Jen C. George
Jen C. George writes out of New York City.
The quickest read of Kimberly Bartosik’s bLUr, world premiering at New York Live Arts, is as a study of emergency. The show’s program describes it as a “landscape of physical and emotional crisis” inspired by an unspecified traumatic event, with a tightly timeboxed, 47-minute duration.
Ain’t Done Bad has nestled into the airy Pershing Square Signature Center for its New York City debut. By setting the show to the music of self-described “outlaw country” performer Orville Peck, Karr provides his audience with a comforting sense of continuity, as if Peck were a mysterious narrator hidden from view.
Promotional materials for the NYC premiere of Bereishit Dance of Korea’s Judo and Balance and Imbalance at NYU Skirball depict the themes for these works as expansive, nearly to the point of meaninglessness: street dance, martial arts, opposition and harmony in relationships, sports, and the transcendence of violent urges.
Eleanor Smith and Molly Lieber continue their long-standing choreographic partnership with Gloria, a feminist exploration of objectification and reclamation, presented at New York Live Arts.
On September 15, New York Live Arts opened its doors, elevators, and stairwells, and welcomed an audience into an unconventional space for an opening night performance: its third-floor studio. The front row (masked, of course) settled into cushions on the floor, as the seated rows filled behind them, ready to witness Colleen Thomas’s Light and Desire.
Stephen Petronio Company’s program for the Joyce Theater documents the company’s growth with five new or reimagined works and makes a case for the continuation of digital dance as we move optimistically into “post-pandemic” times.
It’s opening night of William Forsythe: A Quiet Evening of Dance at the Shed, and the audience files into the spacious black box theater, nearly drowning out a gentle soundtrack of bird chirps with pre-show conversations. Per the program, we will be treated to work compiled from different time stamps along William Forsythe’s career: newly commissioned pieces (Epilogue and Seventeen/Twenty-One) stand alongside existing repertory (Dialogue (DUO2015) and Catalogue) re-worked over the past 20 years.
