Brian Seibert

NEW YORK — If vogueing is taken out of its original context, what is the cost?

That’s the concern that has been raised whenever vogueing, which developed decades ago as a competition form in underground balls, mainly for black and Latino gay men, gets some mainstream attention — as it has again recently, with the success of “Pose” on FX.

Usually, the discussion is about appropriation and misrepresentation. But those weren’t the issues raised by two performances in New York this weekend — Rashaad Newsome’s “Five” and Kia LaBeija’s “Untitled: The Black Act.” The vogue-ballroom credentials of both productions were strong, which left the seemingly less fraught question: If you take vogue dancers out of the ballroom and put them in a theater, what does the new context demand?

In the case of “Five,” at New York Live Arts, the context was actually at a double remove, since the work has previously been presented mainly in art galleries and museums. What might serve, in those settings, as a challenge to definitions of drawing and sculpture, seemed in the theater like something less than a substantial dance show.

It lasted barely 30 minutes, although there was a lot going on. In addition to eight dancers, many of them flaunting the earned honorific “legendary,” there was a five-person band, a small gospel choir and more vocalists, including two ballroom emcees spitting out profane, purring encouragement with thrillingly violent force. Newsome — a multidisciplinary artist but not a choreographer — stood center stage, facing away from the audience like a conductor and manning a table’s worth of computers, converting the dancers’ motions into video graphics projected on the back wall.

The format was partly pedagogical. After three dancers fiercely demonstrated techniques of hair flinging and high kicks, the other five, in sequential solos, fiercely isolated the five standard elements of Vogue Fem style: hands, catwalking, spins and dips, floorwork (rolls, splayed legs) and duckwalking (on the toes, in a deep squat). Each of these five was color-coded: leggings, gloves, wigs and even contact lenses all in the same single shade.

But after this introduction came little development — some unison, then another rotation of solos with new music (by Newsome), requiem-like this time, the dancers goaded by the stratospheric melisma of vocalist Kyron El. Individual dancers made an impression (especially the imperiously truculent Leggoh LaBeija), but there was more flash-and-fade than inventive variation, and all the artists were subsumed in the sensory-overload collage, the color scheme, the concept.

A dance-party coda, with Newsome and the vocalists and members of the audience all showing their moves, was unsurprisingly winning. Yet Newsome’s vision of vogueing, evident in his video-graphic squiggles and his dance-derived artwork in the lobby, is of a tangle of lines. That’s reflected in “Five” to the detriment of dance as dance.

“Untitled: The Black Act,” at Performance Space New York, also had one foot in ballroom culture and one in the art world. Kia LaBeija is a pedigreed, champion voguer — formerly mother, or leader, of the august vogue family Royal House of LaBeija — but she is also a photographer whose work has been shown in galleries and museums. And her inspiration for “Untitled,” presented as part of the performance-art biennial Performa 19, was a famous piece of art history: “Das Triadische Ballett,” a 1922 performance created by Bauhaus designer Oskar Schlemmer. (This year’s Performa has a Bauhaus theme.)

Schlemmer’s work was essentially an avant-garde fashion show — masked performers in elaborate costumes composed of cones, spirals and other silhouette-altering shapes, moving like puppets or figurines. It’s easy to see how a vogue artist would be attracted by the fashion fantasy of it but also perhaps repelled by the impersonal aesthetic. LaBeija’s take was at once faithful and divergent.

On the front of the stage floor, laid out in tape, was a spiral of straight lines and right angles; farther back was a grid. Both designs derive from the third part, the so-called black part, of Schlemmer’s work, as did most of Kyle Luu’s glamorous costumes, distinguished from the original designs mainly by more sparkle and less boldness.

Like Newsome, LaBeija (in the program note) pays lip service to the virtues of improvisation, but high-level improvisation is as rigorous a discipline as choreography, and much of “Untitled,” mixing bits of vogue with shallow borrowings from ballet and other forms, lacked sustaining power. Each section had an idea — one performer walking out of the spiral maze, two facing off as a mirrored pair — that was like a shell with too little inside it.

One partial exception was a late solo for LaBeija, accompanied by her father, Warren Benbow, on drums. Benbow, a veteran musician, understands improvisation, and as he worked up a brilliant abstraction of stripper music, LaBeija’s charisma emerged most fully. She reminded me of a young Josephine Baker.

It was significant, too, that at this point LaBeija had shed her elaborate costume for a simple corset-like affair, and had pushed the other elaborately costumed dancers offstage. Already, she had been pulling up strips of tape, and as the others returned in rehearsal attire, they helped her finish the cleanup job.

“Untitled” became a communal ritual. LaBeija elegantly unrolled a strip of tape toward the exit, a path that she and then her dancers followed. From a spiral labyrinth and an urban grid, she had created not a tangle but an illuminated line: an escape route, perhaps, on a journey that was personal but did not exclude others. This shape was moving, even if “Untitled” didn’t do justice to vogueing as dance.

This article originally appeared in

(Critic’s Notebook)

Two Vogue Shows Strike Art-World Poses

Later iterations have continued in that vein, but this year is different. This year is all about a single company. It’s from Britain, and it’s big, very big: the Royal Ballet.

As organized by the Royal’s artistic director, Kevin O’Hare, the two-week festival is both intimate and large-scale. It’s one major company presenting many small items — no fewer than 21 pieces in four programs. Selecting the opening program himself, O’Hare has delegated the other three to the designer Jean-Marc Puissant and the Royal stars Lauren Cuthbertson and Edward Watson.

Cuthbertson and Watson are also performing. Chances to see them and their expert colleagues in New York come far too infrequently for this up-close look to be anything other than a welcome treat. It’s the choice of repertory that’s suspect.

