In the time to come, I’m sure Triangle dance enthusiasts will remember July 9, 2002 as the day the American Dance Festival fell. And if we don’t, don’t worry: Paul Ben-Itzak will be glad to remind us, judging from his July 12 essay, “Free to Dance,” on Danceinsider.com. In typically understated prose, the editor of […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inNews
Cantaloupe condoms
The vertical cantaloupe are coming in now. They sway above me in the morning breeze, fat and slowly ripening: four, seven and 12 feet off the ground. I see an explanation is in order. On both sides, my ancestors were farmers. Still, the first time I ever tried my yeoman hand at it was three […]
Posted inArt
Sturm und Drag
Clearly, Hedwig Schmidt was in a carnivorous mood when her handlers uncaged her during the early show at Legends last Saturday night. At the start, her icy majesty prowled among the rubes in the conservatory, sizing up the menu, her Lugosi mystique enhanced by designer Miyuki Su’s radically extended cape, two parts bat wing to […]
Posted inArt
Emergency Call
Somewhere on both of NASA’s Voyager deep space probes, scientists placed a laser disk and a complimentary player that resembled a wind-up locomotive. The records were designed to send greetings to any life forms out there, and to tell a story about life on Earth. I’ve always thought of Godfrey Reggio’s landmark film Koyaanisqatsi as […]
Posted inArt
Soldiering On
An old–and thankfully, overstated–insider’s joke insists that, no matter when you got there, the golden age of the American Dance Festival ended just two years before. Still, the jibe has more of an edge to it these days, with the extended absences of co-directors Charles and Stephanie Reinhart, philosophical mainstay Gerry Myers’ off-campus work on […]
Posted inArt
ADF Scorecard
Dayton Contemporary Dance Company successfully fought off the painfully earnest choreographers who sandbagged the early innings of their June 13-15 appearance. First, choreographer Kevin Ward squandered a rare Duke Ellington field recording on the ultimately shapeless Sets and Chasers, a random series of small group and solo episodes that never really coalesced. Daniel Marshall and […]
Posted inGuides
Danny Cameron
We rarely think of donors like philanthropist Danny Cameron when it comes to awards like this. Perhaps it’s part of a persistent American fixation on finished products, as opposed to processes; not causes, but effects. Whatever the reason, it’s time it changed. Why? Look at the numbers for Cameron’s field of interest, theater. Ticket sales […]
Posted inArt
Artist in Exile
The countdown has most definitely begun. For eight years, playwright/performance artist/gay activist Tim Miller has struggled to secure United States citizenship rights for his partner, Australian journalist Alistair McCrowley. The only way the two have been able to live together during the past few years is under a student visa McCrowley secured to study creative […]
Posted inArt
Rhine and Shines
It’s tempting to delicately call N.C. State University’s TheaterFest 2002 a triumph in niche marketing. The Saturday evening I was present for Terrence Rattigan’s While the Sun Shines, I’ll comfortably wager I was one of only a half-dozen patrons in the audience still enjoying their first half-century on Earth. While the generation gap wasn’t as […]
Posted inArt
Rite of Wei
Call the American Dance Festival a monument to change. It’s a fitting paradox by which to summarize the festival’s first 69 years of activity, and its last 25 in North Carolina. In its first years, Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman were in pursuit of the radically new, not only in aesthetics […]