Dance

DANCE REVIEWS

Laughter and Tears
By Emily Moellman
The Village Voice
Tuesday, Nov 20 2001

C.U.A,N.D.O is a run-down building on Second Avenue, but inside it proves art can be created in the wake of destruction. The October series there, entitled "From the Ashes" (produced by Ellie Covan and Amanda Gutowski of Dixon Place), brought in performers to reflect on the WTC disaster; one program included a handful of dancers in multidisciplinary works. In On the Verge, dancer-choreographer Thom Fogarty explored a range of emotions provoked by the disaster, throwing punch-derived movements and gestures, turning a "Hail Mary" into a "Fuck you" with one continuous slice of his arm (to thrashing music by Courtney Love), and then quietly fading away to softer movements of mourning. He finished by methodically folding a pair of pants into a triangle and walking slowly but steadily away, holding the fabric tightly to his chest, leaving the audience with a sense of strength in loss.

[Oddly, after a short review of the Big Apple Circus - 'laugher', I was the only piece from the C.U.A.N.D.O evening mentioned in this review - 'tears'.]

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Julius Caesar and His Close Friend Lady Macbeth
By JENNIFER DUNNING
May 14, 2005
There is nothing quite like a dancing chorus of agile 250-pound men in togas. Who would have known it, though, if not for Lawrence Goldhuber and his new "Julius Caesar Superstar," which opened on Thursday at the Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church.

Performed by Mr. Goldhuber's Bigmanarts company, the piece depicts the murder of Caesar, followed by a duet for Caesar and Lady Macbeth, who escorts him to the netherworld. Dressed in modern-day business suits by now, the senators return with Caesar's guards for a rousing performance of a song called "Can't You Feel the Brand-New Day?" American flags wave, and a shower of red-and-white confetti ends the hourlong show.

If this is meant to be sociopolitical commentary, and apparently it is, the most pointed moment of wit comes as one senator (Hapi Phace) enthusiastically signs the song at the side of the group. But "Julius Caesar Superstar" is simply a terrific romp at heart. It is also a handsome-looking show, particularly in a scene in which a video of Caesar's grimacing, smiling, revolving head is projected on a scrim that the senators plot behind in the baths. Liz Prince's vividly stylish costumes are inspired.

Most of all, this is a joyous, giddily epicene gathering of the downtown-dance clan to which everyone is invited, from the audience to the uptown ballet star Robert La Fosse, who plays Caesar, and the dance patron Micki Wesson, who anchors the evening with her gravitas as a soothsayer and a judge.

There are poignant moments, chiefly in a solo for the dying Caesar and in his duet with Lady Macbeth, played by a deliciously poker-faced Keely Garfield. Thom Fogarty brings a bracing simplicity to his senator, and Arthur Aviles is enjoyably cheeky as a guard.

Lawrence Goldhuber and Bigmanarts will perform "Julius Caesar Superstar" through tomorrowat Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village.

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Nice 'N' Nasty
Eva Yaa Asantewaa
published: February 05, 2002

As a soloist, Molissa Fenley won acclaim for making abstract movement with clear, exquisite shapes, notably flexed hands and hard-angled arms invoking certain Asian dance conventions. Her pieces still have strong, resonant purity, especially Pola'a, now reworked as an egalitarian duet with ballet dancer Peter Boal. Even so, Molissa Fenley and Dancers' "Altogether Different" show felt tedious —earnest, mannerly, overly long. The new 331 Steps made me wonder if Fenley wasn't restless, too. Lesley Braithwaite, Paz Tanjuaquio, and the choreographer, each tethered to the wall by a long strip of fabric, moved to taped sounds that screeched, beeped, grunted, cackled, sloshed, and sizzled until the women finally stepped out of their leashes. Having recently attended a Japanese tea ceremony—the inspiration for Fenley's title—I got lost in looking for specific gestures. Tea masters, despite their cool modesty and spiritual intent, prepare to do something tangible—serve tea to guests. Fenley's dancers stir up space but don't get very far, and not much happens. Laura Staton's vivid characters (Joyce Soho) might be prone to romantic entanglement, but just try throwing a lasso around one of these babies! Sexy, propulsive Mercy captures a certain country-and-western twang in the stubborn rough-and-tumble of a two-timer (Philip Karg) and his gals, Laura Hymers and Victoria Tobia. ("You're gonna chaaaange or Ah'm gonna leave!" Tobia drawls.) The Blind, Staton's new work, pairs fascinating oddball Thom Fogarty and beautiful Jordana Toback in a vision of the blues—and love—as intoxicants that make a man grab his head, cover his eyes, and strain to keep from vomiting. As in the cheerful Hit Parade ensemble, Staton's movement is fresh, brash, and appealing in its ungainliness.
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March 1, 2003
IN PERFORMANCE: DANCE
Poignant Look at the Constants That Are Sickness and Death
By JENNIFER DUNNING
BREAK / BROKE
Amy Sue Rosen and Peggy Peloquin
Dance Theater Workshop

The metaphor of the body as a house or landscape is a peculiarly rich one for dance. Two choreographers explored it in different ways in works by Amy Sue Rosen and Peggy Peloquin that runs through tomorrow at Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea.

Notes for Ms. Peloquin's new ''Strategies Stabilizing,'' which opened the program on Feb. 21, included the poem ''Question,'' by May Swenson. What will she do, Swenson writes, when ''Body my house my horse my hound'' is fallen? The dance does not provide an answer. Instead, it juxtaposes a loping, sinking, meditative woman (Ms. Peloquin) with two other women (Kelly Eudailey and Daniella Hoff), whose bodies complement each other like puzzle pieces, limbs conversing precisely under hanging gauze carcasses designed by Matt Gagnon.

''Strategies Stabilizing'' is set to music by C. Hyams-Hart. The handsome video is by Peter Richards, with lighting by Phil Sandström and costumes by Liz Prince.

''Break/Broke,'' choreographed by Ms. Rosen with visual designs by Derek Bernstein, a painter and longtime collaborator, does address Swenson's question. There is nothing to be done, this profoundly simple piece suggests, about the familiar constants of sickness and death.

A large odd presiding spirit with a blood-streaked shirt (Thom Fogarty) moves behind and in front of a curtain of straw and hanging lights. To the side, a battered bicycle wheel and pedals serve as a generator that is cranked as the lights dim at the end. Four women and a man (Sally Bomer, Amy Cox, Kristi Spessard, Laura Staton and Phillip Karg) in white coats cluster and scrounge across a hay-strewn floor to an evocative sound score by Andrew Russ that is punctuated by Rosen's voice speaking her own plain poetry.

''Will you come home soon? Not soon. When, when, when?'' The words hover over this distressed yet resolute landscape, their brutal honesty immeasurably reassuring. Rosen died on Feb. 19, of cancer diagnosed several years ago, and her death obviously gives the piece an extra resonance. But ''Break/Broke'' does reinforce, with a seamless beauty, Rosen's observation that ''light descends instead of night.''

Jeff Fontaine designed the delicately atmospheric lighting. The costumes are by Reiko Kawashima. JENNIFER DUNNING

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October 12, 1986
DANCE: KINEMATIC'S 'SNOW QUEEN'
By ANNA KISSELGOFF

THINK of a music video with taste rather than vulgarity, with the performers live rather than on tape, and you have some idea of the work of Kinematic, an innovative dance group.

''The Snow Queen,'' the company's newest piece, cuts up and retells Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale of the same name and does so with enough imagination to warrant a look at a final performance today at 3 at the Bessie Schonberg Theater (219 West 19th Street).

This is overtly experimental work, a play with language as well as movement, paradoxically attempting a seeming nonrelationship between both elements.

Founded as a collective in 1980 by Robin Klingensmith, Tamar Kotoske, Maria Lakis and Mary Richter, Kinematic has developed a distinctive fragmentary gestural style that is wittily nonspecific and yet fraught with meaning. The dance movement the group employs is completely smooth and nonclimactic, free of the sharp slicing accents used in the gestures.

''The Snow Queen,'' which was composed without Miss Klingensmith and performed Friday night by Kinematic's other members with Thom Fogarty and Carlos Arevalo as guests, is replete with other contrasts.
Kinematic's text, narrated on tape by Bellamy Bach, does basically retell Andersen's story of Gerda, who rescues her brother, Kay, abducted by the Snow Queen. Despite Kinematic's sardonic stylization of the text Andersen's symbolism about goodness triumphing over evil comes through. We hear that Kay, his heart turned to ice, is warmed back to love by Gerda's tears.

