A new dance for old news? Emanuel Gat’s The Rite of Spring gives Stravinsky a salsa take on the oldest gender saws in the book. Is Emanuel Gat’s version of The Rite of Spring a sexist work, or does it seek to expose sexism instead? If the answer is the latter, where is this sexism […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inNews
Southern studies, part two
The week after Crossroads, Temple Theatre’s white bread and cardboard put-on of a Southern musical, hit the boards, what was on the menus at regional theaters? Two plays and one musical. About the South. In this business, folks, timing is everything. But we put away the long knives once we saw characters and plots with […]
Posted inArt
The grindstone/treadmill dance
It’s the last we see of Tense Dave, at the end of the existential, modern-dance-meets-independent-film thriller of the same name this week at American Dance Festival. After all that had just been visited upon him, there he goes: walking with determination, eyes forward–perhaps a little grimly, but with Dave it’s always hard to tell. Imagine […]
Posted inNews
In tense situations
Dave is, well, rather tense. It’s understandable: He lives next door to a man who loves plastic bags just a bit more than is healthy, a woman who really shouldn’t have gone that far into the Romanticists, and a dapper little gentleman who simply insists upon control. He can hear them through the wall. What […]
Posted inNews
Whodunit? Or whydoit?
In one week, Team Kennedy showed us How It’s Done with its impressive pocket musical at BTI (before Kenny Gannon had to prove if the third time–since 1996–really is the charm with Ellen Byron’s Graceland). The week before and after, regional, community and university-based companies let their hair down and just indulged. Just a wee […]
Posted inArt
And they’re off
What if the most intriguing modern dance on display in Durham this weekend has nothing to do with the American Dance Festival? Since venerable dance photographer Steve Clarke curates Multiple Exposure, his second series of modern dance concerts, Friday and Saturday night at Durham Arts Council, the possibility is not remote. In two different programs, […]
Posted inNews
In modern dance Chinese opera
In recent years, choreographer Shen Wei has first astounded Durham audiences–and then the world–with the cool tectonic games in his Rite of Spring, and his dance-as-sculpture-as-painting manifesto, Connect Transfer. When the American Dance Festival opens this week, Mr. Shen unveils his idea of what a 21st-century Chinese opera is. As usual with this artist, check […]
Posted inNews
Un-standard time
It’s far from the first time that the Kennedy family name has been associated with encouraging developments in the performing arts. Years after giving the North Carolina Theatre–and then Broadway–their talented daughter Lauren, K.D. and Sara Lynn Kennedy put their support behind the black box theater in downtown Raleigh’s BTI Center. This was the summer […]
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Unstacking the dance card deck
Hiya, Pigeon. Have a seat. Care for a friendly game of chance? Now, generally speaking, I’m not a gambling man, myself. And I never cursed before I got into show biz. Uh-huh. But as the usual public moralists try to convince us that the grim spectre of a state-sponsored lottery–and no-cash nightclub Texas Hold-em–threatens to […]
Posted inGuides
Future fax?
To: Indy Readers From: The Very Near Future Wayyyy down upon the Swami River… Greetings from the future, psychic theater and dance fans. Boy is it hot up here. I told the paper that on my upcoming vacation in the Fourth Dimension I’d send back a list of shows that had run between here (your […]