Email Author Deborah Jowitt

2000 Stories by Deborah Jowitt

• The Feistiness of Form

  published June 6, 2000

  Rasputin, the "mad monk" who mesmerized Nicholas II of Russia and his wife and indirectly helped precipitate the Russian Revolution, was almost... More >>

• Swanning Again

  published May 30, 2000

  Does anyone ever wonder how Swan Lake would progress if Prince Siegfried went right home from his revelatory lakeside experience and told... More >>

• A Trick of the Light

  published May 23, 2000

  We're in the garage beneath Dance Theater Workshop, watching a wall of mirrors elevated like a movie screen. Reflected in that wall is a man... More >>

• Eyes That Dance

  published May 16, 2000

  Much postmodern dancing traces its lineage to Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, and Twyla Tharp. The physical languages they invented in the early 1970s... More >>

• Jewel Boxes

  published May 9, 2000

  New York City Ballet's Diamond Project is named for generous patron Irene Diamond, but the title provokes expectations (which new work will turn... More >>

• Four Journeys

  published May 2, 2000

  For The Amber Room, Zvi Gotheiner turns the stone basement of an 1849 synagogue (now the Angel Orensanz Foundation) into an art gallery.... More >>

• Spring Bouquet

  published April 25, 2000

  This paper's late, beloved dance writer Burt Supree once wrote of David Neumann's performing, "You never know which way he's going to jump."... More >>

• The Ways of Desire

  published April 18, 2000

  Jean-Philippe Rameau called his Platée a "ballet bouffon." It was surely the most deliberately ludicrous of the four musical... More >>

• Vision-Shifts

  published April 11, 2000

  The Chuck Close portraits on display at Pace Wildenstein Soho are admirable accomplices to Jonathon Appels's choreography. Close's paintings of... More >>

• Kill Mama

  published April 4, 2000

  I can only imagine how radical Boris Eifman's ballets must have appeared to Soviet audiences in 1977, when he established an independent company... More >>

• New Storytelling

  published March 28, 2000

  Downtown performance has jolted the musician's image from both tuxedoed orchestral stability and the sweaty prancings of rock. In Yoshiko Chuma's... More >>

• Variety Shows

  published March 21, 2000

  People have compared the Canadian Margie Gillis to Isadora Duncan. I can't see it. Gillis's early flower-child solos could evoke Duncan's... More >>

• Lost in the Woods

  published March 14, 2000

  Postmodernism could be seen as trafficking in antiquities, and the kind of meddling archaeologists would frown on (fragments of a vase from... More >>

• Variety as Spice

  published March 7, 2000

  Paul Taylor once said of a dancer he treasured that she had "the hips of an innocent satyress." I think he likes all his women to look that way.... More >>

• Up, Up, and Away!

  published February 29, 2000

  Who but Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar could combine elements of Mark Twain's story The Mysterious Stranger with transcripts from auditions... More >>

• What Price Love?

  published February 22, 2000

  "When shall we learn what should be clear as day,/We cannot choose what we are free to love?" W.H. Auden's "Canzone" is not one of the poems that... More >>

• Uncharted Terrain

  published February 15, 2000

  Molissa Fenley's solos often seem to be about terrain: its impact on her spirit, the impression she leaves upon it. Maybe this is because she not... More >>

• Just Don't Stop

  published February 8, 2000

  "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough." That's what Ben Munisteri calls his program at P.S. 122. He has sage ideas about what "enough" is, seaming four... More >>

• Tharp the Bold

  published February 1, 2000

  Nineteenth-century music critics vied with one another to attribute elaborate scenarios to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Wagner's response was... More >>

• Read the Paper

  published January 25, 2000

  Three women in drab black dresses and utilitarian shoes stare at us from a bleak habitat. Two chairs. A window. A table. A radio. Half-packed... More >>

• So Long, Logic

  published January 18, 2000

  "I liked the second ballet," the man behind me told his wife, "but I didn't understand it." The piece in question was Christian Spuck's Dos... More >>

• Nothing Left to Lose

  published January 11, 2000

  In 1890s London, George Bernard Shaw's music reviews frequently took ballet to task. How weary he was of illogical plots and the empty virtuosity... More >>