The Best Dance Writing in the World: The Return of Jill Johnston — Our Man in Flat Iron Sees Ariane Anthony Through Her Eyes

By Chris Dohse
Copyright 2000, 2022 Chris Dohse

First published exclusively on the Dance Insider on May 9, 2000. To find out how to purchase your own copy of the Dance Insider Archive of 2000 exclusive reviews of performances on five continents over 20+ years by 150 of the best critics in the world, most of them professional dance artists, contact us at artsvoyager@gmail.com . To read more Chris Dohse right now, click here.

NEW YORK — Forgive me, I’ve spent the weekend reading Jill Johnston and I am madly inspired to wonder how many postmodern angels fit on the head of a pin. Therefore I’m going to write the next several hundred words pretending to be her, circa 1965.

Ariane Anthony resembles Buster Keaton as much as Mary Wigman. I mean Ariane Anthony’s quality when performing quizzes Keaton and Wigman in equal proportions. Ariane Anthony & Company make Ausdruckstanz that riffles through Twentieth Century Avant-Garde “Isms” like a rack of thrift store bargains. It is a quirkfest and I like it.

The Construction Company’s space on East 18th Street, where Anthony showed, is showing, and will show her “Why Imagine Golden Birds? & Other Dances” (May 9, May 13-16), is a white shoebox full of variously wonderful things. For instance, vigorous, figurative brushstrokes fill its lobby (paintings by Shannon Woods). Under them stands me: wide-eyed participant in the fertile underbelly of dance’s current upswing or arbiter of the pop cultural zeitgeist? Who knows. All three dances before intermission are longer than they need to be, perhaps because their episodes are too closely bundled to John Stone’s scores. Stone’s music snugfits Anthony’s imagined geography and is worth its own analysis, but all the same, each of Act One’s works dawdles in its middle. Like Anne Sexton’s string beans, Anthony’s vignettes become “too many to eat.”

A cartoon, a vaudeville, 1998’s solo “Gasoline.” A fey waif makes our acquaintance. I wonder if she will keep it up. Sometimes a hat is just a hat. Martha Sullivan sings and I’m glad for it. She and her singing are lovely and they are a captivating device to engage us while the roadies shift scenery. Three male dancers, in “Seeing I,” begin in an oneiromantic tableau with the temporal and spatial distortions of “Nude Descending a Staircase.” Their fractures unfold slowly, a scale both brave and audacious, not to mention chair-twiddling. Beuys’s fedora and shabby overcoat make an appearance, in triplicate. Who allowed this female artist to so subtly capture a certain ineffable maleness, and/or draw it from her dancers — Peter Campbell, Jackson Kent, Brendan McCall? Who leaked these insights? Deceptively spare, controlled performances by the guys ain’t no small potatoes neither. I would like it better if the transitions were fully lit, Flux-like. One of the guys wore cool socks. The gladragged women of “Low Altitude” make nonsensical urgency of crafty non-sequiturs, equal parts funhouse and sideshow, calliope and bonhomie.

Everyone was entirely cheerful during intermission and shared some chips that looked like styrofoam and waited in line for the bathroom and smelled of garlic. A glass of wine drunk on the curb was thoroughly urbane. Cast replacements too complex to recall were announced.

Thirteen stanzas by Wallace Stevens provide bones for the new work mentioned in the program’s title. An ambitious project, a dance-play for thinking during. It makes a space to admire itself in; it insists on itself. Its increasing and decreasing geometries make somber wintriness of a heat wave. Echoing Anthony’s idiosyncrasies, the cast achieves a delicate eloquence and inscrutability, though nobody nudges their head quite the way she does. It was a quirkfest and I liked it.

Monkishness: For Monk’s 40th, a Birthday Chorus of Choreographic Royalty

By Chris Dohse
Copyright 2004, 2019 Chris Dohse

(To celebrate two decades as the leading online voice for dancers and  number one source for exclusive reviews of performances from around the world, the Dance Insider is revisiting its Archive. Among the 150+ critics who have honored the DI by making us the vehicle to share their perceptions of the art which is so dear to them, we’re particularly elated to have been able to feature the incisive, articulate, ambidextrous, and electrifying observations of Mr. Chris Dohse. To find out how you can obtain your own copy of the 2,000 Flash Reviews of performances, books, cinema, and art from around the world covered by the  DI/AV since 1998 for as little as $49, e-mail paulbenitzak@gmail.com. Today’s encore of Chris’s piece, first published on November 23, 2004, is sponsored by Slippery Rock Dance. To learn about Sponsorship opportunities at the Dance Insider & Arts Voyager, e-mail paulbenitzak@gmail.com. And to make a simple gift, in Dollars or Euros, via PayPal, just designate your payment to paulbenitzak@gmail.com or write us at that address to learn how to donate by check.)

