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Dance Insider Principal Sponsorship Available: The Dance Insider Principal Sponsor will join Principal Sponsors Freespace Dance (above) and Slippery Rock Dance in sharing for one year the very top spot on this Dance Insider Home page — the longest-running Home page in Dance Journalism. You get that top spot for four months (where the Nutmeg Ballet image is now on top of our Home page); when you’re not in that spot, you get a recurrent ad on the Home page. For details, please contact publisher Paul Ben-Itzak at paulbenitzak@gmail.com .

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Escape from 9-11 & Terrorism: Maguy Marin’s Brave New World revealed in Paris

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2002, 2017 Paul Ben-Itzak

(Author’s Note: The first dance response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — today more relevant than ever.)

PARIS — AIDS had its Tony Kushner to write it a fantasia, and now 9-11 has its Maguy Marin to furnish a plan for action, an artist who both captures the actual calamity and lights the escape route. With her new “Points de Fuite” (“Points of Escape”), which premiered last night at the Theatre de la Ville – Sarah Bernhardt, Marin not only affirms the appropriateness of an artistic response to 9-11 and the aesthetic potential of such an expression, but its absolute necessity to finding points of escape from the despair, depression, rage and helplessness which continue to emanate from our literal, moral, and political ground zero in the wake of September 11.

To receive the complete article, first published on February 13, 2002, subscribers please contact publisher Paul Ben-Itzak at paulbenitzak@gmail.com. Not a subscriber? Subscribe to the DI 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 Archive of 2,000 exclusive reviews by 150 leading dance critics of performances 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.

Schussing the Korper with Sasha Waltz

By Nancy Dalva
Copyright 2002, 2017 Nancy Dalva

NEW YORK — Sasha Waltz’s “Korper” — which traveled from its home theater, Berlin’s Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 20th Next Wave Festival last week — really does feel like something new, or rather, something neo. This is what German expressionism looks like in the 21st century: a fusion form, as much deconstructed as constructed, but reliant on the German past for its root images and its ur-meanings, as I intuit them. “Korper” — which means body, and which is about the body — is a 90-minute ensemble piece with an international cast of 13. It unfolds with an eerie lack of tone. The funny, the tragic, the weird, the obscure, the preposterous — they’re all given the same weight, which gives the piece the look of surrealism and the feeling of a dream.

To receive the complete article, first published on November 19, 2002, subscribers please contact publisher Paul Ben-Itzak at paulbenitzak@gmail.com. Not a subscriber? Subscribe to the DI 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 Archive of 2,000 exclusive reviews by 150 leading dance critics of performances 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.

Pass Me that Gui-tar ‘Fore I Smash Another Beer Can on My Forehead: Stacy Dawson Goes West, Young Woman

By Maura Nguyen Donohue
Copyright 2002, 2017 Maura Nguyen Donohue

NEW YORK — Stacy Dawson calls her first evening-length work, “Best Western,” a “hallucination that pays tribute to the legacies forged in the underbelly of country and western American folk music.” Like any good hallucination, the work, which played at PS 122 this past weekend, trips through moments of complete obscurity into flashes of incredible brilliance. It moves beyond the obvious Dawson staple of comedic lip-synching into a darker internal journey for denizens of a lonely and heart-broken realm. It’s her delirious homage to country music.

To receive the complete article, first published on February 5, 2002, subscribers please contact publisher Paul Ben-Itzak at paulbenitzak@gmail.com. Not a subscriber? Subscribe to the DI 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 Archive of 2,000 exclusive reviews by 150 leading dance critics of performances on five continents from 1998 through 2015. You can also purchase a complete copy of the Archives for just $49 (individuals) or $129 (institutions) Contact Paul at paulbenitzak@gmail.com .

David Gordon’s Pure Dance: No Cynicism or Pedestrian Movement Around Here

By Susan Yung
Copyright 2001, 2017 Susan Yung

NEW YORK — It is a nearly inconceivable truth that David Gordon has been making dances for about 40 years. The truly amazing thing is that his recent premieres, as seen at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church Friday, are fresh by any standard, without resorting to shock tactics or cynicism. And if you expect choreography by Gordon, a charter member of the Judson Church movement, to be banal and pedestrian, you’d be wrong. It is visceral, technically challenging, immensely pleasing dance/theater executed by performers equal to the task….

To receive the complete article, first published on January 8, 2001, subscribers please contact publisher Paul Ben-Itzak at paulbenitzak@gmail.com. Not a subscriber? Subscribe to the DI 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 Archive of 2,000 exclusive reviews by 150 leading dance critics of performances on five continents from 1998 through 2015. You can also purchase a complete copy of the Archives for just $49 (individuals) or $129 (institutions); $99 when you order before October 15.  Contact Paul at paulbenitzak@@gmail.com .

Making decoys with Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg at MoMA in NY

From the exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends, running through September 17 at the Museum of Modern Art: Trisha Brown, “Glacial Decoy,” 1979. With costumes, set, and lighting (with Beverly Emmons), by Robert Rauschenberg. From  performances by the Trisha Brown Dance Company at the Marymount Manhattan College Theater, New York, June 20–24, 1979. Left to right: Trisha Brown, Nina Lundborg, and Dance Insider contributor Lisa Kraus. (See below for Kraus on setting Brown’s “Glacial Decoy” on the Paris Opera Ballet.)  Photograph: Babette Mangolte © 1979 Babette Mangolte. (All Rights of Reproduction Reserved) Courtesy Museum of Modern Art.

Following Trump statements on Charlottesville terrorist attack, de Lavallade declines White House invitation (Corrected)

By Dance Insider Staff
Copyright 2017 The Dance Insider

NEW YORK — Following President Donald Trump’s equating Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists with those who protested their armed presence Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia — where 20-year-old James Alex Fields, Jr. has been charged with second-degree murder after allegedly ramming his car into a crowd protesting the White supremacists, killing 32-year-old paralegal and activist Heather Heyer and wounding 19 others — dance legend Carmen de Lavallade said Thursday she will not be attending the White House reception following her receiving the Kennedy Center Honors Award next December.

“I am truly honored to receive the Kennedy Center Honors Award and look forward to attending the ceremony at the Kennedy Center,” de Lavallade announced. “In light of the socially divisive and morally caustic narrative that our existing leadership is choosing to engage in, and in keeping with the principles that I and so many others have fought for, I will be declining the invitation to attend the reception at the White House.”

On Tuesday, the president told reporters outside Trump Tower, revising an earlier  statement about Saturday’s attack in which he condemned  White supremacists including the Ku Klux Klan, “I think there is blame on both sides” who took part in the demonstrations. “You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” Yesterday, referring to the city of Charlottesville’s decision to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee which was the pretext for the extremists’ descending on the Virginia city, Trump added, “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”

In addition to Ms. Heyer, two state troopers were also killed when their helicopter crashed while they were en route to the demonstration.