Later programs are filled with at least the potential for discovery and surprise: lesser-known choreographers, new works, guest stars (including David Hallberg and Robert Fairchild). The selection that opened the festival Tuesday (and continues through Friday) is the opposite: a classy collection of the big-name choreographers most famously associated with the Royal.

The names are big but the pieces aren’t — only solos and duets, many excerpted from more substantial works. Eight or nine items in 90 minutes is a lot of bang for your buck, yet the tasting-menu variety sacrifices depth. It might even do a disservice to the Royal’s artistic history.

Because there is history on the program, and not just in the oldest work: the slow, beautifully constructed pas de deux from Kenneth MacMillan’s 1966 “Concerto” (impeccably performed by Cuthbertson and Nicol Edmonds). Nor just in the two wonderful 1970s solos by the company’s founding choreographer, Frederick Ashton: “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” (performed with buoyant innocence by the young Joseph Sissens) and “Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan” (overacted by Romany Pajdak).

Much of the history is more recent. The opening pas de deux is from “Asphodel Meadows,” the 2010 work that put Liam Scarlett, then 24, on the map. But in this excerpt, a smooth expression of hesitancy, it’s hard to see what justified the buzz.

Similarly, one of two pas de deux by Wayne McGregor is from “Qualia,” the 2003 work that was his first for the Royal’s main stage. The acrobatic suggestion of sex here makes its point — the man (Watson) is as flexible as the woman (Sarah Lamb). But the excerpt from “Obsidian Tear,” a 2016 work hailed as a breakthrough for McGregor, doesn’t make much sense. In the full dance, is the master-slave dynamic less disturbing, or disturbing in a more artistically justifiable way?

One solo, “Jojo,” is very recent history. It’s a 2018 piece by Charlotte Edmonds, who is the first to hold the Royal’s new Young Choreographer position. But there’s nothing new here, sad to say, just a well-trained dancer (the shyly smiling Sissens) demonstrating that he can do bravura ballet steps and also get down at the club. Will the rest of the festival show the Royal’s present and future in a more flattering light?

Ballet Festival

Through Aug. 18 at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan; joyce.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/arts/dance/ballet-festival-joyce-theater-review.html" id="dc399f39-9a70-3cd0-a224-735e76971ad7">The New York Times</a>.

Review: Big Names (Royal Ballet!), Small Pieces at the Joyce

NEW YORK — When the Joyce Theater began its annual ballet festival, in summer 2013, it was as a useful showcase of small companies from around the United States. Upstart and offshoot troupes needed New York exposure but maybe weren't ready to fill the Joyce for a week on their own.

We hear the voice near the start of “Maze,” a frustrating dance-theater work debuting at the Shed this week. The message is true in several senses.

The intended one is thematic. As the program note indicates, “Maze” takes on social issues like “the school-to-prison pipeline” and “systemic racism in the justice system.” Viewed historically, such topics can induce a bitter sense of déjà vu.

The familiar smell also arises, though, from the many similarities between this production and “Flexn,” a show that originated at the Park Avenue Armory in 2015. Much of the talented cast and creative team are the same, as are many of the powerful themes, but so is the central problem: all that talent floundering for want of direction.

As in “Flexn,” one of the directors here is Reggie Gray, also known as Regg Roc, a pioneer in the Brooklyn-born street-dance style called flexn and founder of the D.R.E.A.M. Ring, a crew that serves as cast for both shows. Gray was one of the first to develop the form’s narrative potential — to show how its joint-testing contortions, otherworldly gliding in sneakers and stop-motion pantomime could express the extreme emotional pressures experienced by its dancers.

But what works in the context of a dance battle or a music video isn’t the same as what’s required for a 90-minute theatrical production. For “Flexn,” Gray shared the director’s chair with Peter Sellars, who pushed the dancers to go big without showing them how to grow. For “Maze,” he shares duties with experimental theater artist Kaneza Schaal. And this new team seems to be trying to correct some of the flaws of “Flexn.”

Where in “Flexn” the brilliance of the dancers was often lost in the vastness of the Armory, “Maze” begins with the 15 dancers close up, sharing the stage with the freely roaming audience in the Shed’s smaller Griffin Theater, an open space defined by Tobias G. Rylander’s lighting: pyramids and cones of illumination that outline crosses on the ground.

And where the music for “Flexn” was recorded (and oddly mawkish), this time the musical director, DJ Epic B, is joined by live musicians: excellent singer-actors Justin Hicks and Kanita Miller Hicks; t djembe drummer Rasaan-Elijah Green; and, a bit incongruously, a trio of taiko drummers called Taiko Masala.

The immersive staging and the live music provide gains in immediacy. And some of the lyrics, by Eisa Davis, increase the theatrical sophistication. Yet throughout “Maze,” whether the audience is encircling the dancers or (as later) watching from stadium seating, the core problem of weak structure persists.

There are, of course, many astonishing flashes — not merely of attention-getting tricks with hats and double-jointedness, but of real artistry. Yet so many of the serial solos meander and sputter, improvisational in the unfinished sense. And the group sections aren’t much more coherent, individually or in sequence.

“This happened already,” the voice whispers again as we see a stage of standing dancers, their hands crossed as if in manacles, swaying as if on a slave ship. It’s a striking image, and a familiar one — overly familiar, despite the thematic point. Another group section, acting out and abstracting the shooting of Laquan McDonald by Chicago police, is equally striking, unfocused and underdeveloped. Assembly-line choreography effectively conjures prison life, but it’s the street-to-stage pipeline that needs more attention. Everything feels like a first draft.

And everything is in contrast to the aftershow, when dancers and even audience members freestyle. Suddenly, there’s real person-to-person interaction, real in-the-moment invention, real joy. The dancers are still in the Shed, but they’re free from the Maze.

Through Aug. 17 at the Shed; theshed.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/arts/dance/maze-review-street-dance-the-shed.html" id="c623aaae-2f35-3d62-a55d-c4791bf11baf">The New York Times</a>.