The story however, emanates from a prop television set (seen only from the back) that lets out fire and smoke, not to speak of the usual pap of commercials - heard on tape. The first scene is ingenious as Miss Richter, an elegantly expressive performer, presages the Snow Queen in a white tutu and mimes an abstract version of a cartoon whose soundtrack we hear. We ''see'' the cartoon as it is reflected in Miss Richter's movements.

The viewers - with Mr. Fogarty and Mr. Arevalo dressed in jumpers like the women - are soon suctioned toward the television set. This is a key image - a note states that ''The Snow Queen'' was created in response to ''random images, movement impressions and psychological notions found on television.''

''The Snow Queen'' is thus a jumble of fragmentary images based in discontinuity but structured within a larger continuity. The players are also the zombie-like viewers. They switch easily from stamping dances accompanied by Hungarian folk music to little sketches such as the hilarious one between Mr. Fogarty as a reindeer and Miss Lakis as a Lapp woman in a beak and white earmuffs. The dramatic lighting is by Stan Pressner.

At its most pop, the pungency fails. Still, the piece is effective as an allegory about our own time. Kinematic is refreshingly brainy.

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May 4, 1986
THE DANCE: 'PROXIMOLOGY,' BY TIMOTHY BUCKLEY
By JACK ANDERSON

DANCERS love to put on dances about dancers putting on dances. The most recent of the many choreographers who have staged works about the perils and glories of rehearsals and performances was Timothy Buckley, who offered ''Proximology'' on Friday night at the Kitchen.

Presented by the five members of Timothy Buckley and Company, the piece, which lasted about 55 minutes, was accurately described in the program notes as a dance about a company of five dancers dancing. Judging from their costumes, Tamar Kotoske, Maria Lakis and Mary Richter looked as if they had been cast in a folksy ballet about the rural South, whereas the long-haired Thom Fogarty was an androgynous figure wearing a sweater and kilt and one dangling earring.

Just as he directed a company in real life, so Mr. Buckley appeared to be the fictional troupe's choreographer, and he occasionally tried to control performers' movements. Thus, at one point, he entered playing the accordion, thereby forcing his colleagues to dance to his rhythms.

There were sequences of warmups in which steps were only sketched in, as well as energetic passages in which people would fling themselves wholeheartedly about. At times, dancers collided. At other times, they nearly missed colliding. The dancers also squabbled, had fits, threw tantrums and collapsed with fatigue. And, of course, all their outbursts were carefully planned.

Hard to dislike and easy to enjoy, ''Proximology'' was certainly energetic. Yet it often resembled a collection of trivial in-jokes. If dancers and dance lovers in the audience could easily hoot at them, it still could be said that Mr. Buckley did little more than show skilled performers deliberately bumbling and fumbling. Fortunately, his choreographic geniality helped make the klutziness pleasant.

The choreographic antics were enhanced by a taped score by ''Blue'' Gene Tyranny that combined music with what sounded like pingpong games, automobile races, honking horns, twittering birds and chiming clocks. Judging from the noises they made, some of the clocks may have been of the cuckoo variety. In its own way, the dance was slightly cuckoo, too.

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September 30, 1984
DANCE: 'SWING A DOG' by TIMOTHY BUCKLEY
By JACK ANDERSON

For a few moments, Timothy Buckley had his dancers hold their hands as if they were dogs' paws. But, fortunately, no one was cruel to animals in ''How to Swing a Dog,'' the new two- act work that he presented Thursday night in the Bessie Sch"onberg Theater. If anything, Mr. Buckley tried to show how kindhearted he was, for in one scene he required the cast to play with toy animals, including a big snake.

Mr. Buckley calls his troupe the Troublemakers, and if that name makes a dance company sound like a pop group, that's probably what he intended. Much of Mr. Buckley's choreography for ''How to Swing a Dog'' appeared to be inspired by country and western music and dance. The casually attired cast of four -Rocky Bornstein, Karen Pearlman, Thom Fogarty and Mr. Buckley - loped forward and back in a manner suggesting square-dance patterns, and there was much bouncing, striding and hearty flinging of the arms.

The dancers were always at ease. They could even be deliberately gauche. But one could tell by the way they fumbled and fell, then picked themselves up with the utmost skill that, though they may have acted like hayseeds, they could dance like sophisticates.

Mr. Buckley's tribute to rural America was often fun. Yet it was also bothersome, perhaps because the production contained too many self-conscious references to the way things are down on the farm or in a one-horse town. The score by ''Blue'' Gene Tyranny for piano and synthesizer sounded like glorified honky- tonk. The accompaniment also included taped comic monologues in a Southern accent so thick that it was almost incomprehensible.

As a result, the production seemed faintly condescending toward its source materials, as if Mr. Buckley and his dancers were implying that while country folk were sweet but dumb, city slickers were always sharp. This piece of choreographic shoofly pie was just a bit too cutesy pie.

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April 20, 1983
DANCE: TIMOTHY BUCKLEY'S PIONEERS
By JACK ANDERSON

THERE was not a log cabin or a wagon train anywhere inside the Bessie Schonberg Theater on Monday night. Nevertheless, Timothy Buckley's ''Out of the Blue'' managed to evoke the spirit of the American pioneers.

Much of this two-act work, presented by Timothy Buckley and the Company, was set to American folk songs and hymns. Other segments occurred to bits of sermons in a backwoods church and a rambling speech by a North Dakota politician. And, stylistically, some new music by ''Blue'' Gene Tyranny harmonized with the folk material.

Mr. Buckley's choreography for himself, Rachelle Bornstein, Karen Pearlman and Thom Fogarty was the sort of thing one could imagine pioneers doing if those pioneers happened to be modern dancers. This was determined, brusque choreography that emphasized whipping turns and slashes of the air, as if the dancers were hacking their way through a wilderness.

Yet the movement was never merely brutal. Though feet trod heavily on the ground, the patterns they stamped out were complex and precise. Similarly, though the performers were usually poker-faced and, at one point, feuded by waving their arms about, they also cuffed one another with affection, and there were shy courtship duets and eccentric solos in which Mr. Buckley tumbled acrobatically, losing his balance, but not his cheekiness.

For the most part, ''Out of the Blue'' was sturdily constructed. However, even granting that Mr. Buckley did nothing choreographically impious, some dancegoers might still have felt uneasy because he set secular movement to hymns.

A purely esthetic objection could be raised against the work's division into two acts. Whereas, given the strenuousness of the dance, the performers may have needed an intermission, for the viewer the pause came as a disruption and one wondered if the piece might look even more effective if it were trimmed into a single act. But once ''Out of the Blue'' got going, it was exciting to behold and one could only admire the cast's gumption and true grit.

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December 12, 1981
DANCE: TIMOTHY BUCKLEY
By JACK ANDERSON

Some dance companies with such names as Mary Smith and Friends or John Brown Plus Friends are simply being cute. But the dancers at Thursday night's program by Timothy Buckley With Friends at the Bessie Schonberg Theater did genuinely seem to be friends performing for friends. And their friends included the audience.

Mr. Buckley's choreography often gave the illusion of informality. In his solo, ''Shuffle Over Motion,'' he tried out a few phrases, paused, then tried out a few more. The steps looked tossed off. But how they looked was not the same as what they actually were, for many involved acrobatic feats. Thus the fascination of the solo was the way its casual veneer never quite concealed its real complexity.

In ''Irish Jumping Songs,'' a group work to folk music, thrusts and twists frittered themselves away into slumps. Again, the steps might have been invented on the spot. Yet they were so intricate that one knew they must have been prepared in advance. And realizing that they had been so planned made their freshness all the more remarkable.

Because the company proclaimed itself a bunch of friends, it was not surprising that ''Immigrants,'' a quintet to songs by the Pennywhistlers, contained what might have been an in-joke. Although the dancers usually kept their feet on the floor or stamped sturdily, they let their upper bodies move freely. However, that wasn't the joke. The joke came when four dancers assembled for an obviously grand finale. But Mr. Buckley himself never joined them. Why? Only he and his friends could answer that question.

While Harry Mann played the saxophone and, later, the clarinet, Mr. Buckley and Thom Fogarty began to swing and sway their way through ''Light Blue,'' a collaborative work by Mr. Buckley, Mr. Mann and Joseph Chaikin. Then, gradually, the music dominated them. It even gave them the shakes. At last, instead of dancing to the music, they were enslaved by it as if it were an addiction. Most of Mr. Buckley's pieces were amiable fun and games. But this one threatened to become a dangerous game.

