Performance

Bronislava Nijinska's Les Biches

April 1, 2022 - By Lynn Garafola

Excerpt from La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern. Forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 688 pp., April 2022.

No sooner had Nijinska arrived in Monte Carlo than she started work on Les Biches—“The Does” is one translation—her most important Diaghilev-era creation after Les Noces and one that remains in repertory. The music was by Francis Poulenc, a member of the “Les Six,” the group of young French composers taken up by Jean Cocteau after the war and championed in Cock and Harlequin, a manifesto of the new music published in 1918.[1] Diaghilev was strongly influenced by Cocteau’s theories and, according to Darius Milhaud, another “Les Six” composer, was “distinctly attracted by the amusingly direct art personified by Poulenc...

Carl Hancock Rux: Marking History, Juneteenth 2021 at Lincoln Center

November 8, 2021 - By Ifa Bayeza

Carl Hancock Rux is a tour de force. We first met at a Theatre Communications Guild panel in 1998. That day, he invited me to his concert performance which launched Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater on October 16. I did attend that day, and I’ve been following Carl’s creative career ever since.

That first event was a concert reading of his opera, Blackamoor Angel, about the Sub-Saharan African Angelo Soliman, who in 1727 was kidnapped and enslaved at the age of eight and brought to Vienna, Austria. There he rose in stature to become tutor and chamberlain to princes, colleague to Mozart and Haydn, and confidante of the emperor. Yet, upon his death, his skin was flayed from his flesh and stuffed for display among the other African “beasts” in the imperial natural history collection, where it remained until destroyed by fire fifty years later....

American SWANA: A Progressive Theatre Movement Soars

February 12, 2021 - By Jamil Khoury

One of the most significant and exciting developments of 2019 and 2020 in the American theatre has been the formation of the Middle Eastern and North African Theatre Makers Alliance (MENATMA). Years of creating, organizing, theorizing, and advocating have culminated in an American Middle Eastern and North African theatre movement that amplifies MENA voices and strengthens BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) theatre makers. 

It is a movement to which we ascribe enormous ambition and hope; we will be politically and aesthetically progressive, elevate historical consciousness, and fight for justice long denied. We will do so as storytellers who toil in the medium of theatre, in all its live and digital forms. We will do so as the progeny of cultures and communities about which we deeply care. We will do so as activists who confront racism, marginalization, and erasure...

Beethoven's Little Song

December 30, 2020 - By Ashish Xiangyi Kumar

Let’s talk about the last movement of Beethoven’s last piano sonata.

This is a very, very difficult thing to do.

One, because you’re already thinking of this piece as a masterpiece, because who wouldn’t, faced with the connotations of that first sentence? And there is nothing that burdens music like knowledge of its greatness. In fact such an extensive mythos has accreted around the final movement of the Op.111 Sonata—re: its sacredness, its expressive power, its nibbling at the boundaries of what we think of as the sonata, or even art—that it’s sometimes very hard to listen to this piece as music, as opposed to civilisational artefact. By writing this I too risk contributing to precisely this problem—of people treating this work as an object, something to be either regarded from an awesome distance or reduced to...

Dancing Balanchine's Late Modernism

February 28, 2020 - By Mark Franko

Amongst the diverse offerings of New York City Ballet this winter season, an intriguing cross-section of Balanchine/Stravinsky neoclassical ballets stretching from 1944 to 1972 were programmed. Provocative pairings and insightful performances increased our understanding of the Balanchine-Stravinsky collaboration. For the inspiring work of this season, credit goes to the dancers who rediscover, animate, and realize before our eyes this distinguished repertoire and its importance, doubtless a weighty responsibility. But credit must also go to coaches Suzanne Farrell and Rebecca Krohn, among others, whose collaboration with the dancers has been particularly productive.

Danses Concertantes is a good place to start, as it was choreographed in 1944, though reworked by Balanchine in 1972. Despite the choreographic update, the costumes and set by Eugene Berman are the...