Eye On the Arts

For those who are park enthusiasts and culture lovers, Bryant Park collaborates with Carnegie Hall Citywide, Greenwich House Music School, and Harlem Stage to uplift audiences with the many sounds of music. Here is a brief list to upcoming free events. Take advantage.  Friday, July 23 at 7pm Carnegie Hall Citywide: The Knights Join this extraordinary ensemble for a concert that showcases vibrant music by Jessie Montgomery, Anna Clyne, and Christina Courtin alongside Mozart’s classic  Eine Kleine Nachtmusik . Friday, July 30 at 7pm Carnegie Hall Citywide: Adrienne Warren & Friends with Special Guests Matthew Griffin, Amber Iman, Ashley Loren, and Jhardon Milton and Guest Host Mauricio Martinez Celebrate in the role of Tina Turner on Broadway, Warren will be joined by emerging Broadway special guest performers Matthew Griffin, Amber Iman, Ashley Loren, and Jhardon Milton; the performance will be guest-hosted by Mauricio Martinez ( On Your Feet! ). Saturday, July 31 at 7...

BAAND TOGETHER DANCE FESTIVAL : Review by Celia Ipiotis Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Rennie Harris' Lazarus. Photo by Erin Baiano #Dance #NYCB, #ABT, #DTH, #Alvin Ailey American Dance, #Ballet Hispanico  BAAND TOGETHER DANCE FESTIVAL How do you know you're back in NYC? Here's one clue: You order food, then ask for bread and the waiter snaps, "You ordered enough food. You don't need the bread."  Happy days are back, or so we hope, and Lincoln Center celebrated with a "who's who" of dance performance series at Damrosch Park. Energy buzzed  the spiraling lines of dance lovers intent on getting a seat and embracing friends not seen for months on end. Robert Battle (artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater) giddily welcomed the audience and introduced the program that crackled with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performing an excerpt from Rennie Harris' evening length work  Lazarus . The punchy, hip-hop based piece rev...

CHE MALAMBO February 14, 2020 Che Malambo captured the Joyce Theatre’s audience from the moment the cast of 12 dancers appeared through the dark stage against a bright backlight with a crescendo of zapateo - Argentinean rhythmic footwork - culminating in a roaring shout. Choreographed and staged with rampant showbiz and savoir-faire, Gilles Brinas catered an array of traditional Argentinean dances set in an austere contemporary framework. For the entire performance, the dancers wore a single outfit compose of neutral black sleeveless shirts, plain black pants and Malambo boots. The evening started with a variation of the widely known Malambo Norteño, characterized by its brisk zapateo characterized by fast shuffles, hip twists, inverted leg whips, kicks, heel scuffs, toe accents, all embellished by its steady elegantly proud stance. A vibrant feast of bombo legueros followed with the cast showcasing their drumming mastery. Commendable was the soloist that introduced Malambo sureñ...

NYC BALLET: EPISODES February 10, 2020 Historic works rarely revived at NYC Ballet both puzzled and delighted audiences. Last performed in 1993, George Balanchine’s charming Haieff Divertimento (premiered 1947) showcases the company’s new class of ace dancers. In a combination of classical ballet and a jazzy, modern dance vocabulary the ballet features one lead couple, the engaging Unity Phelan and Harrison Ball along with 4 supporting couples. Musically, it flows in a five-part piece that flexes its danceable American music roots—at times referencing Balanchine’s  Square Dance . If  Haieff Divertimento  resembles bubbly wine, then the 1959  Episodes  equals a dry martini—hold the olives. An early experiment meant to bring together two giants of dance world, Balanchine and Martha Graham, Episodes was broken into two parts, separated by one intermission, united through Anton von Webern’s music, and the exchange of a couple of dancers. At the time, Ta...

Known for the width and breadth of his rich dance vocabulary, for his sixth NYC Ballet commission Alexei Ratmansky stepped outside the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, made a right turn down Broadway directly into the lap of the downtown post-modern dance scene. Or perhaps another analogy might be the difference between Tolstoy and Hemingway. To start, Instead of binding his choreography to a complex, highly orchestrated score by the likes of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, or Leonid Desyatnikov, Ratmansky embraces an sound score by the avant-garde composer Peter Ablinger that super-imposes spoken text over a single piano line. The audio elements are visually projected on the scrim in the form of a recorded signal (looks like a PolyGram in a lie detector test). In stark contrast to Ratmansky’s filigree choreography the score suggests concise, direct, staccato movements that stop and start like a clock being constantly re-set. Sharp-shooting ballerinas forging the heart of...

                            Mica as Antigone. Photo (c) Stephanie Berger REVIEW: ANTIGONE Little is known about the actual specifics of how Ancient Greek dramas unfolded on the amphitheaters of Ancient Greece. But the recent production of Shizuoka Performing Arts Center’s  Antigone  at the Park Avenue Armory is exhilarating due to its lucidity and quiet authority. From the river of water flooding the stage, rock formations emerge reminiscent of Stonehenge or Isamu Noguchi’s set designs for Martha Graham’s Greek myth based works. As the audience settles down in bleachers facing the long strip of stage, a ceremonial procession of performers in white robes and pants enter rubbing glass votives producing high-pitched thin rings. Positioned at the lip of the stage in the middle of lie of actors, Maki Honda welcomes the audience and offers to brush up the audience’s memories of Sophocles’ famous trag...

September 27, 2019 Many artists, particularly of the solo variety, project, to varying degrees of subtlety, the will to stand out. Ayodele Casel very tangibly doesn’t. Instead, she educates us of the rich lineage of female tappers of color, at which she is currently the forefront. This generosity is not the sort with which one embarks on a career, however; it comes from an active, humbling realization along the way that one is never alone. “There was only ever room for one,” Casel explains within her recent collaboration with Latin jazz ambassador Arturo O’Farrill, to tell how she journeyed from her Ginger Rogers-obsessed teens through NYU’s drama department to becoming a sultan of tap dance. At tap jams, she discovered a connection between the conversational side of tap with the communicative capabilities of African drumming, and began researching and reaching out to tappers who were not only female, but looked like her, too, whose legacies may have been overlooked, lost to tim...