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ARTS AND LEISURE DESK
DANCE VIEW; Why Certain Performers Are a Breed Apart
By JENNIFER DUNNING (NYT)
Published: September 3, 1989

LEAD: Thom Fogarty walked across Lincoln Center Plaza one recent afternoon and took his place behind a battered clothes rack, playing portly dresser to other dancers. The piece was ''The Angle of Ascent,'' created by Tamar Rogoff and Anthony Tsirantonakis. Before it was finished, Mr. Fogarty had served as neatener of the universe, straightener of costumes and comforter of the troubled.

Thom Fogarty walked across Lincoln Center Plaza one recent afternoon and took his place behind a battered clothes rack, playing portly dresser to other dancers. The piece was ''The Angle of Ascent,'' created by Tamar Rogoff and Anthony Tsirantonakis. Before it was finished, Mr. Fogarty had served as neatener of the universe, straightener of costumes and comforter of the troubled. His chores were never done, though he did steal time to smooth his disheveled hair into a bun and do weighty yet graceful barre exercises with a typically earnest, knowing air.

Then came Mr. Fogarty's chance to shine. Struggling to the top of a tall wood tower, he scattered bright costumes to the winds and lay down for a brief rest. Gloatingly, he patted his suddenly pregnant-looking belly. All was right in the cosmos, and soon Mr. Fogarty's earth mother-goddess would descend to begin it all once more. It was a moment that summed up a world - and a performance whose sweetness and serene theatrical daring were characteristic of Mr. Fogarty.

He belongs to a breed that has been well represented this year in dance, those performers who bring extra color to whatever they do by the sheer force of their distinctive stage presence. All seem willing to abandon themselves to their heightened, separate onstage lives. It is not a matter of what they dance or create for themselves, or of their skills as performers, or of entertaining quirks. They give themselves wholly to the work, yet are a transforming element, often flying in the face of accepted norms.

As a dancer, Mr. Fogarty is a curiosity. He does not have a sleek, muscularly resilient dance body, a fact he himself acknowledges with comfortable amusement. Yet, he not only looks utterly at home in all his roles but is able to suggest innate manliness and womanliness without seeming overtly male or female.

Vibrant stage personalities were necessary staples of the burgeoning American ballet and modern dance of 50 years ago. But as technique grew more polished, ideal dance bodies and highly developed technical skills took precedence over theatricality or individualism. There were exceptions, of course, but individualism of Mr. Fogarty's sort began to raise its unruly head more confidently in the free-wheeling performance art of this decade, with post-modernist dance paving the way by giving the dancer permission to be mortal.

Perhaps because dance has traditionally idealized women, men seem to have a corner on this virtue. Yet, this year has seen a return to the stage by Allegra Kent, a ballerina who long personified that kind of individualism. Last winter, it was clear in her performances with the Los Angeles City Ballet at the State University College at Purchase, N. Y., that Miss Kent, now 50, has lost none of the elusive perfume that characterized her 30 years with the New York City Ballet.

Stories abounded of her charmingly daffy backstage exploits and comments. Her friendships with people outside the inbred world of ballet - like Joseph Cornell, the artist, and Paul Scott, the novelist - bespoke a hungry intelligence. What happened on stage was perhaps a reflection of that. Miss Kent has been an artist who knows how to make the most of each moment without at all violating the spirit or letter of the choreography. Indeed, she was considered a gifted interpreter of the Balanchine repertory.

One major role in a Balanchine ballet, ''Ivesiana,'' suggested much about this musical, perceptive dancer. As the woman in white in the section of the ballet called ''The Unanswered Question,'' Miss Kent was carried aloft, raised and lowered, her feet never touching the ground. Her skills as a dancer may have been seen to better advantage in other parts, but this role captured a kind of wanton innocence, a pliancy - up to a point - and a delicate sensuality.

Those qualities could be seen in her performances with the Los Angeles company in two ballets by John Clifford, as a swooning ballerina to whom all pay homage and as a lonely voyager through life. In the closing moment of the latter work, ''Songs of the Wayfarer,'' Miss Kent was by herself, her neck and back registering a kind of exalted resignation that she alone could define so subtly yet with such potency.

Mr. Fogarty and Miss Kent are best known as interpreters of other people's dances. Earlier this year, Janet Panetta presented work of her own that reinforced the strong impression she has made in pieces by other choreographers. She is quietly indelible on stage, intense and sharply focused, with a smoky, smoldering aura. The dances were not mirrors of that theatrical presence, although her witty attitude toward the contemporary dance scene illuminated ''Two Short Girls With Crooked Noses and Girdles.'' Instead, in ''The Man Who Washed His Hands,'' Miss Panetta's characteristic darkness glinted like mica as she wove through this haunted yet wry look at compulsion.

Individualism of this sort was evident this season in other performers as well. There was Robert Kovich's skittery, ironic persona, enhanced by the laconically outgoing John King, the composer with whom Mr. Kovich collaborated on ''The Dialogues.'' Lowell Smith fused passion with reserve in his dramatic portraits as a member of the Dance Theater of Harlem. And a new young individualist was revealed in Javier de Frutos, a brooding, Nijinsky-like messenger from a mysterious inner world in Nuria Olive's ''Asiaris'' and a lithe standard-bearer in Ruby Shang's ''Tales of Exile.''

None of these six performers has much in common. Some have had lengthy dance training and experience in major companies. Others perform with a variety of experimentalist choreographers. What they do share is the ability not only to leave a personal imprint on a role but to make the stage come alive simply by virtue of their presence.

Photo of Thom Fogarty, who recently appeared in ''The Angle of Ascent'' at Lincoln Center Plaza (Jack Mitchell)

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December 7, 1999
IN PERFORMANCE: DANCE; Obsessed With Eggs And an Infant's Behavior
By JACK ANDERSON
Amy Sue Rosen and Derek Bernstein
Joyce SoHo

''One Magnificent Gesture'' was the title of both the premiere and the program as a whole that Amy Sue Rosen and Derek Bernstein presented on Friday night. Ms. Rosen, a choreographer, and Mr. Bernstein, an artist, depicted people driven by compulsions and obsessions in their collaboratively created productions.

Dancing to recorded Lieder by Schumann and arrangements of Polish children's songs, Thom Fogarty, Ted Johnson, Philip Karg and Laura Staton resembled members of a peasant community in ''One Magnificent Gesture,'' the new work. Led by Mr. Fogarty as their portly patriarch, these peasants were obsessed with eggs, which they repeatedly passed back and forth. And they caught fresh eggs as they dropped from a tube in the space's ceiling. Ms. Staton also ritualistically kept pouring water from one vessel into another.

Everyone was gripped by mysterious emotions. But because those emotional states remained inscrutable, it was hard to maintain interest in the long-winded ceremonies.

Three older and shorter pieces had greater impact. A text by Gertrude Stein that called America's preoccupation with success a form of suffering inspired sometimes dogged and sometimes frantic movements for David Parker and Sam Keany in ''W-2.''

A taped story by Donald Barthelme about a baby punished with solitary confinement for tearing pages from a book accompanied ''Fetal Attraction . . . a Psychothriller.'' Mr. Johnson crept restlessly like a grumpy baby while Sally Bomer occasionally peeped in at him from a doorway like a worried parent. Both characters appeared to be on the verge of a breakdown.

Tanya Gagne looked comparably distraught in ''Green Sweet III'' as she thrashed wildly about and tried to clutch a chair with grass growing from it. If it remained hard to determine what bothered this woman, the work's brevity helped make her troubles compelling. JACK ANDERSON

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March 3, 1988
The Dance: 'Labor Of Love'
By JENNIFER DUNNING

LEAD: THE mood was lighthearted when Gail Donnenfeld and Rocky Bornstein presented their works on Saturday night at the Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church. But the two choreographers had more on their minds than simple, spirited fun.

THE mood was lighthearted when Gail Donnenfeld and Rocky Bornstein presented their works on Saturday night at the Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church. But the two choreographers had more on their minds than simple, spirited fun.

''Who dat, Mommy?'' a young child's voice calls out, clearly and with irresistible innocence, at the close of Ms. Bornstein's ''Labor of Love.'' That question is at the heart of the dance, which is set to a lilting, rollicking score by Blue Gene Tyranny in which are imbedded several such phrases and sounds spoken by the child. Who is the mother and who are the children in ''Labor of Love''? Using magical stagecraft, vivid vignettes and bounding, looping dance that is both anarchic-looking and structured, Ms. Bornstein has created a picture of the trials - and pleasures - of parenthood.

