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2 weeks ago | 
nytimes.com | Brian Seibert
Jasperse's engrossing "Tides" was a thrilling opener to a festival that often feels like a home for first drafts. It begins with a line of women in black dresses, advancing toward us. As the tide of their bodies turns back, one more woman emerges through them. She holds our attention with both otherworldly fluidity and a flashing of claws. She points at us with casual command, then shimmies. As she walks away, she looks over her shoulder with the tiniest of smirks.
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2 weeks ago | 
flipboard.com | Brian Seibert
NowApartments for Rent in a Former Office, but You Have to Live in MidtownFor many New Yorkers, Midtown Manhattan, with its gleaming skyscrapers and busy transportation hubs, lacks an element of cool and cachet that its more culturally vibrant neighbors have.
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2 weeks ago | 
post-gazette.com | Brian Seibert
NEW YORK CITY — The baritone saxophone is hulking instrument, a tube of brass so long it extends down past a player's knees. It makes burly, reedy sounds, deep growls and wails. Kyle Abraham's new dance “2x4” opens intriguingly with only a baritone saxophonist onstage, honking and stomping.
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3 weeks ago | 
nytimes.com | Brian Seibert
On program of New York premieres at the Joyce Theater, Abraham's contribution stands out and so do his dancers. The baritone saxophone is hulking instrument, a tube of brass so long it extends down past a player's knees. It makes burly, reedy sounds, deep growls and wails. Kyle Abraham's new dance "2x4" opens intriguingly with only a baritone saxophonist onstage, honking and stomping. That soloist provides the dance's music - until a second baritone saxophonist arrives.
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3 weeks ago | 
nytimes.com | Brian Seibert |Mark Sommerfeld
Max Pollak rehearsing at 92NY for the Uptown Rhythm Dance Festival. The Uptown Rhythm Festival will mix styles, including tap, swing and flamenco, that are flourishing despite problems of rehearsal and performance space. Max Pollak rehearsing at 92NY for the Uptown Rhythm Dance Festival. Credit... Fans of the sometimes disrespected genre known as dance music have a quip: What other kind of music is there? A similar crack could be made by artists put into a category called rhythm dance.
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1 month ago | 
berkshireeagle.com | Brian Seibert
CHATHAM, N.Y. — PS21, a newly prominent center for contemporary performance, has a new artistic and executive director, it announced March 27. Vallejo Gantner has already stepped into the role. Gantner comes to the position from a long career in arts administration, including leading the similarly named but unconnected New York City theater PS122 (now Performance Space New York) from 2005 to 2017.
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1 month ago | 
nytimes.com | Gia Kourlas |Brian Seibert
"I didn't know how to do this back then," Bebe Miller said near the start of "Vespers, Reimagined." Back then was 1982, when she performed her improvised solo "Vespers" at Danspace Project as part of Parallels, a series organized by Houston-Jones to gather Black choreographers working in experimental dance. Now she knows.
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1 month ago | 
nytimes.com | Brian Seibert
AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. The lights go up on two dancers, each isolated in a zone of light. As the two trade moves and trade places, recognizable elements keep recurring: the side-to-side head isolations of Indian dance, a duck walk from vogueing, a hip-hop crotch grab. The ingredients are familiar, but the combination is novel.
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2 months ago | 
nytimes.com | Brian Seibert
What the performers do in those costumes is less developed. Mainly they travel back and forth from one end of the stage to the other, sometimes with sticks - not with the flare of voguers on the catwalk, nor with the simplicity of postmodern pedestrians, just listlessly, stutteringly, as if not sure exactly what they're doing. Periodically, in squares of video projected on the floor, Makini recites poems: one addressed to a newborn, one to a lover, one that we can't hear.
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2 months ago | 
nytimes.com | Brian Seibert
A program celebrating Twyla Tharp's 60th year making dances features the masterwork "Diabelli" and the fresh new "Slacktide," set to Philip Glass. In the middle of Beethoven's "Diabelli Variations," from 1823, the pianist's left hand starts rocking up and down the keyboard in a pattern that sounds uncannily like boogie-woogie from the 1930s and '40s. For a choreographer courageous enough to tackle that score, this is low-hanging fruit.