'Maze' Review: Virtuoso Street Dance Sends Blurry Message

NEW YORK — “This happened already,” a voice whispers. “This smells familiar.”

Two of the sick, soon to die, were in the Taylor company: Christopher Gillis and Jeffrey Wadlington. Hurlin and her dancer friends, especially another Taylor member, Hernando Cortez, decided they needed to do something. They founded an organization called Dancers Responding to AIDS.

In the years since, that organization (which became part of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS in 1993) has raised millions of dollars. At the start, though, it was tricky to find somewhere to hold money-raising events that did not cost a lot. Cortez, who had a timeshare on Fire Island, had the idea to try there. They laid down vinyl flooring on someone’s bayside deck, set out chairs by the pool, and put on a show that pulled in about $8,000.

That was the first Fire Island Dance Festival, in 1995. This year’s installment, the 25th, has already raised more than $600,000, and the events do not even start until Friday. (It runs through Sunday, with a sun shade and chilled water for audiences, and an indoor venue ready in case of rain.)

The biggest change, Hurlin said, came in 2004, when the festival moved to the largest property on the island. “It has this fabulous position, where the shoreline curves, so you’re facing the sunset,” she said. “We cover the pool and build a stage right up against the sea wall” — a stage that has to be rebuilt each year — “so it looks like the dancers could jump right into the water.”

That move expanded the audience capacity, while the picturesque location increased the allure. But the festival resonated with Fire Island residents from the beginning. “Just as our dance world was affected by AIDS, so was this community,” Hurlin said. “We needed each other.” Beyond attending the shows, many Fire Island residents host dancers in their homes.

And then there are the volunteers — the stage managers, lighting designers, costumers, technicians and grunts who help out each year, many scheduling their vacations so that they can work the festival. “It’s a full-circle community experience,” Hurlin said.

Of the three shows each year, the sunset performance on Saturday is the most popular. The dancers and choreographers who participate tend to be big names. This time, Michelle Dorrance, Kyle Abraham, Christopher Wheeldon and James Whiteside, among others, are all offering short premieres.

The location is a draw for them, too. “There’s nothing else like performing on that stage,” said Robert Fairchild, the New York City Ballet dancer turned Broadway star, who is tapping in Dorrance’s premiere. “The wind that blows off the water, the exposure to nature — it’s such an incredible feeling.”

“The tone is set by the cause,” said Whiteside, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre. “It’s sobering but also a greater-than-you feeling, and a joy.”

The sense of camaraderie is high. The meals and outdoor dressing rooms are communal. Parts of the dance world that don’t often mingle — ballet, tap, Broadway, contemporary — mingle here. And connections happen.

The first time that Kyle Abraham, a contemporary choreographer and dancer, performed at the festival, in 2011, he met Wendy Whelan, then a principal dancer with New York City Ballet. She was a star, and he wasn’t yet. “She asked me if I would ever consider making something with her,” Abraham recalled. “I started laughing hysterically. Are you serious? Of course!”

They ended up working together on Whelan’s show “Restless Creature.” Brian Brooks, another choreographer Whelan met at the festival, was also part of that production.

Some dancers meet donors. Wheeldon met his husband, Ross Rayburn. A yoga instructor, Rayburn didn’t know much about dance then. At a cocktail party, he and Wheeldon hit it off. The next day, Wheeldon, one of the world’s foremost ballet choreographers, got to show Rayburn one of his dances, performed by Whelan against an unbeatable backdrop of sea, sky and sunset.

“If this doesn’t seal the deal, I don’t know what will,” Wheeldon recalled thinking. It worked.

Over the years, as the nature of the AIDS crisis has changed, Dancers Responding to AIDS has expanded beyond the single focus on AIDS and dancers into meal delivery and addiction and recovery services. “There is still a huge need,” Hurlin said, “but it’s broader, bigger. We’re able to incorporate more people into the mission.”

“I think that’s positive,” she continued, “moving forward with celebration, as opposed to sorrow.”

This year’s festival, hosted by Joel Grey, should have some of both. The premiere that Whiteside has choreographed — which he described as “a juxtaposition of extreme beauty and camp” — is for two fast-rising Ballet Theater members, Aran Bell and Hurlin’s daughter, Catherine.

“Catherine has filled in a couple of times when she was younger,” the elder Hurlin said. “Lately, she’s been helping with load in and ushering. But this year, I told her, ‘You have to dance.’”

The Paul Taylor company is also returning, performing part of Taylor’s haunting “Sunset.” Since Taylor himself died last year, that loss will further tinge the dance with sorrow.

For Hurlin and others, it has another resonance. Its duet for two men was originally performed by Gillis and Wadlington, the friends whose illness spurred the creation of Dancers Responding to AIDS, which has since helped so many but didn’t save them. When “Sunset” is performed at sunset on Saturday, the tears in some eyes won’t be from the glare.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/arts/dance/fire-island-dance-festival.html" id="e52770b2-407d-3f1d-ad31-058b02678d5e">The New York Times</a>.

Fire Island Dance Festival: A Full-Circle Community Experience

Denise Roberts Hurlin was a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1991, which meant she could not avoid the terrifying reality of AIDS. “So many friends and colleagues were getting sick and dying,” she recalled recently. “So many.”

For many years, especially as ballet companies came under increasing pressure to identify and nurture female choreographers, City Ballet’s failure to call upon Tanowitz was puzzling. It’s true that she’s an outsider to ballet, but she knows her ballet history, and her proven talent in discovering drama and wit through formal invention puts her right in line with the company’s best traditions.

So it’s about time that she be given a shot. Yet, as it turns out, the commission is also a little ahead of schedule. Originally, the plan was for Tanowitz to make a work for the fall, but when another choreographer pulled out, Tanowitz — suddenly in-demand and busier than ever before in her career — stepped in.