Adults are seldom believable children. But the four performers in this small community of parent-children - Ms. Bornstein, Thom Fogarty, Susan Milani and Tina Shepard - do not try to imitate children. Instead, they allow their strong, clear presence and inspired sense of dramatic gesture and timing to do the work, along with some sharp observation of the curious behavior of children.

It is possible to see in ''Labor of Love'' a hint of the way children struggle for independence. There is also the suggestion of an approving glance at how fathers can be good mothers. But ''Labor of Love'' can be seen, too, as just a memorably funny and touching excursion into dance and wacky domesticity.

''Shotgun Wedding - A Fine Romance'' starts out promisingly with a rather desultory bit of ballroom dancing for John Fleming and Ms. Donnenfeld. The woman strains for her own life, captured in the vignette that formally opens the piece and that incorporates witty drawings by Candy Jernigan. ''Shotgun Wedding'' bubbles at last into jitterbugging, lindy hopping and battle for Mr. Fleming and Ms. Donnenfeld, Cathy Zimmerman and Tertius Walker, and Sanghi Wagner and Frank Conversano.

But the steam has run out of the piece. There are too many ingredients. The score, for example, has music from six different sources. It seems Ms. Donnenfeld has settled for having a good time, agreeably enough, and lost touch with the irony that motivated and promised to enlarge ''Shotgun Wedding.''

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August 20, 1989
Review/Dance; 'Angle of Ascent,' Creative Time Collage
By JENNIFER DUNNING

LEAD: Program notes described ''The Angle of Ascent,'' presented on Wednesday afternoon at the Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors festival, as ''a metaphoric collage addressing the variedness of life, its transformations, its mysteries, its impermanence, and its eternal continuance.''

Program notes described ''The Angle of Ascent,'' presented on Wednesday afternoon at the Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors festival, as ''a metaphoric collage addressing the variedness of life, its transformations, its mysteries, its impermanence, and its eternal continuance.''

Such descriptions are usually prefaces to well-meaning disasters. But just as the heart began a downward spiral, six ragamuffin performers marched onto the fountain plaza, where a tall, spiky tower lay in wait for them, and began to dance. It was clear from the first moments that the work - a performance-art piece by Anthony Tsirantonakis, an architect, and Tamar Rogoff, a choreographer - would not only live up to its billing but also do so in a funny, touching and freshly imaginative way.

''The Angle of Ascent,'' which will be presented again in the Dancing in the Streets festival on Sept. 16 at Orchard Beach, Pelham Bay Park, the Bronx, is essentially a series of madcap lunges and dashes up the tower's spikes and ladders to the top and down a long slide into a sandbox. The set is both childlike and slightly forbidding. And the performers might be children as they turn themselves into babies, families, a bride and groom, a rabbi, a giddy male ballerina and a cowboy through quick additions and subtractions of colorful bits of costumes.

There is an undercurrent of mysticism, epitomized in the performers' circling about the front of the set, their arms moving slowly in ritualistic gestures. The changing world that these men and women inhabit - and that they change - is both playful and prayerful. Presiding over it is a kind of dowdy, pudgy earth goddess, played by Thom Fogarty, whose ceaseless tasks and mostly resigned air suggest that one message of the piece is that a woman's work is indeed never done.

At the end, the performers have made their final descent and Mr. Fogarty climbs to the top and tosses bright shirts and skirts and pants and shoes off the top of the tower. He reclines on its top platform with a slow, Cheshire Cat grin, patting a rounded belly. Life will go on, that grin and belly seem to say, after this seventh day's rest.

The engaging cast also included James Adlesic, Marika Blossfeldt, Chin Gonzales, Margaret Liston and Richard Winberg. Cebello Morales created the evocative collagist score of sounds and music, and Sally Young designed the costumes. ''The Angle of Ascent'' was produced by Creative Time.

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March 3, 1986
DANCE: BARSNESS COMMENTARIES
By JENNIFER DUNNING

ERIC BARSNESS breezed into the St. Mark's Church Danspace on Saturday night and took on Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, the world of classical and avant-garde dance, Yma Sumac and the Italian opera in the space of a single, nutty hour and a half. No topic is sacred with Mr. Barsness, though he handles his themes with an intelligence, affection and deadpan innocence that make him good company.

In ''Holiday in Peru,'' a New York premiere, Mr. Barsness sets the vocal acrobatics of Yma Sumac to dance in a format that owes something to the sillier Hollywood movie musicals of the early 50's. Sumac, a would-be Incan princess, astounded Hollywood audiences around that time with her five-octave voice and exotic music. A one-woman extravaganza, ''Yma'' strolls through three Sumac numbers, summoning thunder, oblivious to lightning, and acknowledging with the faintest glance the seven ''love slaves'' who wind about her.

Barbara Allen looks amazingly like Sumac, moving her lips to the songs in a manner that is, perfectly, magisterial and smarmy. Jacqueline Humbert's costumes are witty evocations of their historical models. The docile love slaves were Mr. Barsness, Carol Clements, Anne Fluckiger, Julie Lifton, Isabelle Marteau, Julie Winokur and the wild and woolly Thom Fogarty.

There are times, however, when one wishes Mr. Barsness would go a little further. One of those times was in ''The Seven Deadly Sins,'' a new piece drawn in part from the Brecht-Weill classic and set to a lilting, witty score by Frankie Mann. ''The Seven Deadly Sins'' is the story of five siblings named Anna, represented by Miss Mann, Mr. Barsness, Miss Clements, Miss Fluckiger and Miss Marteau. All are engaged in conquering the world of avant-garde performing. But that promising theme is never addressed with the acuity one would expect.

Two sections stand out. ''Sloth -the Ballet Class'' is a wickedly funny and accurate view of ballet class at its emptiest. ''Gluttony - Backstage'' is a sleek and chilling little episode that has its characters beelining to food, drugs and jewelry in the wings. And the piece is handsomely staged and executed with amusing cool. If only there had been a little more to it.

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CULTURAL DESK
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; FRED ASTAIRE'S DANCES SEEN FRAME BY FRAME
By JACK ANDERSON (NYT)
Published: January 30, 1986

ALTHOUGH Fred Astaire's name often appears on lists of great American dancers and choreographers, his achievements have received comparatively little serious critical scrutiny. Arlene Croce's ''Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book'' (Outerbridge & Lazard Inc., 1972) discusses the films of Mr. Astaire and the most famous of his partners. But, until recently, no one has tried to examine his entire film career.

Now, with John Mueller's new ''Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films'' (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., $45) we have a book that does just that. No slim volume, it is 440 pages long. And, although profusely illustrated, it is filled with words as well as pictures. Its pages are big ones, each containing at least two - but usually three -columns of type. Mr. Mueller, who teaches dance history, film studies and political science at the University of Rochester, begins with perceptive comments on the general characteristics of the Astaire style. Then he exhaustively analyzes all of Mr. Astaire's films, song by song, dance by dance - and sometimes it even seems frame by frame.

The book will surely prove valuable. Yet it may also be disconcerting. For one thing, the suspicion lingers in certain circles that, delightful though he is, Mr. Astaire represents entertainment rather than art. Is he really worth 440 pages? Mr. Mueller, of course, believes he is and argues his case.

That makes the book disconcerting for another reason. Mr. Astaire, the reader may realize, is one of the few choreographers in the entire history of dance to whom it is possible to devote 440 pages of purely critical, as distinct from biographical, study. Mr. Astaire's medium was film, and his films survive. In contrast, think how many works have vanished away in our century by such choreographers as George Balanchine, Martha Graham and Isadora Duncan. Think, too, what has happened to the ballets of such 19th-century choreographers as Marius Petipa, Jules Perrot and August Bournonville. Before 440 pages can be devoted to dances, the dances must first exist.

Because Mr. Astaire's dances do exist, it is possible to argue over them. One of Mr. Mueller's principal contentions is that Mr. Astaire's dances are great because of their economy of means. ''No number is a grab bag of effects,'' he says. ''Rather, each seeks to explore a limited number of choreographic ideas, each has its own distinctive movement vocabulary.'' Conceivably, some movie fans may disagree. But, fortunately, both Fred Astaire's admirers and detractors can refer to his films as they make their points. Mr. Mueller makes his own points well.

Just as drawing a rigid distinction between art and entertainment may make us hesitant to countenance a serious study of Mr. Astaire, so this distinction may have caused us to ignore a curious chapter in the careers of two distinguished choreographers of the early 20th century: Leo Staats and Leonide Massine. Although his works are little known in America, Staats staged many productions for the Paris Opera Ballet and was considered by French critics to be a choreographer with a refined, Gallic style. Massine, a choreographer for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and, later, for Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and Ballet Theater, is almost universally acknowledged as one of the most important figures in modern ballet.

