NC tour A Canadian who lives in North Carolina, choreographer-on-the-rise Helen Simoneau is using her newest evening-length work, Caribou, to take a closer look at heritage, assimilation and identity. She studies these ideas through the iconic caribou—an enormously antlered animal beloved by our friends to the nort.
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All dance companies are, inevitably, in perpetual transition, but that’s unusually pronounced just now at Pennsylvania Ballet, which opened a program of 21st-century choreography on Tuesday night at the Joyce Theater. Since Angel Corella became the company’s artistic director in 2014, large numbers of dancers have come and gone.
Some of those dancing in New York this week have arrived since Mr. Corella joined the company, while others are in their final season.Read More
All three employ taped music: This works best for Mr. McIntyre’s “The Accidental” (2014), the program’s centerpiece, which is danced to appealing songs by Patrick Watson. Having seen “The Accidental” when it was new in Philadelphia, I love again the wonderful self-contradictions of human behavior that Mr. McIntyre strings together into single dance phrases. A male-female duet begins with the man (James Ihde) standing.
A final male solo abounds in singular incidents: In one fast step, Craig Wasserman arches sideways like a bow while extending one leg like its arrow. He ends both solo and ballet with a slow, marvelous and extraordinary gesture: Standing upright, he first holds his hands together high above his head, but then very slowly peels one hand down — down in a vertical line, down the other arm, down across his chest, down past his hip. As that hand and arm descend, they pull his upper body off-center, so that he seems to be hanging like a puppet from that one, still-raised hand; he seems also to have opened his heart to us.
Mr. Wasserman, boyishly innocent and energetic, becomes more multifaceted as we watch. And Mr. McIntyre confirms his status as one of America’s most peculiarly original dance poets. This performance showed the marvelous musicality of his phrasing. Details of footwork (notably with Evelyn Kocak in the first song) and sweeps of phrasing were married to the music with a felicity that made “The Accidental” the highlight of the evening.
“Grace Action,” by Mr. Fonte (who is to be the resident choreographer at Oregon Ballet Theater, starting this fall), closes the program and was the company’s greatest hit with the audience. Anyone can see why. It has stunning lighting by Brad Fields, with 12 searchlight-like lamps creating different beams across the stage (we might be in a planetarium); the dancers are dressed by Martha Chamberlain in midnight blue; and the Philip Glass music is easy on the ear.
Diversity is a hot-button topic in today’s dance world. It’s often linked to conversations about the rise of Misty Copeland, and there have been many notable outreach efforts, such as Charlotte Ballet’s partnership with Dance Theatre of Harlem, American Ballet Theatre’s Project Plié, The Washington Ballet’s recently launched program called Let’s Dance Together and the work done by the International Association of Blacks in Dance.
Read MoreThe Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation is raising the roof: it held a ceremonial “roof-breaking” performance on Tuesday to mark the beginning of a $25 million construction project that will add three more stories of studios, classrooms and offices to its Manhattan home. The expansion of the building, the Joan Weill Center for Dance, which opened in 2005, is being designed by Iu & Bibliowicz Architects.
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