Might that fast-forwarding account for why her new “Bartok Ballet” feels both overstuffed and undercooked? Its plentiful virtues are characteristic, starting with a wonderfully multidimensional use of stage space. In this ensemble piece, two dancers might oscillate in and out of a relationship intermittently identifiable as a duet, while someone else, way in the rear, lies on her back, raising a bent leg, and yet another dancer peeks out from a forward wing.

Many of the steps, especially for entrances, are stimulatingly eccentric: odd, sideways, hunched, heely. Tanowitz also responds to the fractured folk melodies and rhythms in the score — Bartok’s String Quartet No. 5, played a little tamely by the Flux Quartet on one lip of the proscenium — with bursts of footwork and balleticized folk gesture: hands on hips or behind the head.

The costumes, by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, are gold to match the theater’s décor. The dance, like the score, is complexly symmetrical. It begins and ends with women, and at its center, two trios of women trade off forming and passing through golden gates, a beautiful image.

Throughout the dance, motifs are skillfully introduced, repeated, inverted. Yet the whole doesn’t quite come together as more than a demonstration of Tanowitz’s favorite methods. After how exceptionally well Tanowitz met the challenge of making a work for the Martha Graham company recently, it’s disappointing that she didn’t hit this one out of the park. Most fundamentally, the combination of this choreographer with this company and these dancers has not yet jelled.

That’s not a problem shared by Justin Peck, the troupe’s resident choreographer. Earlier on the program, the City Ballet dancers looked fully at home in his new “Bright,” even if this pretty appetizer of a dance lasted no longer than the speeches. Where Tanowitz fell short of the challenging, powerful music she chose, Peck — not for the first time — exactly matched a shallow, empty-headed score (Mark Dancigers’ “The Bright Motion: II”), using Sara Mearns as a kind of free spirit, slightly apart from the others and inspiring them into motion.

But if “Bright” was slight, the gifted Peck will have more chances. Crucially, so will Tanowitz. She’s already scheduled to make another work for the company next year. Too often, female choreographers are not given opportunities, as male ones are, to try again and grow. Signing up Tanowitz for two in a row is an excellent new-era move, a truly bright idea.

New York City Ballet: Through June 2 at the David H. Koch Theater; ncyballet.com

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/dance/review-city-ballet-pam-tanowitz.html" id="20350f66-b887-3cb3-a0b3-656c592c99a6">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Lately, there’s been a lot of talk of a “new era” or “new chapter” at New York City Ballet. At the company’s spring gala at the David H. Koch Theater on Thursday, both phrases cropped up in preshow speeches by the new artistic director, Jonathan Stafford, and the new associate artistic director, Wendy Whelan. These speeches were far from lively, but fresh ideas have been emerging in other forms. The fruit of one was on the program: a commission for choreographer Pam Tanowitz.

Two and a Half Cheers for Pam Tanowitz!

NEW YORK — Making a new work for the Martha Graham Dance Company is a tough assignment. Any attempt to copy Graham is self-defeating, sure to pale next to the real thing elsewhere on the program. And yet the new work must have some relation to Graham, some reason to stand beside her art and at the same time stand on its own as art of today. No wonder so few of the pieces the company has commissioned in recent years have been any good.

Now there’s an added challenge. The newest commissions come under the rubric of the two-year EVE Project commemorating the ratification of the 19th Amendment and the enfranchisement of women. Female choreographers are tasked with expressing female empowerment.

The first nights of the company’s two-week run at the Joyce Theater featured the world premiere of “Deo” by Maxine Doyle and Bobbi Jene Smith and the New York debut of “Untitled (Souvenir)” by the suddenly-in-demand Pam Tanowitz. “Deo,” striking on its own, suffers in comparison with the Graham around it. But Tanowitz has succeeded where so many have failed. Borrowing from Graham, she’s made her own magic.

Starting in silence, “Untitled” feels at first like a clash of aesthetics. There’s something willful about how Tanowitz fractures the stage space and keeps her rhythms fragmentary, chopping up the ordered world of Graham more in the manner of Graham alum Merce Cunningham, Tanowitz’s chief influence.

But with the start of the music, Caroline Shaw’s “Punctum” and “Valencia,” the piece builds and builds, establishing its own world, its own poetic coherence. Just as the music gives a swirling momentum to highlights of string quartet language, so the choreographymakes shards of Graham gleam with new brightness and beauty. The flow is Tanowitz’s.

“Deo” is more dutiful and less original. Following Graham’s love of myth, Doyle and Smith have extracted themes of mothers, daughters, mortality and grief from the story of Demeter and Persephone. The piece, for an all-female cast, proceeds by image and blackout: a forest of women on their backs, with heads and legs floating; a crowd of women with their backs to us, writhing as if weeping; a clump of women rotating like a slow-motion tornado.

Some of the vocabulary is taken from Graham: contractions and cupped hands. But these are surface gleanings. Smith’s physicality, true to her roots in the Batsheva Dance Company, pushes Graham’s pelvic truth down into squatting thighs. The Graham women clearly enjoy the sensual abandon and Batsheva-style solos, yet you only have to watch a little of “Chronicle” — a 1936 all-female, who-needs-men Graham juggernaut also on this season’s programs — to sense the relative flimsiness of “Deo.”

Even its ensemble largeness, “Deo” also seems small next to Graham’s two-woman duet “Hérodiade” (1944). Yet the logic of Tanowitz’s “Untitled” grows more engaging if your mind has recently followed “Hérodiade” and its patterns of intense indecision, especially as strongly performed by PeiJu Chien-Pott and Natasha M. Diamond-Walker.

Not all Graham is faring so well this year. The revival of “El Penitente,” an important and difficult Graham work from 1940, is anemic. There’s too much acting in the face, rather than in the body, as becomes particularly apparent when the performers wear masks or shrouds. And “Secular Games,” one of Graham’s swinging-60s pseudo-comedies, falls short of justifying its inclusion on overstuffed, jumbled programs.

