Dance
In Conversation
IT'S JUST THE CHOREOGRAPHY THAT SOMETIMES GETS IN THE WAY
ANNIE-B PARSON with Stephanie Joy Del Rosso
It is a clichéd New York art world complaint: no one is doing anything interesting anymore. Everything is insular or redundant. And while such blanket dismissals are unproductive, the tenor of the criticism is sometimes accurate. Annie-B Parson kicks these grumblings forcibly and ingeniously aside.
SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW
A Marriage Of Styles In Baroque’d
By Madison Mainwaring
The “baroque” is generally associated with poor taste and bad politics. We think of Versailles and the courtiers powdering their wigs with flour as people died of starvation on the streets. It might be surprising to learn that the excessive aesthetic of the baroque actually started in the populist tradition, when in 1563 the Catholic church declared that artists needed to make an effort to reach a common audience. Standards of form and genre were to be trumped for a more spontaneous, individualistic expression of the human voice. The tragicomedy became a hit. I
APPROACHING THE POLE
Gerard & Kelly's P.O.L.E. at the New Museum
By Leslie Allison
Pole dancing is a form generally excluded from the critical discourse surrounding dance, and—though increasingly less so—dance is a form historically excluded from the critical discourse of fine arts and the museum. It is thrilling then to experience Gerard & Kelly’s P.O.L.E. (People, Objects, Language, Exchange), a series of events and performances at the New Museum that shrug off these distinctions and allow pole dance to exist both as Dance and as Fine Art, with capitals D, F, and A, respectively.
Houses without Masters: Part 1 of 2 on "Platform 2015: Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets"
By Siobhan BurkeEdwin Denby died in 1983. I met him in 2006 (he would have been 103), if reading him counts as meeting him. I was taking a dance criticism course, and my teacher, Mindy Aloff, assigned his Dance Writings and Poetry, introducing me to endlessly readable essays like “Three Sides of Agon” (even the title makes you want to hold it up, inspect the choreography) and “Against Meaning in Ballet,” which I now assign to my students.
