Email Author Deborah Jowitt

1999 Stories by Deborah Jowitt

• One Thousand Years Goodbye

  published December 28, 1999

  Old winter solstice rituals simply made sure spring would come again. Millennial festivities and dread-suffused preparations are another matter.... More >>

• Rush Forward. Look Back.

  published December 21, 1999

  Envision a Kung Fu movie performed by computerized action figures with serious glitches and you might grasp something of the wacky,... More >>

• Black Music

  published December 14, 1999

  A lone guy comes onstage, singing and plucking a ukulele. Your mind starts humming. This is the verse; what's the chorus it's simmering up to?... More >>

• Coming Through the Skin

  published November 30, 1999

  "I wonder what Peter Stuyvesant would have thought of it," said a newcomer to Downtown dance, struck by the incongruity between RoseAnne... More >>

• The Singing Body

  published November 23, 1999

  Introducing her small pickup company at Poughkeepsie's Bardavon Theater, Suzanne Farrell said of George Balanchine's Divertimento No. 15,... More >>

• Tenderness Two Ways

  published November 16, 1999

  To see Lance Gries's Dear Guardian, Farewell Grace is like switching on The Real World and finding the apartment topsy-turvy and... More >>

• From Europe: The Familiar and the New

  published November 9, 1999

  Once, I thought I had a key to the differences between post-'60s modern dance in America and work coming out of Europe or Canada: white... More >>

• In the Name of Diversity

  published November 2, 1999

  At its founding in 1940, Ballet Theatre pledged itself to diversity. Now with almost 60 years of repertory to plunder and new ballets coming,... More >>

• Tales Retold

  published October 26, 1999

  "Art is international, but the artist is the product of a nationality, and his principal duty to himself is to express the spirit of his race,"... More >>

• Warning: Dancing May Save Your Life

  published October 19, 1999

  Fantasies might be a better name for Susan Stroman and John Weidman's "dance play" than Contact, although there's plenty of that in... More >>

• Dancing Grief Away

  published October 12, 1999

  People often say that Antony Tudor's great Dark Elegies looks like a modern dance. Made for Marie Rambert's little company in 1937 during... More >>

• Irresistible Invitations

  published October 5, 1999

  I don't want to just sit and watch Bill Young's latest dances. I want to inhabit them—to be part of the tender communities he creates.... More >>

• Big Numbers

  published September 28, 1999

  Thirty years ago, Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook opened a dance school in Harlem, where, for very small fees, neighborhood kids could... More >>

• Tossing Gender Overboard

  published September 21, 1999

  Odysseus had one hell of a time getting home to Ithaca. Did his crew ever wonder if the ship was going in circles? Aboard the Yankee, a... More >>

• The Vibrancy of Rhythm

  published September 14, 1999

  Back in the '60s, revolutionary agendas in African American choreography were more likely to be political than artistic. Artists broadcast... More >>

• Climb Toward the Flame

  published September 7, 1999

  The last time I interviewed Martha Clarke, she was rehearsing an elephant in Herman Melville's barn in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The year was... More >>

• Bonding for All Seasons

  published August 31, 1999

  The larger of the two males is quicker to adopt a defensive posture, but also more apt to swagger. The slighter one seems to understand the uses... More >>

• Heat Beat

  published August 10, 1999

  You can see the Manhattan skyline from Sunnyside, Queens, but a breeze works the aboveground subway station, and the only heat in the cozy Thalia... More >>

• Meet the Composer

  published August 3, 1999

  It began when Lina Wertmuller approached Trisha Brown about choreographing her 1986 production of Bizet's Carmen. Brown was startled.... More >>

• Complexity's Master

  published July 27, 1999

  New York City awarded Merce Cunningham the Handel Medallion, its highest honor, at the July 21 opening gala of his company's New York State... More >>

• Bridging the Century

  published July 20, 1999

  Among The Peony Pavilion's 55 scenes, one of the sweetest is surely "Making Love With a Ghost." The highly corporeal spirit of a Chinese... More >>

• Hot Springs

  published July 13, 1999

  Could this be a Jewish wedding? Maybe. The crowd carries a man and a woman high on its shoulders. People kick up their heels while klezmer music... More >>

• It Takes Time

  published July 6, 1999

  Something very bad has happened. A few frisky peasant women in bright blue and white dresses have been caught knitting on the palace... More >>

• Look Back!

  published June 22, 1999

  L'Orfeo must have sounded like this in 1607. Brasses call from the balcony and are answered in the pit, where René Jacobs conducts... More >>

• All That Jazz

  published June 15, 1999

  Jazz and ballet are uneasy partners. Getting down isn't part of the classical lexicon. On NYCB's "Tri-bute to Ellington" program, Wynton Marsalis... More >>