I wonder whether what critic Clive Barnes felt about “Secular Games” at the time of its premiere — that it was witty, in a particular sense — is the same as I feel about Tanowitz now. By witty, I don’t mean funny. And it’s not only about eccentricity, though “Untitled” has many wonderful baubles that come out of nowhere and yet fit just fine.

One subtle bit of wit is the unemphatic way she gives female Graham steps to the men in her mixed-gender cast and how that cast unostentatiously splits into gendered groups near the end. A male trio, after completing a brilliantly complex section, sits to watch the women strike glorious Graham balances. Slowly, the seated men scoot along the front of the stage, still watching. And by this witty choreographic motion, Tanowitz speaks volumes about Graham and herself and the empowerment of women.

Martha Graham Dance Company

Continues through April 14 at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan; joyce.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/arts/dance/martha-graham-dance-pam-tanowitz-bobbi-jene-smith.html" id="f9aa3195-31a0-31a7-a8a4-3ee96065909c">The New York Times</a>.

Creating for Martha Graham's Company, Competing With the Great Mother

That someone else was Merce Cunningham, a giant of American dance, whose centennial is being honored this year with performances across the globe. Throughout March, the Harkness festival is joining the celebration, featuring programs of new work by Dunn and three other choreographers — Ellen Cornfield, Jonah Bokaer and Dylan Crossman — who danced in the Cunningham company as much as 40 years apart.

That company, founded in 1953, no longer exists, having disbanded in 2011, two years after Cunningham’s death. But Cunningham’s influence is far from dead, as these choreographers know better than most.

It’s a storied element of modern dance lineages: Dancers leave a company to become choreographers, then struggle to distinguish themselves from the company style, as children strive to differentiate themselves from their parents. Cunningham got his start dancing for Martha Graham, and was one of very few to escape her enormous shadow.

Now his shadow is huge, his influence evident in generations of choreographers who never danced for him. But for those who did — not just the Harkness four, but many others, including Karole Armitage, Neil Greenberg and Kimberly Bartosik — the anxiety of influence is particularly acute.

Some hallmarks are technical: a classical clarity, an animal alertness, a penchant for difficult coordinations of torso and feet. Some have to do with time and space, with creating what Cunningham in 1952 called “a space in which anything can happen,” like nature, which “makes a space and puts lots of things in it,” things that are “all unrelated, yet each affecting all the others.”

When Crossman first started presenting his own choreography and people remarked on its resemblance to Cunningham’s. Crossman wondered if he would have received such comments had he not been known as a Cunningham dancer. But wonder was all he could do, since dancing for Cunningham was his main claim to fame.

The other three Harkness choreographers might speculate similarly, but with each the Cunningham influence is unavoidably apparent. The easiest aspect to notice is the technique, which, as Cornfield explained, is “indelibly imprinted” on their bodies from years of performing Cunningham and on their minds from years of watching.

Another layer is their reaction to some of the radical methods developed by Cunningham and his partner, composer John Cage. How strictly do they maintain the independence of dance from music, creating each apart from the other? Do they use chance procedures in choreography, making choices by rolling dice or consulting the I Ching?

Harder to sense in their work are their responses to Cunningham’s personality. He was, as Dunn characterized him, aloof and “impersonal,” not one to give much encouragement, at least not verbally. He was a man of few words, and yet the little he said was often phrased so that you might be thinking about it for the rest of your life.

In separate interviews, the four Harkness choreographers spoke of Cunningham’s example as a life-changing liberation. They all spoke of gratitude and ambivalence.

For Dunn, 76, who danced in the Cunningham company from 1969 to 1973, the impersonality was an attraction. It felt familiar: Dunn’s father was similarly distant.

“Merce never addressed us in a personal way,” Dunn said. “Even though he might be aiming a correction at someone who just fell over or something, he would say, ‘Some of you ...'”

Exceptions proved the rule. Dunn recalled a time after he had been taking class with Cunningham for months and thinking that Cunningham hadn’t noticed him, when suddenly the reserved teacher whispered in his ear, “I think your legs are getting longer.” (“Now that’s seduction,” Dunn said.)

“We never had what you could call a personal conversation,” Dunn continued, “but I would sometimes ask him things and he would answer so beautifully, as if he been waiting for that exact question.”

These kinds of responses, which Bokaer likened to Zen koans, also appealed to Dunn. “The rhetoric was brilliant,” he said. “It always left space around it. It was never prescriptive. He never told us what to think or feel.”

Mostly, there was no comment — not when Dunn grew a beard or tried something a little wacky in a less structured section of choreography or danced Cunningham’s solos in the wings while Cunningham was performing them onstage. And to Dunn, this silence felt like freedom.

When he started making his own work, he assumed it would be like Cunningham’s, “because that’s what I loved,” he said. It wasn’t at first. Then it was, so much so that he tried not to think about it anymore. Forced by the Harkness festival to look at the connections again, Dunn said he noticed the space he tries to give his dancers, requiring them to be accurate but letting them be themselves.

Cornfield, 70, whose tenure in the Cunningham troupe was from 1974 to 1982, remembered that she and her fellow dancers “always wanted Merce to be the loving daddy.” They weren’t going to get that. (Like Dunn, she has a memory of the one and only time that Cunningham praised her. “You’re getting better,” he said.)

But what they did get, Cornfield said, “was someone’s absolute truth, in a physical sense.”

“Merce was very sensitive to the states people were in,” she continued. “You could feel it when he was watching you.”

Developing as a choreographer, Cornfield said, has been a process of “shedding the part of me that wants to do it right.” A hard choice came in 2003, when she decided to stop teaching at Cunningham’s studio. “I realized that I was organizing movement material that would be appropriate for his dancers, and it was keeping me in that place as an artist,” she said.