Most reference books disclose that in 1930 he choreographed ''The Rite of Spring'' at the Metropolitan Opera House with Martha Graham in the leading role. But not all of these books make clear that one reason why he was in New York at the time was because, for a few seasons in the late 1920's and early 30's, he served as ballet master at the Roxy Theater. Similarly, few references point out that his predecessor in that post was Staats. It was the job of Staats and Massine to devise the balletic episodes in the elaborate stage shows that shared the bill with films at the Roxy.

Such shows may not have inspired Staats and Massine to create their most innovative ballets. Nevertheless, the very fact that they were employed at a movie palace fascinates me. What were their productions like? Does anyone remember seeing them - or dancing in them? What did critics and audiences think of them?

Are any dance history students inquisitive enough to look into this matter? Their research could easily result in a term paper, or even a thesis.

Among the most heartwarming of recent occasions were the benefit dance concerts presented at Performance Space 122 in support of people with AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The dancers who appeared in them and the people who attended them all seemed united in a common concern. With Stephen Greco and Barry Laine as hosts, Jason Childers as co-ordinator and Tim Miller as adviser, the program I saw also proved to be interesting on purely choreographic terms. Even works that could have been slight were enriched by some wry or bittersweet touch. In ''To Give Self,'' Mr. Childers demonstrated that rivalry can be a kind of camaraderie. Mark Morris's ''One Charming Night'' showed a sweet woman and an awkward man on a date - a familiar enough theme. However, when this clumsy swain unexpectedly turned violent, his outburst suggested he was really a vampire. A more innocent blunderer was the protagonist of ''The Good Life,'' by Thom Fogarty. What made him touching was the way he was beguiled by images of an elfin woman, a sultry woman and a muscular man; yet every one of those visions vanished away.

Best of all were two very different solos. The constant shifts in movement quality in Doug Varone's ''Facts and Fiction'' made him appear, at various moments, uneasy, confident, pugnacious and gentle. Each section was punctuated by bows, as if Mr. Varone were auditioning for, or performing in, a show. And before the solo was done he managed to imply that, in displaying emotion, one does indeed put on a show.

Steve Gross wore an evening dress in ''Pale Blue'' and because he did not stretch his arms through its sleeves, but held them stiffly at his sides instead, he looked armless, mutilated. One soon learned why. As he danced, he told a story about a boy's discovery of his mother's suicide. Whereas his kicking and teetering steps expressed the boy's agitation, the dress and the stiff arms symbolized the way the memory of his mother's death oppressed and tortured him. At last, having made peace with the past, he stepped out of the dress.

He wore shorts. But he should have been naked, for he was now free. He had, at least psychologically, stripped himself bare. Often, theatrical nudity can seem gratuitous or sensational. Here, however, it would have been totally appropriate.

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January 12, 1986
CRITICS' CHOICES; Dance
By JENNIFER DUNNING

Some of the 11 men performing at P.S. 122 on Monday night are well-known choreographers and dancers. Others have recently arrived on the New York dance scene.

Their dances represent a wide variety of experimentalist styles. But all share a common goal. Self-described homosexuals, they will present and perform works in two benefit programs that will raise money for the care of AIDS victims, with a focus on their isolation and the gap between their financial needs and resources. The proceeds from ''Dancing for Our Lives - A Dance Benefit in Support of Persons with AIDS'' will go to the Gay Men's Health Crisis for its Financial Advocacy Program, which provides financial assistance and advice to AIDS sufferers, and its Buddy Program, which trains volunteers to assist AIDS patients in their daily tasks.

The first program, at 7 P.M., includes works by Mark Morris, Doug Varone, Steve Gross, Thom Fogarty and Jason Childers. Works by Ishmael Houston-Jones, Neil Greenerg, Stephen Petronio, Peter Healey, Ching Gonzalez and Remy Charlip will be performed on the second program, which begins at 9 P.M. Barry Laine and Stephen Greco are the hosts of the evening, which was organized by Mr. Childers and Tim Miller. ''Dancing for Our Lives'' is presented by The Glines and P.S. 122 and all services have been contributed. This is not the first community benefit to be held at the congenial P.S. 122 theater space, but it promises to be one of the most warm-hearted and artistically interesting.

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March 18, 1984
DANCE: PORTRAIT SKETCHES - HINDSIGHT choreographed by THOM FOGARTY
By JACK ANDERSON

It was appropriate that Thom Fogarty danced in an art gallery Wednesday night, for ''Hindsight,'' the hourlong work that he presented at the SoHo Center for Visual Artists, consisted of choreographic portrait sketches of crazed, weary or down- and-out people on the city streets.

It began with Mr. Fogarty, Eric Barsness, Barbara Boolukos, Madeleine Higbie, Karen Pearlman and Claire Sweet wandering on stage, to music by Tom Waits, as if they were a bunch of derelicts and bag ladies. They scratched themselves, fidgeted and bedded down for the night on newspapers.

When they got up again, they were other characters. And they kept portraying different characters throughout the work. But, always, they were pathetic or wacky characters of one sort or another.

Mr. Fogarty and Mr. Barsness staggered like two roaring drunk college kids hoping to pick up some women. The entire cast danced wearily, as if during the wee hours at an all-night party. Another sequence might have been a nightclub routine for dead-tired, sore-footed entertainers.

Occasionally, the dancers gathered together for nervous spasms of miming that included silent screaming and silent hysterical laughter, as well as gestures that suggested drinking from invisible bottles and piercing arms with invisible needles. But when they pointed to invisible wedding rings on their fingers and saluted invisible flags they might have been implying that supposedly respectable people can be as demented as addicts or bag ladies.

That may very well be true. However, Mr. Fogarty never proved the point choreographically. Nor did he really make any other point during his dance. Treating his urban castaways as curiosities, he offered caricature without social comment. Therefore, because everyone in the cast was almost always required to look bleary with booze, high on drugs or low in despair, ''Hindsight,'' whatever its intentions may have been, became something of a freak show.

[The ONLY review of my own work in the NY TIMES - I WILL TAKE IT!]
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Leaving Traces
People and Things, People as Things, People in Things
by Deborah Jowitt
March 26th, 2001

Choreographer Amy Sue Rosen and artist Derek Bernstein have been collaborating since 1981, creating unified worlds out of dance and visual design. Object Lesson, which opened their March program at the Duke on 42nd Street, restricts Sally Bomer, David Parker, and Kristi Spessard to lanes of white floor defined by carafes of water linked with plastic tubing. Moving to a magical score by Mieczyslaw Litwinski and wearing white clothes by K. Meta, they feel the ground carefully with each step; crouched on knees and forearms, they stare at us. Their few, fastidiously designed actions and gestures are calm—except when they erupt into wild dancing, waving their arms crazily. Meanwhile red dye seeps through the tubes and into the carafes. You think lab experiment. You think blood transfusion. A poem in the program commemorates the death of a sister. Rosen is battling cancer herself. The evening is called "Triage." These facts grip you as the clear water turns inexorably crimson.

The new Abandoning Hope, to music by Frank London and I. Manger, is even sparer. Bomer, veiled and clad in a sheer black dress (by Reiko Kawashima), walks carefully on the upheld hands of Thom Fogarty, Sam Keany, and Phillip Karg. She moves as if her skin hurts. Jeff Fontaine's beautiful lighting is here stark and chill. A curtain of water falls from above onto the trough that stretches across the front of the stage; we see Victoria Boomsma catch Bomer's head in her hands through that rain, as if through tears. People lay one another out, but Bomer is clearly the fragile, distraught voyager separating herself from life, and Boomsma tenderly, reluctantly guides the way.

In One Magnificent Gesture, Rosen and Bernstein's spare and painterly approach elegantly serves what might be a fairy tale gone haywire. The stage, with its beige wall, broom, and basket, looks like an underpopulated Brueghel with all the color bleached out. Fogarty wears a voluminous farmer's smock (by Kawashima), and Laura Staton, in dress, apron, and hood, could be anyone's stiff Gretel. Litwinski's score recycles a Schumann lied. Eggs are major players. Staton rows an imaginary boat while Fogarty, Karg, and Ted Johnson circuitously pass eggs she has doled out. In one memorably lascivious moment, Staton bends over and slowly and repeatedly pours water into a bowl, while Fogarty, pressed tight against her from behind and making evil faces, "helps" her. At the end, a large slanted tube spits eggs from above. Fogarty fields them with a basket of feathers.

