NEW YORK — “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” is not a play. Or that’s not what the breakthrough work was called by its author, Ntozake Shange. Her word was “choreopoem,” and any production of “For Colored Girls,” like the major revival now in previews at the Public Theater, has to figure out what the term means.
NEW YORK — Choreographer Kyle Abraham is a Misty Copeland fan. One of his favorite fan memories is of a Prince concert where Copeland appeared as a surprise guest artist. This was before she was a superstar — before 2015, when she made the cover of Time magazine and became the first black woman promoted to principal dancer at American Ballet Theater. So maybe not everyone in the audience knew who she was. But Abraham did.
At the White Plains Jazz Festival this month, the band Mwenso & the Shakes was setting up, plugging in instruments and checking microphones. Michela Marino Lerman was among them. She set down a wooden board and hooked it up to the sound system. Then she changed out of her sandals into tap shoes. Lerman is a tap dancer, and she is also a member of the band.
NEW YORK — When the Joyce Theater began its annual ballet festival, in summer 2013, it was as a useful showcase of small companies from around the United States. Upstart and offshoot troupes needed New York exposure but maybe weren't ready to fill the Joyce for a week on their own.
Denise Roberts Hurlin was a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1991, which meant she could not avoid the terrifying reality of AIDS. “So many friends and colleagues were getting sick and dying,” she recalled recently. “So many.”
For the dance’s 20th anniversary, Bard SummerScape invited Brown’s company, Evidence, to perform “Grace” as never before: with live music. Bard also commissioned a new companion piece, “Mercy.” Both ideas were risky.
Glover, 45, has been saying things like this for decades. Usually, it’s to help audiences respond to his dance as music, an effect he achieves more in directly in performance.
NEW YORK — Walk around bustling Lower Manhattan this week, and you might come upon prompts to slow down and reflect: “Have you seen the horizon lately?” “Listen to the sound of the Earth turning.”
NEW YORK — Watching Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater can change your life. If that sounds like a slogan, it’s truth in advertising, an established fact that this most self-congratulatory of companies has never been too modest to trumpet. Many testimonials to this Ailey effect come from inside the organization itself: from the dancers, directors and guest choreographers who cite their first experience of Ailey as life altering.
(Critic’s notebook): NEW YORK — When Sara Mearns and Amar Ramasar took the stage at New York City Ballet on Saturday afternoon, they were greeted by so much applause they had to delay dancing until it died down.
Even to the most admiring observers, the Ballet Nacional de Cuba has seemed, for a very long time, an institution stuck in the past. One reason has been especially conspicuous: the advanced age of the company’s artistic director, Alicia Alonso, now 98.
NEW YORK — Consider a duet in which the man alternately drags the woman around and shoves her away, sometimes rolling her recumbent body with his feet, all while she begs for more.
NEW YORK — Lately, there’s been a lot of talk of a “new era” or “new chapter” at New York City Ballet. At the company’s spring gala at the David H. Koch Theater on Thursday, both phrases cropped up in preshow speeches by the new artistic director, Jonathan Stafford, and the new associate artistic director, Wendy Whelan. These speeches were far from lively, but fresh ideas have been emerging in other forms. The fruit of one was on the program: a commission for choreographer Pam Tanowitz.
NEW YORK — Cory Stearns was feeling cocky. It was 2001, and he was 15, competing in the finals of the Youth America Grand Prix ballet competition. As he took the stage to perform a solo from “Swan Lake,” some students from his school cheered, and he winked back. Then the start of the music surprised him, and, as he remembers it, he “choked completely.”
NEW YORK — It was time to tell the story again, and who better to tell it than Cicely Tyson? She was there, after all, in 1968, just after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, when African-American ballet star Arthur Mitchell called her to his apartment at 2 a.m. She was there when he asked, “What should we do?” and when he said, “I have an idea.”
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