Since then, she’s experimented with gestures and shows of emotion that diverge from Cunningham’s example. But it can be difficult for her to separate what’s his from what’s hers. Making a dance and adding music later makes sense to her, she said, because she grew up in a rural environment, dancing to the sounds of nature. Part of her new dance, when two different trio sections happen at once, is “definitely an homage to Merce.”

When Bokaer joined the company in 2000, at 18, he was the youngest person ever to do so. He was also, to his knowledge, the only person of Middle Eastern origin. In the years since he left the company, in 2007, he said, it’s the second distinction that has loomed larger, as his work as a choreographer, including what he has planned for the festival, has grown to stress identity in ways that Cunningham never did.

Bokaer, 37, drew a stark contrast between Cunningham’s mentorship and that of experimental theater director Robert Wilson, with whom he’s worked closely since 2006. Where Cunningham was “monastic and reserved at best,” Wilson gives “an overabundance of communication and clarity”: copious notes, shoptalk at all hours, warmth.

“But what I appreciated about Merce’s way,” Bokaer said, “was that it opened up a whole plane of animalistic intuition that was very intense.” Sometimes, Bokaer’s dancers remark on the space and freedom in his work. “I would like to think that’s something I received from Merce,” he said.

Crossman, 34, was among the last dancers to be hired by Cunningham, joining the company a month before Cunningham’s death and staying through the farewell tour. Yet for two years before he joined, he was one of four helpers working with Cunningham, who was nearly 90, every day as he continued to choreograph.

“I think we had a more fun, storytelling, grandfatherly version of Merce than maybe other people did,” Crossman said. “We had more input, because it made it easier for him. Our asking questions accelerated the process.”

Still, if “Merce Cunningham is watching you, you go 300 percent all the time,” Crossman said, and the principle of always giving everything is one he holds for his dancers and himself.

Working for Pam Tanowitz, a prime example of a choreographer who never danced for Cunningham yet is heavily influenced by him, Crossman said he felt freer to take liberties and bring more of himself to the work.

Crossman’s piece for the festival addresses politics as Cunningham never did, but his aesthetic preference for presenting virtuosic people, rather than characters, as much as his use of chance and separating dance from music, certainly derives from Cunningham.

So much does. For years, Dunn told a story about his last performance with the Cunningham troupe, in which Cunningham gave him a solo but then ended up dancing himself at the same time. Dunn used to tell the story as one about the mercurial, possibly vindictive Merce, until writer Nancy Dalva suggested that Dunn think of the episode not as Cunningham upstaging him, but as Cunningham dancing with him.

That’s how Dunn prefers to think of it now, which is wise, since he and his fellow Cunningham alums will always be dancing with Merce.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/arts/dance/merce-cunningham-harkness.html" id="943ee6d6-f085-3b45-ae0b-25aa4729d5a8">The New York Times</a>.

Douglas Dunn has been making dances since 1971. His choreography has earned acclaim and awards, but presenters don’t call as frequently as they once did. That helps explains why, when Dunn was asked to present a premiere in the 92nd Street Y’s Harkness Dance Festival this year, his emotions were mixed. Gratified to have his work chosen, he was disturbed by the reason underlying the choice: that 50 years ago he danced in work by someone else.

Making Dances in the Shadow of Merce Cunningham

Wearing a feathered bikini and high heels, she swivels her hips nearly out of joint as her feet subdivide the beat. Her mouth open in joy, she rides the rhythm with her whole swinging body.

“Do it any way you will,” she instructs through song, but few are likely to do it quite the way she did.

That was Mable Lee, a singer and dancer who appeared in enough films of this type to earn the title “Queen of the Soundies.” Lee died Feb. 7 at a nursing home in Manhattan. She was 97.

Her son, Michael Mansfield, said the cause was heart failure.

A professional entertainer since she was 9, Lee had performed as recently as July, at Symphony Space in Manhattan as part of the New York City Tap Festival. In her later appearances, she tended to behave as she had in the 1940s, her sexy moves making no concessions to age. Her range of motion may have been slightly diminished, but her indomitable spirit not at all. Secure in her ability to charm any audience, she might forget the lyrics and improve the song. In the days before her death, she was still discussing plans for a new one-woman show.

“She made a way for herself, and paved a way for others,” said Beverly Moore, a dancer and friend of Lee. “She was a lover of life, but she took no tea for anybody’s fever.” Lee refused, in other words, to put up with anyone’s nonsense.

“Mable had a way and she cared to teach it,” said tap dancer Michelle Dorrance, the most prominent member of a generation of dancers, younger than Lee by a half century or more, who were strongly and directly influenced by her.”

Mable Lee was born in Atlanta on Aug. 2, 1921, to Rosella Moore and Alton Lee. In elementary school she choreographed, directed and starred in shows at recess, charging a quarter. As she told The Atlanta Constitution in 1978, “I have thought of myself as a star since I was about 15.”

By that age, Lee was already appearing in local venues like the Top Hat nightclub and the 81 Theater. Already she could be, in her word, “belligerent.” Lee, who was African-American, told The Constitution about a time when she was boarding the back of a bus and a white girl grabbed her by the hair. Lee fought with her fists.

“I’m not really malicious,” she explained. “I just don’t like to be talked down to. I just let them know I was human.”

In 1940, Lee and her mother moved to New York City. In Harlem, she joined the chorus lines at the West End Theater and the Apollo, doing six shows a day.

These were elite groups, filled with dancers often as skilled as the headliners. Still, it was rare for any woman to break out of the chorus. Lee did, appearing in comedy skits and singing and dancing as a soloist with a line of dancers behind her.

She performed in Harlem nightclubs and received rave reviews for her work in the 1947 London revue “Here, There and Everywhere.” That year she also appeared, showing much skin, on the cover of Ebony magazine.