To heroic music, the Condors, 12 zany and endearing guys from Japan, fly past the Statue of Liberty toward the Japan Society audience through an improbably blue sky. This is a film, of course, and like the whole of Ryohei Kondo's Conquest of the Galaxy: Jupiter Love You Live, it brings to mind Monty Python's Flying Circus. Except that the Condors' humor is less verbal and more physical, and adolescent grottiness (the men often wear school uniforms) and outright lunacy invade the terrain of Japanese pop culture.
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Traveling Through
Clubs in Space and Dancing Beyond Death
by Deborah Jowitt
February 26 - March 4, 2003

The DTW program shared by Peggy Peloquin and Amy Sue Rosen/Derek Bernstein Projects will be performed again March 1 and 2. Rosen will not be there. After struggling with cancer for years, she died on February 19, the week after the premiere of her Break/ Broke. She was 48. "Mom got a headache/Her headache grew overnight." That's how her poem in the program begins. She and Bernstein have three children. At the end of what seems part nightmare, part ritual to exorcise fear, and part love offering, three baby dolls descend on cords and hang there. We hear a quiet, calm dialogue. "Will you come home soon?" "No." "When?" "Soon?" "Not soon." "When?"

Bernstein's visual design backs the events with a hanging curtain of straw; there's straw on the floor too, and a sort of bicycle wheel that Thom Fogarty pedals with his hands, and a small chandelier that drops. Rosen's devoted dancers (Fogarty, Sally Bomer, Amy Cox, Phillip Karg, Kristi Spessard, and Laura Staton) people a hallucinatory landscape. In the beginning, two white-coated women talk quietly. When Fogarty walks behind the straw curtain, his coat crackles and a cleat on one shoe adds an ominous metallic click to his progress. When he stands, though, one hand held out, Bomer crouches as if to fit the top of her head into his palm, then crawls away, hunches her shoulders, and opens her mouth in a silent scream. People butt against one another for attention, lean against one another for support. They fall. They die laughing. They scrabble through the curtain and re-emerge. They paint black marks on Fogarty, turning him into a grave demon. Midway through Rosen's farewell work, we hear, " 'No,' said Sally, 'we will be less sad soon.' " Is that a promise, Amy Sue?

[Amy Sue Rosen died the day of our opening performance, it was indeed heartbreaking.]

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Amy Sue Rosen and Derek Bernstein
92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Project
The Duke on 42nd Street
New York, New York March 14, 2001
Reviewed by Wendy Perron

Amy Sue Rosen, a choreographer, and Derek Bernstein, a painter and sculptor, have been working together for eighteen years. Theirs is the rare collaboration that achieves a true integration of movement and image. This evening, entitled "Triage," included three pieces from the last ten years. The work possesses an elegant simplicity—no extraneous props, dancers, or steps. At certain moments it achieves a sublime blend of kinetics and imagery, consciousness and subconsciousness. A sense of great beauty washes over at these moments.

In the earliest piece, Object Lesson (1990), three dancers in medical whites crawl over the floor and each other. An orderly forest of sixteen transparent beakers, connected with curling cords, monopolizes the space. Eventually, the water in all beakers and tubes receives a squirt of dye that turns it red. With the white costumes, white floor, and bright lighting (by Jeff Fontaine), the piece has a decidedly clinical look, with the gore confined to the beakers. The audiotape of Mieczyslaw Litwinski's haunting voice and accordion transports one to a different place—maybe a hospital in Eastern Europe where nurses are constantly faced with death, or someone's fever dream about the past. The movement motif is a careful hand-to-cheek gesture on all fours. During this uneasy serenity, Kristi Spessard claims the piece with her direct gaze, sensual but clear body movement style, and slight melancholy. About two-thirds of the way through, the dancers abandon the crawling and rise with a kind of celebration of nervousness. And now it is David Parker, getting goofy with his hands, who attracts the eye.

In One Magnificent Gesture (1999), the cast of four wears antique, white costumes by Reiko Kawashima. Laura Staton is sumptuously alluring in her medieval cap and Cinderella outfit—at one point she hangs her broom seemingly in midair. She walks toward the audience to drip water into a bowl repeatedly, then backs up. Thom Fogarty as the man behind her is by turns affectionate, wildly sinister, and wayward. He's controlling her from behind, and the look on both their faces is smugly sexual. Is he her master? Landlord? Rapist? It would be mildly disturbing if it weren't funny, or vice versa. (Fogarty's broad face is quite wonderful to watch throughout the evening.) The magnificent gesture that begins and ends the dance is this: One person fondles an egg with great symbolic drama and then drops it into the hands of another person who has been doubled over, perhaps nursing a headache. The punch is that the headache sufferer seems oblivious of the fondler until the exact moment the egg is dropped. Charmingly, the egg slips out of the hand both times.

The evening's premiere, Abandoning Hope, begins with a mesmerizing scene. A woman in black (Sally Bomer) moves along the floor enveloped in an oval of blue-and-white rippling light (video projection by Douglas Rosenberg). She could be trapped in an enlarged womb, or fleeing toward a bright sky, or drowning in troubled waters. She seems to be both possessed by the traveling pool of light and trying to escape it. A recorded Yiddish song hints at sorrows, perhaps mourning a lost childhood. Later in the piece, the water comes back as a sheet of rain falling downstage onto a long trough. Behind the rain the other performers (Fogarty, Sam Keany, Phillip Karg, and Victoria Boomsma) continue, sometimes gently helping Bomer walk onto their supporting hands; Bomer nevers touches the floor. If hope is to be abandoned, at least a community of friends surrounds and protects her. During the third and last such crossing, Bomer falls into Fogarty's arms, leaving a trail of people behind her. Boomsma is left standing center stage, following Bomer with her eyes. Suddenly the observer is the central figure. One feels the abandonment, but one feels the hope, too. Abandoning Hope, with music by Frank London and I. Manger, is an unsentimental but poetic vision of the end of . . . something.

In a time when dance and art partnerships are sometimes thrust together carelessly, it is both refreshing and satisfying to see a unity of image and mood that reflects a long and deep artistic partnership.

Copyright 2006 Dance Magazine, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Shakespeare, Supersized
Larry Goldhuber manages to add both snap and heft to “Julius Caesar”
By GUS SOLOMONS, JR

As a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Larry Goldhuber made modern dance safe for big people. The oversize gazelle, whose theater dance pieces are becoming a hot downtown dance ticket, premiered his latest dance theater opus, “Julius Caesar Superstar,” at Danspace Project, May 12 to 16.

With former New York City Ballet star Robert La Fosse in the title role, the hour-long extravaganza leaps in time from ancient Rome, where eight 300-pound senators plot to dethrone Caesar, to 1950s Washington, D.C., where the assassination occurs. The senators stab him with pocket knives and swath him in a crimson ribbon of blood. Live video of the action by Janet Wong, projected on a scrim behind them, amplifies the action.

Music by Handel, Vivaldi and original music by Goldhuber’s cousin, Geoff Gersh, as well as live electric cello embellishments by Loren Kiyoshi Dempster, back the dancing senators in ample, red-trimmed white togas. The rotund octet, cavorting merrily in square-dance patterns, includes dance novices like Sidney Boone and director/actor Eric Stephen Booth, seasoned performers like Thom Fogarty, who outstrips Goldhuber in heft, downtown club emcee Hapi Phace, performer Rhetta Aleong, dance educator Micki Saba and Jones/Zane alumna Rosalynde Leblanc in a fat suit.

Four studly soldiers––Arthur Aviles, Alberto Denis, Marcelo Rueda Duran, and Valentin Ortolaza, Jr.––in authentic-looking armor and helmets (all the super costumes are by Liz Prince) act as Caesar’s backup dance group, in the triumphant “Caesar Returns/War Stories” section, as well as swarming over his body, bathing him and fulfilling his every physical need––if you catch my meaning––as he basks on his throne.

In staging “The Baths,” Goldhuber shows keen theatrical sensibility, projecting clouds of steam on a scrim, behind which we glimpse the hefty senators parading to and fro, plotting against that skinny little Caesar. In “The Hearing,” senators, now wearing dress shirts and ties and trousers with suspenders, try Caesar, who’s still in his loin cloth and laurel anadem, before the judge, beloved downtown dance patroness Micki Wesson.

Caesar’s “Dance of Death” leans a bit too heavily on old ballet steps that look as though La Fosse hasn’t been doing for a while. In a loin cloth, his physique still boasts its fine proportions, although Kathy Kaufmann’s imaginative lighting can’t disguise the inevitable softening of muscle tone that maturity brings along with the benefits of greater stage presence and dramatic authority. Another costume choice would have been kinder.

