24 March 2011. The Rose Theatre, New York The 2011 New York revival of Snow on the mesa, subtitled Portrait of Martha, began in a highly theatrical manner. Three stuffed wolf heads lay on the stage floor. Three women clad in black hooded cloaks appeared at various intervals. Dramatic colours, often a brilliant blue, washed the backcloth. A single hand
20 March 2011, The Kitchen, New York Vicky Shick’s newest work, Not entirely herself, is a beautifully lyrical and sensuous dance piece for a trio of young women, Shick herself, and another veteran performer, Neil Greenberg. Performed in the black box space of the Kitchen in downtown Manhattan, Not entirely herself began with three dancers, Marilyn Maywald, Jimena Paz and
The New York Times published an article this morning by Roslyn Sulcas, whose critical writing from New York and Europe, is always thought-provoking and intellectually probing. The article summarises recent events relating to the future of the Royal Ballet of Flanders, the company led by Australian Kathy Bennetts. The ongoing saga of the company is worth following. Here is a
The ticket said ‘Darcey and Rafael in conversation’. The menu cover said ‘Dance—collaboration, creativity and choreography’. A tall order? This luncheon event associated with the National Gallery of Australia’s current exhibition Ballets Russes: the art of costume featured former Royal Ballet star Darcey Bussell, now living with her family in Sydney, and Rafael Bonachela, artistic director of the revamped Sydney
The British-Australian choreographer and dancer Liz Lea recently presented a show at the National Gallery of Australia in which she managed, with singular success, to rework her popular piece 120 Birds, staged at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010, from a work for a small company into a one-woman show. But the irrepressible Lea has another project in the pipeline—a documentary made
Meryl Tankard reports that her first short documentary film, MAD, has been selected for showing at the 17th World of Women: WOW Film Festival. MAD focuses on madness and schizophrenia, explored by poet and writer Sandy Jeffs, who has lived with schizophrenia and all its moods for 34 years. It features music by Elena Kats-Chernin and vocals by Mara Kiek both
In a post in September 2009 I queried various aspects of an image held in the National Library of Australia’s Pictures Collection. The image is attributed to Axel Poignant, although I indirectly questioned this attribution as the photograph appears to have been a gift to Poignant from the Dandré-Levitoff company in recognition of the work he did with them in
Seymour Centre, Sydney Festival 2011 I didn’t see roadkill or lawn, the previous works by Gavin Webber and Grayson Millwood shown in Australia in recent years. So I have no way of knowing how Food Chain, presented at the Sydney Festival 2011, fits in with their developing (or developed?) aesthetic. I have to say that if those previous works were
28 January 2011, Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay. Sydney Festival, 2011 Wayne McGregor’s Entity, performed by his company Random Dance as part of the 2011 Sydney Festival, begins and ends with black and white footage of a greyhound in motion. It may be or be based on the work of the nineteenth-century, British-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge, a pioneer of the physics
As the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Diaghilev exhibition is being taken down, its curator, Jane Pritchard, has made the startling discovery that there appears to be film footage of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in performance. And we have always thought that no such footage exists! She reports on this remarkable discovery in her latest blog post—’I eat my words’, where you can also