She was never shy about displaying her body. “Wham, Sam, dig them gams,” Louis Jordan sings in the 1947 musical film “Reet, Petite and Gone” before the camera ogles Lee’s legs. Those limbs didn’t stay still for long, not in this film or in any of the many soundies Lee made, once hard to find but now easily accessible on YouTube.

When the all-black 1921 musical “Shuffle Along” was revived on Broadway in 1952, Lee was in it. But her kind of show business was headed into decline.

In 1960, she gave birth to her only child, a son, with Tony Mansfield, a musician. In addition to him, she is survived by two grandsons and a great-grandson.

In 1969, she was one of only three women to dance in “The Hoofers,” a hit off-Broadway show that brought renewed attention to black tap dancers. From 1976 to 1978, she starred in the touring production of the Broadway musical revue “Bubbling Brown Sugar,” which looked back at the heyday of Harlem nightclubs.

While tap dancing was only one of Lee’s many talents, it was in the revival of tap in the 1980s and ‘90s and the concerts and festivals that grew out of that revival that she found a late-career home. When she appeared at the annual Tap Extravaganzas honoring National Tap Dance Day, it was usually with the Dancing Ladies, her own chorus line of young women.

These young women, Dorrance among them, had been heavily influenced by the masculine style of Savion Glover. Teaching them the chorus line tradition, Lee taught them how to be feminine.

“She was one of the only people who could,” Dorrance said. “In a culture with so much vulgarity, she showed us how sexuality could be funny and tasteful.”

Alexandria Bradley, another of the Dancing Ladies, said Lee “showed us class and grace, but also that when it’s time to get loose, get loose. And it was more than the dancing. It was a sisterhood.”

Tony Waag, the artistic director of the New York City Tap Festival, performed regularly with Lee in her last two decades. “You never knew what she was going to do,” he said. Once, he recalled, he asked her what she had planned for their duet, and she told him, “Just come on when I tell you to.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/obituaries/mable-lee-dead.html" id="27dc3e87-e0cb-3019-ade4-da40c55e2c9b">The New York Times</a>.

Mable Lee, Tap-Dancing 'Queen of the Soundies,' Dies at 97

First, she sings: a boogie-woogie dance instruction number called “Chicken Shack Shuffle.” And then, because this is a soundie — one of the many short musical films made in the 1940s to be played on coin-operated jukeboxes — she demonstrates.

While tap dancing was only one of Lee’s many talents, it was in the revival of tap in the 1980s and ’90s and the concerts and festivals that grew out of that revival that she found a late-career home. When she appeared at the annual Tap Extravaganzas honoring National Tap Dance Day, it was usually with the Dancing Ladies, her own chorus line of young women.

Such images and formations have been the most conspicuous proof of Peck’s uncommon talent since he began choreographing for New York City Ballet in 2012. “Principia,” which had its debut at the David H. Koch Theater on Thursday, is his 17th ballet for the company, and it shares much with those he’s made before. It’s youthful, ardent, inventive, sincere. Claire Kretzschmar might be said to define its sunny spirit, except that no one in this work stands out for long.

A pair might draw focus in the foreground, but behind them, in silhouette, life goes on, with other people making connections or missing them. (The lighting is by the masterful Jennifer Tipton.) Those missed connections are typical, too. A friendly threesome keeps turning into a duo, leaving one member out and reaching into the wings. Two guys who have eyes for each other can’t seem to stick together. The group keeps absorbing their pas de deux.

By the end of “Principia,” whose fancy Latin title alludes not so helpfully to Isaac Newton, this wistfulness has already turned into wistful memory, as all the images of the dance return in an artfully composed, meditative skein. In tone, this is a bit like high school seniors flipping through a yearbook, remembering when they were young. And the rush to reminiscence almost seems an acknowledgment that what has immediately preceded it — a series of exposed duets and solos — is more generic and less engaging than the group stuff, a persistent problem in Peck’s work.

There’s a sense in “Principia” of compositional habits leading Peck to say the same things he’s said before. Part of the trouble could be with the music. This is far from the first time Peck has turned to singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens, and the two artists clearly have a simpatico relationship. Yet, even more than in their 2014 collaboration, “Everywhere We Go,” Stevens has produced an inoffensive collection of pastiche orchestral sections, lacking the kind of sustained organization that George Balanchine said a choreographer needed. That gives Peck room to impose his own structure but not much help in escaping creative ruts.

On Thursday, “Principia” was bookended by the chic of two different eras. The program opened with the return of William Forsythe’s “Herman Schmerman,” a 1992 work that since 1994 has been represented at City Ballet only by the pas de deux that Forsythe added in 1993.

We haven’t been missing much. The opening section, for three women and two men, is a black-and-white affair that offsets hyperextension and some rhythmic panache with flat-footed walking and other ostentatious casualness. In its anxiously jokey relation to the classic of Balanchine modernism that City Ballet is also performing this week, it could have been titled “Agon Schmagon.” What is as dated as the sound of the electronics in Thom Willems’ recorded score? The early-1990s attitude of this dance.

The “Herman Schmerman” pas de deux confronts the same conventions Peck struggles with now, but it sidesteps them with a wink. Before it’s time to trade off solos, the couple shakes hands. After the woman reappears in a yellow skirt, so does the man. With its sped-up showing off and Twyla Tharpian jogging, the pas de deux is kind of fun, and Tiler Peck and Tyler Angle looked sexy having fun with it.

You want a man in a skirt? Kyle Abraham’s “The Runaway,” closing the program, has two of them, shirtless in fur collars — and it also has tracks by Kanye West (among others). Abraham created the work, his first ballet, for the 2018 Fall Gala, and its costumes by Giles Deacon are wild. Pieces made for these fashion galas often don’t find a place in the repertory, but Abraham’s are holding up.

