Word: ballets
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Over one-fourth of the audience walked out on the opening night of the Boston Ballet's Fall, 1974 season. The reason: a performance of "Winterbranch," a work by avantgarde master Merce Cunningham...
...likely to be predictable--a fitting tribute to the child of a family of Centralia, Washington lawyers who grew up to shock those who shocked the world with modern dance. But even outrageous art can only outrage within a context of respectability; for Cunningham, the background includes both sporadic ballet study and several years in the early '40s as a leading dancer with Martha Graham's company. Beginning with his first solo recital in 1944, however, Cunningham gradually drifted away from the objective, disciplined symbolism of modern dance's first generation toward his own radical redefinition. New York's early...
...Cunningham's reliance on Events continues to provoke controversy. Ballet Review's Jack Anderson accuses him of disregarding the audience in the name of practicality, and a number of critics have pointed out that a ninety-minute Event, without intermission, can become thoroughly tedious. The final verdict is not yet in, but Cunningham himself upholds the validity of a format which allows for "not so much an evening of dance, as the experience of dance...
...went with a friend who loves classical ballet. Reading the program note for the second dance "Locus"--"The score for 'Locus' is a random ordering of 27 points on a cube of space immediately surrounding the standing figure"--she moaned, "It sounds awfully theoretical." But an awareness of the theoretical nuances of avant-garde dance is an initiation to familiarity with the academic language of classical ballet. The initiation makes you an insider, one party to a compact between artist and viewer. Once you're familiar with the compact, you can appreciate the dance as dance...
Despite the program note describing its formal structure, the formal order of "Locus" is not what matters. What matters is the larger motion--the easy motion of the dance. The spontaneity set within a precise structure and the fluidity of the improvised play with movement much like ballet, only ballet seems to have its logic built into its technique, whereas the logic in Brown's work, and in modern dance generally, comes solely from the choreographer's decisions. Brown's dance--like all great dance--touches the same deep chord: a sense of ease, freedom, spontancity, openness...