Email Author Deborah Jowitt

2007 Stories by Deborah Jowitt

• The Flame Game With Estampas Porteñas

  published December 25, 2007

  Prior to 1985, the year a terrific show called Tango Argentino played City Center for a week, many New Yorkers knew the sensual social... More >>

• Turning Dance on Its Head

  published December 25, 2007

  When the lights come up on Innaviews, Rokafella and Kwikstep are curled up in a fanciful bed (designed by Garland Farwell). They're wearing... More >>

• Yvonne Meier: Monkey Do

  published December 18, 2007

  Watching a piece by Meier is like seeing a bunch of fearfully imaginative kids playing in a sandbox—their improvisatory wildness controlled... More >>

• Dancers as Actors

  published December 18, 2007

  A figure hurtles backward onto the sand-covered stage, as if a giant fist of fate has socked him in the gut. He staggers up and brushes himself... More >>

• Waiting Room Hots

  published December 18, 2007

  Oh, those Ailey dancers! Sleek, gorgeous, virtuosic, and charismatic—is there anything they can't do? Artistic director Judith Jamison's... More >>

• Same Differently for Alan Good's Omnibus

  published December 11, 2007

  I’ve always been impressed by choreographers who not only want us to experience dancing in an unusual way, but want us to understand how that... More >>

• Molissa Fenley Celebrates 30 Years of Nonstop Dancing

  published December 11, 2007

  When Molissa Fenley formed a small company in 1977, many people had taken to jogging in a big way, as if they wanted to be fit enough to outrun... More >>

• Together and Apart

  published December 11, 2007

  Jennifer Nugent and Paul Matteson are nothing like the sleek couples of ballet who often look as though they'd been bred to channel petty royalty.... More >>

• Flaming Creatures

  published December 4, 2007

  Less than a week after French choreographer Maurice Béjart died at 80, the Ailey company opened its season with a revival of his 1970... More >>

• The Thrills Are Alive

  published December 4, 2007

  Remember the opening shot of The Sound of Music? The camera flies over the Alps, gradually zooming down until the tiny figure in the meadow... More >>

• James Thiérrée's Au Revoir Parapluie

  published December 4, 2007

  Who knows what dreams Orpheus may have had as he searched for his lost Eurydice? Might he not have envisioned her high in the air, trapped in an... More >>

• The Latin '50s

  published November 27, 2007

  In the 1950s, you could hang out on West 52nd Street and drop into one jazz club after another. The Palladium at Broadway and 53rd featured Latin... More >>

• Going Nowhere Beautifully

  published November 27, 2007

  Hiroshi Koike named his company Pappa Tarahumara after a Mexican Indian tribe. He has made dance-theater works based on Chekhov's The Three... More >>

• Feasting on Beauty

  published November 27, 2007

  In my dream, I’m lying on a silky couch, and someone is dripping honey into my mouth. I like it very much. For a while. It’s like that... More >>

• Space Flights

  published November 27, 2007

  You could say that dance is about time, space, and motion, but few works make us aware in any profound way of the first two elements; movement... More >>

• Split Screen Live: Maria Hassabi's Gloria

  published November 20, 2007

  The woman is wearing a hot pink tank top and tights. Her costume supports the ambiguity of the positions she assumes and holds for varying lengths... More >>

• Rite in Progress: Yvonne Rainer Jumps Over Two Sets of Decades

  published November 20, 2007

  Back in the 1960s, when Yvonne Rainer was a queen of downtown dance, she and her colleagues in Judson Dance Theater—Trisha Brown, David... More >>

• Runway Project

  published November 20, 2007

  This must be Matthew Neenan's Carmina Burana. The orchestra under Beatrice Jona Affron and the members of the New York Choral Society are... More >>

• Soul Shakers

  published November 13, 2007

  I first saw Tero Saarinen's Borrowed Light at Jacob's Pillow in 2006. Enclosed by the Ted Shawn Theatre's wooden walls, we could feel a... More >>

• Monica Bill Barnes & Company's Frank Acts

  published November 13, 2007

  A performance by Monica Bill Barnes puts strange thoughts into my head. Do I want to take her home and sit her on a sofa so her big eyes can... More >>

• Time Trip with Douglas Dunn & Dancers

  published November 13, 2007

  Douglas Dunn is standing in the corner of a white structure the size of an old-time, low-rent New York City bathroom. It’s mostly corner (two... More >>

• Hidden from View

  published November 6, 2007

  Ashleigh Leite has only been choreographing for a few years, and she danced in Stephen Petronio’s company for over eight (1997-2005). ... More >>

• Performa 07's Share Package

  published November 6, 2007

  In 1983, RoseLee Goldberg revised and updated her indispensable 1979 book, Performance: Live Art, 1909 to the Present, retitling it... More >>

• Masterworks and Edgy Ventures at American Ballet Theatre

  published October 30, 2007

  Any season in which ABT mounts fine productions of Antony Tudor’s The Leaves Are Fading and Twyla Tharp’s Baker’s... More >>

• John Jasperse Pulls a Treasure From the Trash

  published October 30, 2007

  John Jasperse speaks softly and smiles at us, but he's clearly worried. In the statistics-filled speech that opens his wonderful new work,... More >>