NEW YORK — In honor of the 40th anniversary of Meredith Monk’s creative output, Laurie Uprichard, the executive director of Danspace Project, assembled a stellar group of post-modern choreographers to create new works set to Monk’s music. If you traced these choreographers and their influences and resumés and their similarities to other dancemakers, then connected those names, lineages, mentors and proteges to Monk, you’d have the material for a fabulous avant-garde drinking game.

Each choreographer in the “Dance to Monk” program, seen November 20 at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, did what he or she is known best for doing. Like flavors in a broth that has been reduced for thickness, the qualities of their choreographic minds were magnified in unpretentious works that existed primarily to celebrate Monk’s genre-defying compositions. But in each dance, an appreciation of Monk’s person also abided. Aligned with the generosity and humanity of Monk’s own works, any sense of one-upmanship was absent. These ended up being minor works for these major artists, but each was significant as an historic record of the kind of impact one mind can have on her peers. Infected by Monkishness, the choreographers allowed rare sides of themselves to come to the surface. So for instance, we saw an uncharacteristically humane Molissa Fenley, a positively humble Bill T. Jones.

In Fenley’s trio, “Piece for Meredith,” we saw the impassive, somewhat chilly gaze, the imperturbable carriage, bird-like arms and crab-like legs, and formally formal forms that Fenley has built a repertory from. But set against the ethereal voices of Monk’s work from “mercy,” we also saw three lovely women who looked at times like figures on Golgotha in a liturgical dance: supportive, caregiving and reverent. When they bowed to the three sides of the seating area separately, a kind of depth to their spatial relationships became present that had been hidden within the material. Fenley’s style was suddenly lit in a much different light.

Ann Carlson’s “Flesh,” a previous commission for Oakland’s mixed-ability Axis Dance Company, questioned the quality of the inert body as two women in electric wheelchairs stacked able-bodied dancers in a heap downstage like so much firewood. Wearing nondescript jumpsuits and goggles, the cast might have been spelunkers or skydivers or explorers on an Arctic tundra.

Three solos were performed by their creators. Sean Curran was light in his loafers in “St. Petersburg Waltz.” Curran’s explosive aerials and petit allegro belied in some way his characterization of a hesitant, avuncular Eastern European folk dancer. But his snapped-to gestures, bowler and wistful shrug quickly revealed his storytelling heart.

Dana Reitz rocked from foot to foot like an obsessive rebirther or Trager therapist in “With Meredith in Mind,” and her white tunic glowed in the space with the purity of a healer. Kathy Kaufmann’s lighting rose to the challenge of Reitz’s history of innovation with designers. Tai chi simplicity gave way to immediacy, and Reitz’s gestures began to look like urgent sign language. With her arms chattering against the assured rhythm of her weight changes, her direct, rather shining demeanor cut through. The piece became not about what she was saying but about who was doing the talking, and why, and why we wanted to listen.

Jones ended the program in a haunting video projection made by Janet Wong. Equal parts whimsy and sadness and edited into the form of a duet with his ghostly naked self, the manipulated and halted shots began to suggest absence. When Jones tipped his hat and smiled, we could realize that his entire dance had been based on a simple bow, the signal that something has reached fruition. The impulse of that bow radiated through the audience when Monk came out to receive our gratitude (and to listen to us sing “Happy Birthday”).

Post-Modern Classics: Brown and Rainer Live — Stripping White Oak’s Celebrity from its Integrity

By Chris Dohse
Copyright 2000, 2119 Chris Dohse

(To celebrate its 20th anniversary as the leading artist-driven publication in the United States, the Dance Insider and Arts Voyager  is reflecting on Post-Modern classics, as captured by Dance Insider critics in performances around the world over the past two decades. This Flash Review from the Dance Insider Archive was first published on June 10, 2000. To find out about purchasing your own copy of the DI’s Archive of more than 2000 exclusive reviews by more than 150 leading critics of performances and art exhibitions on five continents over the past 20 years, e-mail paulbenitzak@gmail.com . Today’s re-publication of this Flash Review is made possible by Freespace Dance.)

