REVIEW: Karole Armitage’s ‘A Pandemic Notebook’ at New York Live Arts
photo: julieta cervantes There they were, two luminaries of the 1980s NYC dance scene, facing us 40 years later, Karole Armitage and Jock Soto, in simple black and grey outfits. Armitage got everyone’s attention with Drastic Classicism (1981), a fierce, high-gloss, visually and sonically arresting work that shook up ballet conventions with outrageous costuming and ...
Dance memories stored in a jewelry bag, a gift from Yuriko
Mar
16
2022
A short time after Paul Taylor Dance Company founding member Sharon Kinney left Taylor’s company and had her first child, a son, she got a call for work. Calling was Yuriko (1920-2022), the great, fleeting exponent, and leading light, of Martha Graham Dance Company. It was the late sixties, and the Japanese-American dancer, transitioning from ...
Martha Graham’s ode to nature, ‘Canticle,’ re-imagined for 21st-C
jacob larsen, so young an, martha graham ‘moon’ ed. note: This story by dance critic Debra Levine, commissioned and published by the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for the Arts, is reprinted with permission. When Martha Graham premiered a new, full-company work with a poetic title, “Canticle for Innocent Comedians,” it was the Spring of ...
Waaaah Ricky, our movie’s terrible! 1
Mar
4
2022
Lucille Ball, held hostage in Aaron Sorkin’s brain in ‘Being The Ricardos’ (2021) So, count them, there are two movies now available, and curiously, both are streaming on Prime video. The first to be released was the biopic written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, Being The Ricardos. My notes written shortly after viewing here: Well, ...
Nijinska’s heartstrings to Ukraine recalled by biographer Garafola
Feb
24
2022
Nijinska (left) rehearsing Nina Vyroubova and Serge Golovine in her version of The Sleeping Beauty produced by the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas in 1960 ed. note: We are nearly paralyzed with concern for Ukraine, which has played such a vital role in dance and the arts, and is now under Russian attack. Giving ...
Swept away by ‘Mimi’ 50 years later: Laemmle Anniversary Classics salutes Lina Wertmuller
Ed. note: We celebrate woman artists on artsmeme, and that’s why Italian director Lina Wertmüller’s sexy, impish, outrageous, passionate ouevre of movies mixing sex, love and politics belongs on the blog. Our guest contributor is the host of Laemmle Theatre’s “Anniversary Screenings” series, Stephen Farber. To launch its Anniversary Classics series in 2022, and during ...
Gerald Clayton, Gretchen Parlato set to open ‘Jazz at Naz’ weekend @ The Soraya
A trio of cutting-edge Jazz at Naz intimate concerts takes jazz’s temperature and points to the art form’s future. Hungry for the potent experience live music brings, jazz fans (safely distanced and masked) will encounter, over the course of one weekend, a blazing sextet, a sensual vocalist, and a scintillating up-and-coming pianist from Havana. The ...
To San Francisco for ‘Mrs. Robinson’ the ballet, and more
Coo coo ca choo, Mrs. Robinson! So go the whimsical lyrics of the buoyant-yet-melancholic Simon & Garfunkel song that burbles behind The Graduate, the seminal film 1967 film directed by Mike Nichols that introduced Dustin Hoffman to the world. Playing the 21-year-old recent college graduate, Benjamin Braddock, Hoffman can’t exactly decide his next step. That ...
Getting back to where we once belonged: Karole Armitage at New York Live Arts
Jan
24
2022
When I perused a press release of the program choreographer Karole Armitage and her performance troupe, Armitage Gone! Dance, intend to present at New York Live Arts in March, it stunned me. She’s calling the evening of dances “A Pandemic Notebook.” But no one seems to have informed the now 60-something dance adventuress (yes, the ...
Cover girl. The great Chita Rivera.
Chita Rivera, DANCE Magazine Nov 1957 West Side Story opened on Broadway in September 1957. By November, DANCE Magazine had a new cover girl.