Morphoses to Adopt a Curatorial Model
February 25, 2010
Morphoses in Christopher Wheeldon’s Rhapsody Fantaisie, photo by Erin Baiano
After an announcement earlier this week about Christopher Wheeldon’s departure from Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company, which he established in 2007, the company released a statement today about its plans for the future. Here is the press release:
Lourdes Lopez, co-founder and executive director of Morphoses, announces a new direction for the company following the departure of founding artistic director Christopher Wheeldon, effective February 18, 2010. The company will now be known simply as Morphoses.
“Morphoses will adopt a curatorial model in which the company will invite artists from various disciplines to take on the role of resident artist for one season, leading the company’s artistic vision for that year,” said Ms. Lopez.
The embrace of a curatorial model is a natural evolution and expansion of the company’s mission and vision. To date, more than half of the company’s repertory is comprised of works by a diverse group of emerging and well-known choreographers that include Michael Clark, William Forsythe, Tim Harbour, Adam Hougland, Lightfoot León, Edwaard Liang, Pontus Lidberg, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Liv Lorent, Emily Molnar, Alexei Ratmansky, as well as Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins; the balance of the works were created by Christopher Wheeldon.
Morphoses has become a robust platform for some of the most talented choreographers in contemporary ballet, enabling them to create work with a versatile company of dancers. Collaborators have included such artists as Los Carpinteros, Francisco Costa, Hugo Dalton, Narciso Rodriguez, Joby Talbot, Isabel and Ruben Toledo, and Martha Wainwright.
“Christopher’s artistic vision and talent has helped make Morphoses one of today’s most important dance companies,” said Ms. Lopez.
By adopting this curatorial model, the company will afford artists the opportunity to use Morphoses as a stage to forge dynamic creative partnerships that will produce innovative works for the dance world. This model will enhance the company’s capacity to reach out to a larger, broader audience and engage a younger generation. The company has begun the process of identifying the roster of resident artists for the upcoming seasons and will be announcing plans in the near future.
“In addition to its artistic achievements, Morphoses has established a successful business model and self-sustaining administrative structure that allows the company’s resources to be focused on its artistic goals, bringing forward a new generation of talent to younger audiences,” added Ms. Lopez. Since its founding, Morphoses has achieved artistic and financial success through annual seasons in New York and London, domestic and international touring, and private and institutional support.
“The company has built up a reserve of funds to support the curatorial model,” stated Catherine Gildor, a member of the board of Morphoses. “We see this as validation of the crucial role that Morphoses has taken on in the world of contemporary ballet and are therefore committed to building upon our success.”
Morphoses’ mission is to broaden the scope of classical ballet by emphasizing innovation and fostering creativity through collaboration.
From Many Mouths, From the Horse’s Mouth
February 24, 2010
- photo by Tom Brazil
Over 75 dancers will gather at the 92nd Street Y this weekend to perform in From the Horse’s Mouth, a celebratory dance-theater piece that blends storytelling and exceptional dancing. The performances and stellar roster of performers kick off the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival. Created by Tina Croll and Jamie Cunningham in 1998, From the Horse’s Mouth will feature 25 different dancers at each performance, all of whom will share personal stories from their lives and movement of their own choosing. The lineup of performers includes Wendy Perron, Deborah Jowitt, Arthur Aviles, Carmen de Lavallade, Grover Dale, Martine Van Hamel, and Monica Bill Barnes.
Jowitt, who has known Croll and Cunningham since the 1960s and has previously performed in From the Horse’s Mouth, wrote about the creation of the piece in this month’s Dance Magazine. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
It’s fascinating to watch performers with very different aesthetics and backgrounds share the stage. During those first 1998 performances, choreographer-teacher Viola Farber, who’d been a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, ended up improvising with Carmen de Lavallade, who had danced in Lester Horton’s group in the 1950s and later performed with Alvin Ailey’s company, among many others. Farber was ill with cancer and never knew for sure whether she’d feel strong enough to show up for the performance. To see these two tall, slim, gorgeous women (both born in 1931) quietly mingling their very different artistry could stop your heart.
Tickets to From the Horse’s Mouth are just $15 and can be ordered online. Performances are this Friday and Saturday at 8 PM, and on Sunday at 3 PM at the 92nd Street Y at Lexington Avenue.
Figure Skating: The Quad Quandary
February 22, 2010
2010 Olympic silver medalist Evgeni Plushenko and gold medalist Evan Lysacek, photo: AFP
How exactly does figure skating define itself? It differs from many other Olympic sports because along with its technical requirements, there is also a scored artistic component. The men’s competition in Vancouver last week concluded with USA’s Evan Lysacek crowned as the champion while the reigning Olympic gold medalist, Russia’s Evgeni Plushenko, took the silver. In his long program, Lysacek cleanly landed triple-triple combinations and filled his program with well-choreographed footwork, spins, and transitions. There was never a dull moment. Plushenko landed a quadruple-triple combination (a harder jump than a triple-triple), but many of his other jumps were quite shaky, and artistically and choreographically his program was lackluster (plus, playing to the audience by blowing kisses, shimmying, and swiveling his hips was just embarrassing). The results, which have angered Plushenko and his coach, fueled a debate over the future of figure skating. Should the sport give more weight to technical feats or to less risky programs that equally emphasize technique and artistry?
