A weekly, highly personal and subjective list of performances and artists we want you to know about:
Leigh says:
I’m away this weekend, but if I were in town, I would be heading to see “A Mouthful of Shoes.” If a contemporary dance company had grown up on an MGM studio lot, it would be “The Bang Group.” Founded by David Parker and Jeffrey Kazin, TBG is a lovely hybrid of downtown dance infused with the sensibility of the golden age of musicals. Choreographer Parker, an accomplished tapper, loves dance that makes its own noise, and his new work gets help from some pretty tony sources: Morton Feldman, W.A. Mozart, Steve Reich and Igor Stravinsky. Runs March 9 through 11 at 8 pm.
Check out the preview, which takes on film noir. If the finale takes place in a room of mirrors, please advise.
Martha says:
The first time I saw Richard Move as Martha Graham, I thought Graham had been exhumed and returned to us. Move, who captures Graham’s eyes, hair and hauteur as uncannily as her movement, first created the role in 1996, and will bring her back in a 20th anniversary homage: “Martha@20.” But that’s not the main event. Move/MoveOpolis! premieres a new work, “XXYY,” to open the 2017 Live Ideas Festival, “Mx’d Messages.” “XXYY” is a dance theater creation, exploring the spectrum of what constitutes gender, and performed to an original score by Martux_m that includes the Vatican’s Last Castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, the only castrato to have produced solo recordings. Move, in this performance, is just as likely to be larger than life. Starts on March 8 at 7:30 pm through March 11.
I’m a bit of a broken record about recommending the work of Annie-B Parson. But don’t miss her talk about her whimsical, dance-illuminating “Dance by Letter: an illustrated dance abecedary” at the 92 Street Y’s Harkness Dance Festival (www.92Y.org.) Among Parson’s letter descriptions, one of my personal favorites is: “S is for syncing up with synchronicity of the universe. It’s handy to keep a couple of dice in your pocket, just in case you need advice from the gods.” Hear the artist read from her smart and silly book on Sunday March 12 at 3 pm.
Cover: Jeffrey Kazin and David Parker in “A Mouthful of Shoes.” Photo © Nicholas Burnham
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