There’s a kind of irreverent joke, of course, in dancing ballet steps to confrontational hip-hop. But it’s an earned joke, because the steps fit the speech rhythms so well. Abraham has discovered real connections, humorous and beautiful, between ballet and his own hybrid, street-influenced style. “The Runaway” feels of the moment, and overdue. And it remains a star vehicle for Taylor Stanley, who is so at home and extraordinary in this new mode that it’s hard to imagine the dance without him. Catch his performance before it’s a memory.

“Principia”

New York City Ballet. The season continues through March 3 at David H. Koch Theater, Manhattan; nycballet.com.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/arts/dance/justin-peck-principia-review.html" id="5edd7e57-0484-36f1-a3ba-8d580539901a">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Like many works by Justin Peck, his new “Principia” is immediately arresting. Two dozen dancers clump in a crouch, and somebody in the middle spurts up. Then someone else does, followed by another and another, each burst contributing to the collective image of a fountain. A little later, dancers huddle together in three groups like tall sheaves of wheat. When someone touches the top of a bundle, it opens to reveal a treasure inside: another member of the company.

Review: At City Ballet, More Youthful Invention From Justin Peck

For Baker, 31, who recently became the lighting director for Boston Ballet, good lighting design is integral to a dance, inseparable from its moods and meanings. It doesn’t follow, however, that the lighting should grab attention.

“Brandon’s contributions are in support of the choreographer’s vision,” said Justin Peck, the resident choreographer at New York City Ballet. Their careers have risen together. Peck’s first major work, “The Year of the Rabbit” (2012), was also that of Baker, and since then, they have collaborated on nearly 20 dances.

“What I love about Brandon," Peck said, “is how thorough he is, how involved.” Not all designers sit in on rehearsals, he added, but Baker is “woven into the development of the piece, and he has a lot of good ideas for the work as a whole, not just how to light it.”

Jamar Roberts, a choreographer and star dancer at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, agrees. When he and Baker were working on Roberts’ “Members Don’t Get Weary,” set to John Coltrane, they discussed many things: Should a dance about the blues have any blue in it? Should a memory of the past look murky or clear?

“And then things I had been thinking about would just show up in Brandon’s lighting,” Roberts said. “That’s why I call him the wizard.”

Usually, Baker is the kind of wizard who stays behind the curtain. But on Friday and Jan. 20 he will draw attention to his own work for once with “The Choreography of Light,” part of the Works &amp; Process series at the Guggenheim Museum.

For this event, which alternates between performance and discussion, the lighting comes first. In addition to an excerpt from a piece that Peck is making for Houston Ballet, there are three new solos that Roberts has choreographed in response to Baker’s lighting schemes. “It was important to me,” Baker said, “that these not be solos with light but duets in which the partner is light.”

One solo for Patricia Delgado — the former Miami City Ballet dancer, who happens to be married to Peck — is about color. “Many choreographers are afraid of it,” Baker said. Another solo moves through extreme angles of light, in an arc, as if from sunrise to sunset. A third, for the City Ballet principal Taylor Stanley, demonstrates the varieties of white light. “Choreographers will often tell me, ‘This is a white light dance,’ and I’ll ask, ‘what kind of white?’” Baker said.

In a recent interview, Baker spoke about his essential but rarely discussed art: pointing out mistakes and misconceptions, revealing just how quickly he has to work and explaining the artistic satisfactions of service. “Just being part of this thing that’s bigger than I could ever be is all I ever wanted,” he said. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

How did you get interested in something as specific as lighting for dance?

I grew up as a musician playing in rock bands in Van Nuys, California, but I’ve always been deeply inspired by visual art. When I was 13, I went to see a musical and I was, like, “Wow, lighting is this beautiful bridge between the visual spirit and the musical spirit.”

How so?

In the same way that a painter may use a brush to create phrases and mix color, I’m doing that with light. And lighting also has rhythm and pace. My friends back home will say, “Why did you give up music?” But I never gave up music. I just use a different instrument now.

But practicing stage lighting isn’t quite like practicing the guitar.

Right. I don’t own any lights. I did study at the California Institute of the Arts. All my roommates there now work for Pixar. But one common misunderstanding is that people think of lighting designers as technicians. There’s a whole different union in charge of that.

So what is your role, then?

To create a frame and a point of view. Like a cinematographer. I create a visual language and a color palette that is specific to each ballet. Each work should be a single statement, and the choreographer and I have to decide what it is.

What do you mean by a frame?

It might be an open space, a wide frame of light that embraces both the height and the width of the stage and lets the dance speak for itself.

That sounds like getting out of the way.

It can be. When Justin Peck choreographed “Rodeo,” he was taking on this famous Aaron Copland score that has an enormous amount of color in it. I chose to approach it in a minimalist way, with a wide space and warm sunlight. As an artist, you have to decide what needs to come forward. The lighting for “Rodeo” is simple, but it’s essential. It’s probably my best work.

When is a narrower frame appropriate?

In Justin’s “Everywhere We Go,” the first and last movements have a massive amount of dancers, and I made it extremely bright, like an arena. But there’s this pas de deux that’s quiet, just solo piano, and I took that as a hint and used only two follow spots. It allowed us to focus in, with an intimacy almost like a campfire.

You don’t let the space stay dim for long, though, unlike many other lighting designers for dance.

People do come up to me and thank me, saying, “It’s good to see who’s onstage for once.”

What are some other mistakes you see in lighting design?

Sometimes it’s very obvious that the lighting was an afterthought. Or is trying to cover something up. That’s why it’s so important to me to work collaboratively from the beginning.

You’re in on the planning all along, but how much time do you get in the actual theater before a dance has its premiere?

It’s easy to understand why lighting is essential to dance performance. Dancing in the dark is hard to see. But when Brandon Stirling Baker says he wants his lighting design to be essential, he means something different.

Brian Seibert

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