NEW YORK — Forty years after its genesis, Trisha Brown’s and Yvonne Rainer’s icon-blasting realness, seen last night at BAM, still blows the cobwebs off mummified high art seriousness and still awes the bedazzled sycophants of mummified high art style with a wazoo full of ideas. Their dissimilar artifacts, separately derived from Robert Dunn’s 1960-62 workshop, strip the White Oak Dance Project’s celebrity from its integrity to reveal its pith within complex, lexicon-defying vocabularies.

My taxi got lost on its way to the Brooklyn Academy of Music so I missed a first solo, Mikhail Baryshnikov doing Brown. My program opened with John Jasperse Lite, “See Through Knot.” All five dancers really strained their necks into it, but the vast Gilman Opera House diluted somehow Jasperse’s odd, lugubrious time and stripped his signature idiosyncrasy to compositional strictures. In this particular case of taking downtown style off the street and marching it up the avenue, something got lost in translation.

The correspondences of Brown’s 1979 “Glacial Decoy” are still filled with humor, subtlety and minimal cool, but the rural still life idealized in Robert Rauschenberg’s slides smacks of cultural colonialism, if you bothered to look at them.

Baryshnikov in a Mark Morris solo, “Peccadillos” … Here’s the stuff that fills the seats. I bet the hoi-polloi would applaud wildly to watch either of them wipe their ass. Morris manipulates expectations predictably (toy piano, doll-like staccato) and the crowd chuckled and peed themselves. A bonus treat, Morris jumped onstage to take a bow.

Rainer’s collage of previous elements/homage to the mythos of herself rations dance history in real time. If I was a Marxist I’d guess “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan” critiques commodity, smearing Have and Have Not across Y2K complacency. Rainer is not shy to reveal her own mysteries. Whatever her cast might be doing onstage, the framing device of her intellect is always the real star. Her abiding humor surprises, the sympathy with which she prods the images we call Twentieth Century icons. Rainer is insistently, disarmingly clever; she discovers previously undetected details of White Oak talents and defines their celebrity anew

20 years of telling stories not told elsewhere: Here’s a work I don’t ‘like.’ Which doesn’t mean it’s bad.

By Chris Dohse
Copyright 2005, 2018 Chris Dohse

(To receive the complete article, first published on October 14, 2005, subscribers please e-mail paulbenitzak@gmail.com. Not a subscriber? Subscribe to the DI for one year for just $36/year or $21 or Euros for students, as attested to by a copy of your student I.D., by designating your PayPal payment in that amount to paulbenitzak@gmail.com, or write us at that address to learn how to pay by check, and receive full access to all new articles plus our 20-year archive of 2000 reviews by 150 critics of performances and art exhibits on five continents.)

Building the dance audience: Rat-faced Bastards in the Kitchen with Michelson

By Chris Dohse
Copyright 2003, 2018 Chris Dohse

(To receive the complete article, first published on April 18, 2003, subscribers please e-mail paulbenitzak@gmail.com. Not a subscriber? Subscribe to the DI for one year for just $36/year or $21 or Euros for students, as attested to by a copy of your student I.D., by designating your PayPal payment in that amount to paulbenitzak@gmail.com, or write us at that address to learn how to pay by check, and receive full access to all new articles plus our 20-year archive of 2000 reviews by 150 critics of performances and art exhibits on five continents.

The Work is Never Done + la suite: Simone Forti @ MoMA and filling the Danspace at St. Mark’s Church with ‘palpable acuity’

From the exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done, running at the Museum of Modern Art through February 3: Simone Forti, “See Saw,” 1960. Performed at Reuben Gallery, New York, December 16–18, 1960. Performers: Yvonne Rainer and Robert Morris. (Rainer and Morris also worked on the piece in Yoko Ono’s Chambers Street Loft Series.) Photo courtesy Robert R. McElroy photographs of Happenings and early performance art, the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.M.7).

By Chris Dohse
Copyright 2001, 2018 Chris Dohse

(To receive the complete article, first published on November 13, 2001, subscribers please e-mail paulbenitzak@gmail.com. Not a subscriber? Subscribe to the DI for one year for just $36/year or $21 or Euros for students, as attested to by a copy of your student I.D., by designating your PayPal payment in that amount to paulbenitzak@gmail.com, or write us at that address to learn how to pay by check, and receive full access to all new articles plus our 20-year archive of 2000 reviews by 150 critics of performances and art exhibits on five continents.)

