Dance
Farewell to Forsythe’s
By Shanti CrawfordBallett Frankfurt Dancers of William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt arced, angled, and whipped about the opera house stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music earlier this fall (October). At times they seemed to erupt in Terets-like dance passages. And though Forsythe’s densely complex movement style has a contemporary sensibility, ballet is always a shimmering, elusive presence.
Cunningham Chances It
By Vanessa MankoMerce Cunningham has been leading dance audiences into uncharted territory for the last fifty years, and the October performances at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) were no different. When Cunningham broke away from Martha Graham and began choreographing his own works, eventually forming a company in the 1950s, he created a more sparse movement vocabulary in which dancers seemed wholly unaware of each other; remote and self-contained.
O’Connor’s Earthbound
By Vanessa MankoTere O’Connor has longed worked in the realm of dance and text, exploring ways that movement and words might form a symbiotic relationship and thus a coherent unified work of art or dance play as he defines it. But in more recent works, the choreographer has chosen to move away from the text-based and toward pure dance. Last year’s premiere of Winter Belly and Choke at Danspace Project, for instance, marked O’Connor’s change in direction.
