New York Live Arts

ZviDance: MAIM (“Water” in Hebrew)

December 19, 2019

Israeli-born choreographer Zvi Gotheiner created "Maim ('Water' in Hebrew)," a somber meditation on water, drought, misery, community and survival for seven members of ZviDance, all brilliant dancers with clearly defined personalities. Somehow, in under an hour, Gotheiner managed to dredge up memories and images of his early life on a kibbutz and how valuable water was in the life of his community. That, added to the current climate crisis’ causing drastic drought concerns, stimulated him to produce "MAIM ('Water' in Hebrew)." [more]

BalletNext 2019

February 25, 2019

BalletNext is a company founded by Michele Wiles, former prima ballerina of American Ballet Theater. Wiles has developed a symbiotic relationship with the University of Utah where she trains professional ballet dancers who are simultaneously getting degrees in various fields. In exchange, she has bodies on which she can develop her skills as a choreographer. And she arranges public performances, giving her students real stage experience. These performances always include live musicians, which is a particular pleasure compared to so many companies that use canned music. [more]

Women/Create! A Festival of Dance 2018

June 24, 2018

Jennifer Muller, of Jennifer Muller/The Works, whose artistic history includes a long association with José Limon, provided “Shock Wave,” a world premiere to a cello-heavy score by Gordon Withers. “Shock Wave,” with its suggestive title, showed how darkness and loneliness can pervade a microcosmic set of people—The Works’ members—as they are stopped in their paths by a loud explosion and have to cooperate to re-group and go on. [more]

Mimi Garrard and Friends

December 2, 2017

In “Lines,” the videos were straightforward representations of Mr. Selden, clad in a loose-fitting red outfit, pausing his image in dramatic moments while in the second work, “Untranslatable,” directed by Ms. Garrard and choreographed by her and the very solid dancer, Ms. Hopkins-Greene (formerly of the Alvin Ailey troupe), the visual elements—produced by Ms. Garrard—were far more abstract, chaining together tiny images of the dancer in fantastical patterns like giant letters, globes, maps, etc., as the dancer, clad in a chic two-piece purple outfit designed by Mindy Nelson bounded about. Snatches of poetry by Walt Whitman were cut and shifted about to provide an aural accompaniment to the steps which were vigorous with lots of quick direction changes. Images of Ms. Hopkins-Greene floated about the screen making it seem as if she were dancing with clones, all equally talented. [more]

ZviDance: Like

November 28, 2017

This time Gotheiner put his dancers through a faux competition that fell in mood somewhere between "Dancing with the Stars' and "Shark Tank," combining eager striving with off-handed sadism. Electronic gadgetry virtually turned the beautiful dancers into products that viewers in the NYLA Theater were inadvertently bidding on. [more]

Ariel Rivka Dance: 10th Anniversary Season

September 12, 2017

Ms. Grossman tended toward overuse repetition of movements and arm gestures. Emotional states were supported by little else than the titles and her husband’s gemlike scores. “No Words,” to a score composed and played by Mr. Homan, opened the program. His music sounded like an anguished string quartet to which she made an honest stab at using gesture and arrangement of the eight dancers to express the anger and loss in a poem, “Fury: In Praise of Stone,” by Janet R. Kirchheimer and Jaclyn Piudik, which was printed in the program. [more]

Lydia Johnson Dance 2017 Season

July 2, 2017

Johnson’s choreographic ethic borders on the minimalistic, repeating some basic movements, particularly certain arm gestures, in all of the works. In two of the three ballets, it works, in one it fails terribly, and in the fourth, it merely comes up short. [more]

Jack Charles V The Crown

March 23, 2017

His innate charm, joy of performing and theatrical grandeur is always on display in this show. All of those qualities combined with his resonant, Australian accented vocal delivery makes it easy to imagine him being commanding in Shakespearean and any number of roles in the classics of dramatic literature, as well as a screen actor. Sadly, environmental circumstances did not as of yet make this possible. [more]

Ariel Rivka Dance’s Ninth Season Festival

May 28, 2016

Ms. Grossman’s three works were all world premieres: “Hallelujah Eva” to the famous Leonard Cohen song, “Beatrice’s Rainbow” to the Yip Harburg/Harold Arlen classic “Over the Rainbow,” and “Variations on a Box” to music by Ms. Grossman’s husband David Homan (who also did the beautiful arrangements of the first two works). Each was a study in relationships and community. [more]

New York Theatre Ballet: Legends & Visionaries 2016

March 5, 2016

“Song Before Spring,” to a vibrant and pulsating steel band score by Philip Glass is an exciting addition to the NYTB repertory. Choreographed by Zhong-Jing Fang and Steven Melendez, “Song” caught the rambunctiousness of the score while telling many poignant and funny stories about the characters’—the entire company—lives. Dressed in Ms. Nolan’s incredibly witty street clothes, these young dancers became a community, a microcosm of urban life as they interacted. There were a sullen youth (Mr. Melendez), three flirty young ladies (Alexis Branagan, Carmella Lauer, Mayu Oguri), two aggressive young men (Joshua Andino-Nieto and Michael Wells) and a panorama of telling activities that combined ballet, modern dance, mime and very fine acting. “Song Before Spring” is a real forward leap for Ms. Byer’s troupe of dedicated dancers. [more]

H.T. Chen & Dancers: “South of Gold Mountain”

October 23, 2015

"South of Gold Mountain," the latest dance work from the iconic Chinatown-based H.T. Chen & Dancers, is a warmhearted, historically-based piece that illuminated the experiences of the hardy Chinese immigrants who settled in the Deep South during the nineteenth and twentieth century. (“Gold Mountain” is a reference to the Gold Rush area, and subsequently the U.S.A., which attracted immigrants of all nationalities.) It is a corner of American history barely acknowledged, let alone studied or dramatized. [more]

ZviDance: Escher/Bacon/Rothko

July 1, 2015

Certainly, the ceaseless energetic intertwinements of the Escher section could allude to his eye-popping, busy canvases and the large rectangles of white light just might allude to Rothko’s famous wide bands of impeccably applied colors. In the Bacon section, dancers kept distorting their faces and bodies in modest approximations of the bizarre images in Bacon’s portraits: unsymmetrical, shockingly colored and ugly. [more]

Patricia Noworol Dance Theater: “Replacement Place”

May 6, 2015

Four intensively self-involved, but personable, performers meandered on and off the stage which was glaringly lit by the geometrically arranged fluorescent bulbs designed by Barbara Samuels, their paths only occasionally crossing. Each was given or created a simple movement theme: one a stomping walk, another a finger snapping hip sway and a third some steamy hip-hop movement, complete with the usual badly rhymed “poetry” and a plethora of N- and F-words. [more]