New on The Dance Insider: Charles Atlas, Dancenoise, Jodi Melnick, and more

Haven’t yet subscribed to the DI? This week you’re missing Parker Herren’s Flash Review of Charles Atlas Presents: The Kitchen Follies, with performances by Dancenoise, Jodi Melnick, and others, and the accompanying retrospective of Atlas’s video work recently presented at the New York theater. This week subscribers also receive, exclusively by e-mail, from the DI’s Archive of more than 2,000 reviews of performances on five continents by more than 150 writers, Angela Jones’s 2004 Flash of Margie Gillis performing at the Joyce Theater, which begins: “Margie Gillis is the reason I dance and choreograph.” And, from the same year, Chris Dohse’s Flash of Tere O’Connor’s “Frozen Mommy,” which, Chris writes, “burns into the mind’s retina like an 8-millimeter film with embarrassing footage from your childhood that sticks in the projector and melts against its bulb, blistering the image to smithereens.” To subscribe to the DI and access both new content and stories from our 20-year archive, for just $39.95/year individuals (students: $19.95 with university ID) or $49.95 institutions, just designate your PayPal payment in that amount to paulbenitzak@gmail.com, or write us at that address to find out about payment by check or in Euros. (In the latter case, the payments will be directed to our European correspondents.) You can also contact us at that address to find out about limited, well-integrated e-mail and Web site advertising and sponsor options. The Dance Insider is sponsored by Freespace Dance (top) and Slippery Rock University Dance (above).

Back to the Future: How to access stories on the Dance Insider & Arts Voyager

Returning to its roots as a Direct E-mail List — as the most effective, efficient way to serve our subscribers, writers, advertisers, and readers — the DI will heretofore make all new content, as well as reprints from our 20-year archive of more than 2,000 exclusive reviews by 150 writers of performances on five continents, plus news, commentary, art, and the Jill Johnston Archive, available strictly by e-mail. To subscribe to the DI and access both this new content and archived stories, for just $29.95/year individuals or $49.95 institutions, just designate your PayPal payment in that amount to paulbenitzak@gmail.com, or write us at that address to find out about payment by check or in Euros. (In the latter case, the payments will be directed to our European correspondents.) You can also contact us at that address to find out about limited, well-integrated e-mail advertising options.

20 years of Dance on Dance Insider: O Deborah — In Hay World with Durning, Greenberg, Gutierrez, Mapp & Schick

“What is the truth of the universe that fills your body and mind? Don’t tell me, show me.”     — John Daido Loori, “The True Dharma Eye”

“Inside the fortress of our skins we human beings have remarkable defenses against enemy intrusions, but we are not impregnable.” — John Money, “Reinterpreting the Unspeakable”

By Chris Dohse
Copyright 2006, 2018 Chris Dohse

Founded in 1998 by a collective of professional dance artists and journalists to build the dance audience, tell stories not told elsewhere, and give a voice to dancers, the DI is celebrating its 20th anniversary. See below for information on accessing our archive of 2,000 reviews of performances and art from around the world by 150 leading dance critics.

NEW YORK — So Deborah Hay’s “O, O,” January 26: in this version a showcase for five downtown dance veterans (Jeanine Durning, Neil Greenberg, Miguel Gutierrez, Juliette Mapp, and Vicky Schick). These bodies are as comfortable inside Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church as five old socks in an old shoe. As we enter, cell phones trill, powering down; we’re not particularly paying attention and the dancers enter consecutively, taking the space to perform subtle gestures. They are immediately, and as it turns out, irrevocably, embodiments of a sort of politesse, a sort of Stoicism. They impassively ignore us, even though their gaze includes us, as if they’re well-trained figure models.

To receive the complete article, first published on February 17, 2006, subscribers please contact publisher Paul Ben-Itzak at paulbenitzak@gmail.com. Not a subscriber? Subscribe to the Dance Insider & Arts Voyager for just $29.95/year ($99 for institutions gets full access for all your teachers, students, dance company members, etc.) by designating your PayPal payment in that amount to paulbenitzak@gmail.com, or write us at that address to learn how to pay by check. Subscribers receive full access to the DI/AV Archive of 2,000 exclusive reviews by 150 leading critics of performances and art on five continents from 1998 through 2015. You can also purchase a complete copy of the Archives for just $49 (individuals) or $109 (institutions) Contact Paul at paulbenitzak@gmail.com. Sign up by April 20 and receive a FREE Home page photo ad.

Protected: Still Re-born: Jones/Zane Looks Back and Finds You Can’t Go Home Again

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