Dance
A Dancer’s View: Pavel Zuštiak’s Hebel
By Doug LeCoursHebel translates to vanity, emptiness, vapor, breath, absurdity, or fleetingness, among many other possible definitions. Murdered by his brother, Abel becomes the embodiment of the absence he’s named for. With no motive given, we are forced to fill in that narrative gap ourselves, to make sense of the senseless.
Tales of Hopper: The Additive Adaptation from Painting to Dance
By Hannah FosterHopper unknowingly painted for the novel coronavirus era. Thus, a new danced adaptation, luckily coming weeks before bans on in-person performances, has significant resonance. In Tales of Hopper, a repertory dance work that Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance premiered at New York’s DiMenna Center for Classical Music in late February, Lavagnino and composer Martin Bresnick take on Rothenstein’s “interpretation of incident and of character” for Hopper’s oeuvre.
In Conversation
OXANA CHI and LAYLA ZAMI
with Gillian Jakab
By Gillian Jakab
Dance as a form of perseverance and resistance is not just the stuff of movies. Tatjana Barbakoff, a now much-forgotten historical figure, did just that, at great personal risk. Like Rosie, Barbakoff danced as long as she could in the face of hate during the Holocaust. A dancer from Russia (now Latvia) of Jewish and Chinese descent, Barbakoff moved to Germany and had a successful career performing throughout literary cabarets and theaters in the 1920s and early ’30s.