“Crossing Over” introduces Lady Macbeth in the potent persona of Goldhuber’s frequent collaborator Keely Garfield, looking spiffy in an Empire dress and crown, compulsively scrubbing her bloody hands. She dances a pas de deux with Caesar, clearly maintaining the wry upper hand.

Stripped of Brutus, Anthony and all of Shakespeare’s boring plot stuff, Goldhuber’s “Julius Caesar Superstar,” like his one man show last season, “The Life and Times of Barry Goldhubris,” is snappy and infectiously buoyant. Senators and soldiers sing and dance Luther Vandross’ “Brand New Day” for the requisite production number finale, complete with star-spangled hats and sashes and a shower of big fat confetti. With a little editing, maybe some full frontal nudity for the soldiers and lots more scenery, this production could have a nice little Off-Broadway run.

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ONLINE FLASH REVIEWS
By Gus Solomons jr
Copyright 2003 Gus Solomons Jr.

NEW YORK -- As most of the downtown dance world knows by now, on February 19 Amy Sue Rosen lost her valiant battle against cancer, a little more than a week after the opening of her latest collaboration with visual artist partner, Derek Bernstein. "Break/Broke" is an exploration of support and comfort in a community of people.

A striking setting by Bernstein consists of a carpet of shredded material (it looks like Excelsior, the old packaging medium that bubble wrap replaced) on the floor and a backdrop of the same stuff with light bulbs scattered through it. Hung from a spine of human bones it could suggest a huge grass skirt or the flesh of a decaying torso.

Sally Bomer, Amy Cox, Philip Karg, Kristi Spessard, and Laura Staton in stiff white lab coats by Reiko Kawashima move glacially: creeping, staggering, collapsing, embracing. Rotund Thom Fogarty prowls the scene like a demon/father. At one point the others smear his skin with a black goo. Later, he cranks a manual generator that keeps the bulbs behind the shredded tapestry lit: the organs alive. Finally, he stops turning and the lights go out to end the dance. A soundscape by Andrew Russ of human sounds and electric noises and Jeff Fontaine's lighting reinforce the mood of despair. The agonized piece is the last of Rosen's meditations on dying, and at the last performance the cast couldn't conceal their pain and sadness.

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Not a Dry Eye in the House - New York - Dance Review
Dance Magazine, August, 2003 by WENDY PERRON

The final performance of Amy Sue Rosen's Break/Broke at Dance Theater Workshop last March was a luminous and heartbreaking event. Her six dancers continued the three-week season despite her death from cancer mid-run. Created with visual artist Derek Bernstein, the piece featured a curtain of straw studded with light bulbs. Thom Fogarty, as a bewitched and bewitching golem figure, clomped about with a coiled spring attached to one shoe (about to spring up to heaven?). Rosen's voice on tape was haunting: "When will you come home? Soon? No, not soon. When? When? When?" Three dolls descended from the rafters. (She and Bernstein had three children.) In the final tableau, Fogarty cranked a bicycle wheel, activating a single pulsating light. When he stopped cranking, the light went out.

[Amy Sue Rosen died the day of our opening performance of this run. It was indeed heartbreaking.]
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ANYBODY CAN DANCE: FOUR ARTISTS WHO BREAK THE MOLD
[Cover Story: Physical Build of Dancers
Dance Magazine, Nov, 2001 by Wendy Perron

Nobody's body is perfect. There may be a "perfect" Balanchine body or a "perfect" Ailey body, but these are only concepts, not real bodies. They refer to a sense of proportion that seems to fit with a certain style of choreography. Perfection is relative. When we use the word "perfect" to describe people, we are consciously or unconsciously comparing them to a culturally defined ideal.

Perhaps more relevant is to have a sense of what kind of bodies function well onstage. A dancer should probably measure within a certain height and weight, should be pretty young and have full use of her or his limbs. But what if your body happens to fall outside these boundaries and you have the desire to dance?

Dance Magazine talked with such "imperfect" dancers. They have faced discouragement and disappointment, but each one has found a niche as a professional dancer and has enriched our dance landscape. And they have something to say to all of us, no matter how we perceive ourselves in relation to our ideal.

A strong, passionate dancer at 5' 11 1/2" tall, Chrysa Parkinson has worked with the Tere O'Connor Dance Group since 1987. She also has danced with director Martha Clarke and choreographer Mark Dendy. And she goes to Brussels, Belgium, three times a year to teach technique and improvisation to Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's highly acclaimed company, Rosas.

But things weren't always rosy for Parkinson. Although the modern teachers at North Carolina School of the Arts found her "interesting," the ballet teachers discouraged her from pursuing ballet. She feels now that her height, which started becoming a "problem" when she was about 15, was a factor. "So many people told me I shouldn't be dancing, that I had a lot to prove," she reflects. "The revenge factor was big." Looking back, she says, "Ninety-nine percent of the girls I danced with at 16 were more talented than me, but less interested. It was really my interest that carried me through."

Her height seems like a random gift/curse to her. "I'm essentially a small person trapped in a tall person's body," she says. "My relationship to my height is incidental and somewhat conflicted. I have always been too proud to show--especially onstage--that I'm uncomfortable with my height."

With her strong Graham technique, she was headed for the Martha Graham Dance Company or London Contemporary Dance Theater. But she became attracted to postmodern choreographers who had a more liberal view of gender. "I developed a kind of androgynous persona," she says of her work with O'Connor and Dendy. For O'Connor, it was never an issue. "I was attracted to Chrysa because she is a total artist," he says.

In 1996, Parkinson won a Bessie Award for sustained achievement as a dancer with Tere O'Connor. The citation calls her "a starkly beautiful and wonderfully ironic danceractor." Recently, she has been working with improvisational artists Jennifer Monson, David Zambrano, and Kirstie Simson. At 37, Parkinson has no regrets. "I'm excited by the work that I do. I've gotten to perform a lot and work with extraordinary people."

Her advice to young dancers who may think they are too tall? "Look at the work you're interested in and go toward that. Don't worry about what people think about you."

When you first see Thomas Dwyer perform, you can't believe he is a dancer. Skinny and brittle-looking, he looks like he's never done a deep plie. But this 67-year-old man hurls himself around the stage fearlessly and charms audiences with his comic and poignant manner. A commanding presence with the intergenerational Liz Lerman Dance Exchange since 1988, Dwyer tours forty-six weeks a year as a performer and workshop leader. Luckily for him and the company, he is an old hand at traveling. He worked for the U.S. government for twenty-six years and the Navy for four, traveling to embassies and consulates all over the world.

"My becoming a dancer was like fate," he enthuses. While on his last assignment in Vienna, he started a mild conditioning program, walking two miles every morning to the embassy. When he returned stateside, he went to see his older half-brother perform with Liz Lerman's Dancers of the Third Age at an elementary school. "I was awestruck by seeing seniors moving in ways [these kids] could never imagine. I said, `Boy this is powerful stuff, I really want to do this.'" But at 53, he was too young to join the group, which was the forerunner of the Dance Exchange.

After attending workshops with Lerman and her dancers for many months, he finally got his break. Late in 1987, Lerman needed an extra dancer and asked Dwyer to step in. Shortly afterward, she invited him to join the company. It's been a hectic schedule ever since.

Dwyer does a daily regimen of stretching and push-ups in addition to rehearsing. "I'm a helluva lot stronger now than when I was 54," he boasts. When asked how he feels about dancing with younger people, he exclaims, "I love it!" He trusts Lerman to design intergenerational partnering that is expressive and not just for the sake of novelty. In order to perform the leaps and falls of Lerman's choreography, he prepares himself mentally. "I'm very focused onstage. I am always aware of where my body is in relationship to others, and I have excellent reflexes."

His experience in the Navy came in handy in other ways. As a radio telecommunications officer responsible for handling message traffic, he had learned the signalman's system of flag-waving. A few years ago, when Dwyer was working with Lerman on a gestural section of Shehechianu, she asked him to teach the signals to his fellow dancers.

For Dwyer, dancing is a calling. He wants to send a message to older people that they can be active and "not be the stereotypical grandparents." Rachel Ripple, a patient with cancer who takes his workshop, says, "It has been life-transforming."

Young people have also been touched by Dwyer's ardor: All five of his granddaughters, after seeing him perform, have taken up dance!

As Kitty Lunn glides across the stage, lifting her arm in a fluid port de bras, her ballet training is easy to see. But instead of pointe shoes carrying her, a handmade wheelchair propells her.

