If you took the white cards explaining many of the “art” works (some colorful shmattas, geometrical designs, my favorite fake art, a display of medicine cabinets), threw them in the air and then attached them haphazardly to any of the works, they would be the same: “this work is about the oppression of (fill in the blanks) and the destruction of (the environment or fill in the blanks) by predatory capitalism.”
Avignon – When I first visited Spain decades ago, I loved flamenco, which had derived from folk dances of the gypsy culture of Andalusia. They were dances ordinary folks, peasants could do. For centuries, the elites, who despised gypsies, looked down on flamenco as vulgar and performed in seedy places. There’s a curious similarity to what Argentine elites thought of tango.
Avignon – Tango is so iconic that sometimes productions say they are doing tango when it appears not quite so. At least what those of us not aware of changes in the dance believe. “Los Guardiola” is a case. This is today’s tango. Because tango has gone beyond the classic steps to infuse modern dance. And drama. And I liked it!
Avignon – In this graceful, inventive piece by choreographer Wang Junjian, Beijing’s Tuyi Dance Theater presents a plane journey—landing, preparation, and takeoff.
The tarmac is “under the clouds” and the dancers sometimes imitate planes, moving at angles, falling and rising as if they were flying.
Avignon – I love tango, but I’ve never seen a tango performance like this. French choreographer Ariane Liautaud takes the iconic Argentine tango as a muse, but challenges its limit to couples dancing à deux.
Avignon – Why are people aggressive, why do they hurt others? How does the tension of life make people aggressive when they don’t want to be? That is the theme of a very contemporary and relevant and very smart dance piece by the Belgian company DTS, which uses hip-hop as a means of expression and reflection on contemporary themes.
Avignon – Chang Chung-An, founder of Taiwan’s Resident Island Dance Theatre, has with great artistry created a work that expresses the difficulties ordinary people have to survive. They are like machines in a factory, repeating the same routines, existing in a time and space defined by society, but it becomes clear that “society” is industrial corporations.
Artist Judy Chicago is known for her feminist work “The Dinner Party” (1974-79), plates depicting women’s lives, on permanent exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. Not as well known, but very pertinent now, a few decades later, she created another dinner, “Rainbow Shabbat,” challenging hostilities between religious partisans.
“Purlie Victorious,” playwright-actor Ossie Davis’s surreal satire about racism in the Jim Crow South, was first produced in 1961 at the cusp of the new civil rights movement. The Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, NC, had just taken place in February 1960.
There is sometimes a surreal disconnect between what the political class and the artistic class say. The Whitney Museum’s Puerto Rico exhibit, on till April 23, is an attack on American colonialism. The U.S. annexed the island as booty after victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898, and these artists’ works say it oppress the people who live there.
Rodney Zelenka is an artist from Panama whose exhibit now in New York shows stunning colorful realistic/fantastic paintings that comment on how abusive power by major governments has caused suffering among peoples worldwide.
What’s better than seeing an artist’s work at a museum? There are some event promoters who would like to persuade you that it’s even better to experience an “immersive” event, meaning you are surrounded by huge blow-ups of the painter’s works as in this exhibit of Claude Monet’s art.
That doesn’t cancel out museums, but it has some advantages.
We know Edward Hopper’s iconic “Early Sunday Morning,” the low red buildings. But at the Whitney Museum’s Hopper exhibit, there are paintings most of us have never seen before.
Dec 3, 2019 – Angela Zumpe, a Berlin filmmaker, media artist and painter, was in New York in November to present a film and also a book that intercuts the story of László Moholy-Nagy, a visionary lighting designer and the most experimental of the Bauhaus artists, with her own story. Zumpe is a media artist and was a professor at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Dessau, where the Bauhaus was based.
The costumes seem South Asian and place the dancers in a real world. In the first piece, “Tilted Arc,” there is a lively pulsating South Asian sound created by classical piano and horn, and the dancers exude energy.
Aug 9, 2019 – At the Whitney‘s summer exhibit, a rich retrospective of decades of art produced in America, are some highlights that show politically aware painters reflecting the important struggles of the era, against the oppression of workers, against fascism, against racism.
May 13, 2019 – I pay attention to political art, but I was amazed at an exhibit at the new Whitney Biennial which not so subtly attacks the museum’s board of trustees vice chair as the owner of a company that builds weapons that target civilians!
A dance event of the main Avignon Festival featured two productions about words and language, “Prononcer Fénanoq” and “Long Time No See.” Maybe there‘s a reason why dance is about movement, not words.
The place is elegant, the courtyard of the Palace of the Popes, where Popes of the Catholic church held court. The surrounding six-story palace walls are beige brick with Roman arches and a rose window. An amazing venue. The state took it over after the 19th century Napoleonic revolution, and later it became a state museum. The huge courtyard reminds one of a Greek outdoor theater. So, for that reason alone, one goes to any event the Avignon Festival holds there.
It‘s an imaginary master class named in homage to Nijinsky, choreographed by Faizal Zeghoudi, text by Marie-Christine Mazzola, danced by four fine interpreters of his art, and narrated by Bernard Pisani, once a dancer, now an actor. I loved the dance. I was less entranced by the pretentious text.
I liked this clever pas de deux. But don‘t think classical ballet, think very contemporary male-female dance. “Et Si” means “And if.” First you see a table, and under that legs. Everything above the table is blacked out. He is twisting. She kicks off red spike heels. You use your imagination. Very smart. She is cool. The twists are erratic, movements are jagged. Like the relationship.
The Tjimur Dance Theatre of Taiwan presents a finely designed contemporary dance inspired by the culture of the Païwan tribe, an aboriginal group of the island‘s south. Choreographed by Baru Madiljin, “Varhung – Heart to Heart” is slow, expressive, angular. It tells stories of people‘s lives, loves, difficulties though the cultivation and harvesting of the ginger plant.
The best production I saw at the 2018 Avignon Theater Festival was “Dance ˜n Speak Easy,” a stunning work by Wanted Posse set in the U.S. 1930s prohibition era. The mood is swagger, the language is hip hop, the undercurrent is aggression.
May 21, 2018 – The people who put up this poster at New York’s CooperHewitt Museum, which I saw yesterday, must be millennials or younger! It’s a critique of US foreign policy mostly in the 1980s. War in Vietnam, invasion of Grenada, Contras in Nicaragua and death squads in El Salvador, US bombing of Libya, invasion of Panama. But blurb says the poster was created in ca (about) 1980! How can a poster that references those events be created before most of the events occurred? Curators appear to know nothing of the US 1980s war crimes the poster attacks!
Dance Forms has been presenting performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for 16 years, everything from classical to avant garde, from major company principals to unknowns. This year’s International Choreographers’ Showcase had major European and American ballet soloists and the iconic post-modern choreographer Douglas Dunn, who danced with Merce Cunningham’s company. As one expects from Dance Forms, were some very fine pieces.
