-puzzle of a dance. Promenading at a clipped pace, four tidily attired male dancers circumscribe a large oval shape. As the British love ...

Ticket to dance, courtesy of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Dance
by 
During the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater‘s winter season in New York, ticketed dancegoers should hang onto their ducats! For 60 days following the Ailey performance you attend, your stub will be good for one free class at the Ailey Extension program. Those classes happen in the company’s glam, window-walled, mid-Manhattan building. You’ll get to ...

‘Dance Masters’ Chakiris & Chase in ‘An Evening at the Barn’

Dance · Film
Two great dancers. Two beautiful people. Both with Los Angeles dance roots. Both gypsy dancers in the great decade of movie-musicals, the 1950s. Between them, their titles include: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, There’s No Business Like Show Business, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, Meet Me in Las Vegas, The I Don’t Care Girl, Daddy Long ...

Dance on, three nymphs, at Hollyhock House!

Architecture & Design · Dance · Visual arts
Don’t these girls deserve a rest? Apparently not! We recently announced the joyful homecoming of a reaaaaally old work of art — a first-century Roman bas relief still in stunning condition. A high-tech replication of an original tableau of three dancing girls lives once more on Olive Hill, a hilltop retreat dedicated to the arts ...

Aline’s nymphs to prance once more on Olive Hill

Architecture & Design · Dance · Visual arts
It’s the thing I most love, except for my relatives. I need this marble when I arrive home from a day of shopping or business. And I recover immediately when I look at those three maidens. They sooth me with their rhythm, that balance of movement, so charming, so pitre … This marble is already ...