Personally, I thought the results were fair and that Lysacek wholly deserved the gold. His short and long programs were well-crafted, technically clean, original, and strategic in that they took advantage of the new scoring system introduced at the 2006 Olympics – something that was not evident in Plushenko’s programs, which seemed to center entirely around his jumps.
Interestingly, Lysacek and Plushenko received the exact same score for program components, which measures artistry. But Lysacek slightly edged Plushenko on the technical component score, suggesting that his jumps, spins, and footwork were better executed than Plushenko’s. Since their artistry scores were identical, the question was whether a cleanly landed quad jump automatically means gold. Plushenko and his coach seemed to think so, stating that anything less than a quad was setting the sport backward. They even went as far as saying that without the quad, figure skating is just dancing. But Lysacek, who has shown incredible composure and diplomacy in the face of post-competition questions over the quad/no quad argument, said in a NY Times article, “If it was about doing one jump, they would give you 10 seconds and no music” to complete the free skate. And his coach, Frank Carroll, said, “It’s not figure jumping; it’s figure skating.”
If figure jumping ever becomes a sport, Plushenko should definitely enter the competition. But in the meantime, it seems like competitive figure skating needs to deal with its identity crisis, and I imagine that the same is true for competitive gymnastics (and dancing, though it isn’t an Olympic event, which is probably a good thing). As long as competitors are graded on artistry – which is entirely subjective and leads to personal bias – can skating and gymnastics be considered Olympic sports? If artistic marks were eliminated, would Olympic figure skating and gymnastics be more fairly graded by focusing solely on technical ability? Or could it be that, without artistry, skating and gymnastics cannot be judged, and therefore shouldn’t be part of the Olympics?
Moving Theater at the Armory
February 20, 2010
Last night, I attended the final dress rehearsal of Moving Theater’s Armory Show, a genre-blurring piece created during the company’s eighteen-month residency at the Park Avenue Armory. Saturday night’s performance is already sold out, but tickets are still available to the 5 PM and 8 PM shows on Sunday. Created by MT’s founders, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly, the new work blends dance, live video, text, and music as it moves through the armory’s landmark period rooms. In a nutshell, Armory Show is an intriguing mess. The performers explore memory, history, the military, and gender – specifically, male identity through ballet vocabulary – in the context of the armory’s lush décor and areas of decay. Armory Show might be frustrating and confusing, but in the best way possible. You won’t be bored, but make sure to gaze up at the ceiling in every room. It’s full of surprises.
Trisha Brown Dance Company at the Dia: Beacon
February 18, 2010
Tamara Riewe in Trisha Brown's "Spiral" at the Dia: Beacon, photo by Tony Cenicola
The Dia: Beacon, a massive, naturally-lit contemporary art museum housed in an old Nabisco box-printing factory, is an ideal setting for dance performances – especially when the performances require high ceilings and pillars from which the dancers can gracefully fall. Trisha Brown Dance Company, currently celebrating its 40th anniversary, performed at the Dia: Beacon over the weekend in several of its large galleries.
Spiral (1974) was the shortest yet most complex piece, requiring ten pillars, ten harnesses, and ten ladders – one per dancer. The performers simultaneously climbed to the top of the columns in the museum’s lower level gallery, and then walked perpendicular to the column until they reached the floor. They seemed to defy gravity as they hung sideways with their feet on the column and gracefully spiraled to the ground. The second round of spiraling was done in a wave, with two dancers at a time starting their descent. The lower gallery is a monstrous and spookily empty space, but it felt amazingly airy and enchanted throughout Brown’s piece.
The other piece on the program requiring a set was Floor of the Forest (1970). Two men, Todd Stone and Samuel von Wentz, navigated across a large web made of thick rope and colorful clothing. They climbed over the rope, slipped horizontally in and out of shorts and shirts, and dangled for lengthy amounts of time below the grid. There was a satisfying rhythm to the piece as the dancers intently maneuvered across the rope-clothing forest and then settled comfortably into their chosen attire. The only sound was the occasional ripping of seams that couldn’t support the suspended men.
An excerpt from Foray Forêt (1990) positioned four dancers evenly in front of an exhibit of large, wooden boxes. Their fluid weight shifts and repetitive gestures contrasted with the stiff, cold feeling from the exhibit. In the Knoebel gallery, Dai Jian and Leah Morrison performed You can see us (1995/1996) to a score by Robert Rauschenberg. Morrison had her back to the audience for the duration of the work, and as she and Jian swung their limbs and created multi-dimensional shapes with their torsos, the audience begged to see not only her movement, but also her expression. Jian, whose face was visible the whole time, was fully present, while Morrison remained a mystery.
There is nothing quite like lying on the floor of the Dia and listening to the recording of Brown’s meditative and occasionally quirky voice guide you through Skymap (1969), the only non-dance work on the program. It was a journey across cities and an opportunity to envision one’s own mental map of letters, places, words, and dreams. The museum’s high ceilings and skylights lent themselves well to the creativity required of the work. Brown recorded Skymap forty-one years ago, but an exercise in imagination never grows old.