As a teenager, Lunn danced with the New Orleans Civic Ballet and later with the Washington National Ballet. In 1987, while preparing for a show on Broadway called Sherlock's Last Case, she slipped on ice and fell down a flight of stairs. Her vertebrae shattered into pieces, some of which pierced her spinal cord. She has not been able to walk since that moment.

After three years in the hospital and five major surgeries, dancing, for her, was "totally, completely, and hopelessly over." Since her identity depended on dancing, she became depressed and suicidal. Finally her husband asked: "Who's stopping you? Where is there a rule that says you can't dance?" His hard questions forced her to confront her fears of looking ridiculous.

At first, when she wanted to return to class, some teachers barred this dancer-with-wheelchair, perhaps believing she would have distracted other students. She is now used to this kind of treatment. "Humans have an innate fear of something different," Lunn contends, "and they fear that the disability could happen to them, so they shun the contagion."

Now she takes daily class on a professional level at Steps on Broadway with David Howard, Nancy Bielski, Milton Myers, Peff Modelski, or Edward Ellison. Other dancers have come to respect not only her right to take class, but her artistry as well. She found that "the process of being a dancer sitting is very similar to the process of being a dancer standing." She also teaches wheelchair-using children for the National Dance Institute and has become an activist for people with disabilities.

In 1995, Lunn started a mixed-ability dance company, Infinity Dance Theater, which now has twelve dancers, steady gigs in Italy, and increasing bookings on the college circuit. Her husband, whom she met only weeks before her accident, hand-builds lightweight and flexible wheelchairs for the company. Choreographer Peter Pucci, who recently created a duet for Lunn and her chair, speaks highly of her as a dancer. "She was very open to trying anything and to taking chances," he says. "Sometimes you don't think she's disabled because she moves so well. She has a very lyrical quality. She's the real thing. She works harder than some dancers with two legs."

If you saw the popular group Timothy Buckley and Dancers in the 1980s, you may remember a zany go-for-broke dancer named Thom Fogarty. Fogarty is now a reading specialist for New York City public schools, a husband and father, and weighs 220 pounds. But he still dances.

Starting out as a theater major at Ohio State University, Fogarty switched majors when Twyla Tharp came to the university with her company in 1973. "They blew me away," he says. "They were dancing around, high-stepping, just freaking off." After graduation he danced with Buckley, a fellow OSU grad, for about ten years. He has also performed with Jane Comfort, Yoshiko Chuma, the dance theater group Otrabanda, and director Ping Chong, and he currently dances with Amy Sue Rosen (see Dance Magazine June Web site review).

In the early 1990s, he stopped dancing because of back injuries and a series of deaths--friends lost to AIDS and his father and uncle dying of cancer. Like many people, he used food and drink to drown his sorrow. "The next thing I knew, I was out for a couple of years and gained about a hundred pounds."

Then about five years ago, choreographer Rosen asked him to fill in. A dancer with an enigmatic presence and a willingness to go out on a limb, he was liked by audiences, but critics had difficulty describing him. One of his favorite attempts is "a burly truck driver who moved like the wind."

Now that Fogarty is losing weight again and feeling good about himself, he plans to do more dancing. As a large person, he says, "I had to pay more attention to the smaller things, like beginnings and endings of movement. Maybe the choreographer thought I should stop at [the count of] eight, but parts of me just didn't. I learned to make the whole body have that continuous motion." This quality also infused his choreography, which he still occasionally has time for.

When asked if he would encourage other heavy people to dance, Fogarty, who weighed 315 pounds at his heaviest, answers without a moment's hesitation: "Yeah! Just get out there and do it--whatever it is that sparks you, wherever you find that joy!"

Wendy Perron is the New York editor of Dance Magazine.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Dance Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group

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música en teatro EN U.S.A.

TANGO - Dir : Joan Lombardi
Novemsemble Dance Co. (American Ballet)
The Lincoln Center
TV Channel 13 - New York

PEYTOON PLACE - Dir : Thom Fogarty
Nikolai Dance Theatre de New York.

H.M.S. PEENAFORE - Dir : Donald T. Evans
Comedia Musical en 3 actos

Karamu House Theatre
NOTA : KARAMU HOUSE THEATRE es la Institución teatral NEGRA más prestigiosa de USA, fundada en 1897. Su "Alma mater", el poeta negro LANGSTON HUGHES. Desde 1934 hasta 1949 su Director Musical fué DUKE ELLINGTON. En 1985, J.L.R. fué el PRIMER artista de RAZA BLANCA en toda su historia.

SYMPHONY SPACE - Dir : Joan Lombardi Broadway - New York
(American Ballet)
Ballet "TANGO"
EN ARGENTINA

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IS A PUZZLEMENT
VILLAGE VOICE REVIEW
By BURT SUPREE
FEBRUARY 4, 1986
THOM FOGARTY AND GROUP / DANCING FOR OUR LIVES

In his concert Judson Church, Thom Fogarty informally linked nine pieces (two of them excerpts) into two acts, bleeding one into the next. I liked the pleasant ambiance of the program, Stan Pressner’s decisive lighting, and the shine { } watching dance in Judson’s voluminous space again. But often something eluded me. Some of Fogarty’s old pieces seemed like hunks of information without the context or the development that would justify them. They didn’t necessarily seem too private, but rather, somehow truncated, the clues excised and the fingerprints removed.

In The Jig of Life, a trifle, Kathryn Komatsu punctuates her prancing, rocking, and sassy walks with twitching hips and poses. In Stanley and Stella, a duet to some of Belle Bart’s hearty, racy routines, Fogarty and Maria Lakis do pesky things to each other. He swings her, she jumps around him, he flaps her arms as if to wind her up, and she runs down like a fizzing balloon. In a way it’s incomprehensible, but in another it’s daffy and unpleasant, like any lousy marriage in which all the partners know is to pick at each other, and the things that push their buttons are meaningless to an outsider. I very much liked Roots, a plain but bold unison duet of big, square, push-pull movements of the arms and torso for Fogarty and Tamar Kotoske, to great growling music by Tom Waits. It slows to half time and repeats after they shoot themselves in the jaw with their index fingers.

Zulu Ping Pong satisfyingly balances the dynamic presences and enigmatic actions of its three characters in a visually striking and mysterious way. Hefty Carlos Arevalo, quasi-barbarically clad in leopard cloth and fur, stands on the altar holding a Ping-Pong racket. Fogarty, just beyond the spotlight, kneels in humility, later holds an imaginary gun to his shoulder. Kotoske, as a nun, comes into a square of light with a racket, clicking her returns of the nonexistent ball.

But I don’t fathom how these spatially separated characters impinge on each other, or what their relationship implies beyond incongruity. Certainly, the nun and the zulu are equally exotic in attire. In his role, Fogarty combines the colonialist and the devout purveyor of religious truth, and perhaps suggests their collaboration in subjugating the heathens. But I don’t feel his intentions, and I can’t add up the whole.

In Passion for Living, Pressner casts a circle and big zigzag shapes on the floor. In the first moments of this group piece, Komatsu points, brings her fist to her mouth, frequently alters her direction. There’s not sense that she sees anything out there that might be exciting or frightening. Her hand opens, closes; she smacks it. Fogarty seems to use these sort of gestures in an essentially abstract way.

Because, in his dances, the movement isn’t ever busy, it has a factual and sculptural authority, when delivered as clearly as it is by all his dancers. But the glue - the transitions that ordinarily hold a piece together, take you from one significant action to another, and help determine perspective - is often absent. So related actions can seem like non-sequiturs. And you can follow the dots and try to make a picture out of actions that oughtn't be linked.

Sybil opens with three sequential solos for women, followed by a funny and curious one for Fogarty in drag. Fogarty has remarked that it concerns the divided personality of the artist - “the four faces of Thom” - but I don’t think you could put that together from the piece alone. And I wasn’t quite sure when Sybil became The Good Life or when that became Compassion, although I liked much of the distracted world of Good Life, particularly Komatsu scampering around to one of Dalila’s luscious arias from Samson et Dalila.

In the Epilogue: The Ability to Say Yes, light beamed from the dressing room on one side of the altar onto the wall and the rim of the arch. David Bruskin’s flute was exquisite in that fat space. (And there was Michael Kelly at the piano, with Lee Guilliat and Essie Borden to sing.) Singly, the dancers ran gaily across the altar, then, moments later in the opposite direction with more generous, gathering arms. There’s a line in the song about “watching angels celebrating” - and there was something of that simple, joyous spirit.