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Autumn
in New York: along with new theatre, Chelsea gallery openings, and
film premieres, dance is on the city's artistic
calendar -- a flurry of
movement as if keeping in time to the leaves that will start to
fall in all the glorious colors of fire! NYC has a
particular love affair with contemporary dance, having witnessed
its flowering in the studios of masters such as Martha Graham,
Merce Cunningham, and Trisha Brown. Two very different
choreographers from Europe, Emio
Greco
and Akram
Khan
have brought their considerable talents to the Joyce and BAM, each
one displaying radically different approaches to how one tells a
story with movement.
Anglo-Bangladeshi wünderkind
Akram
Khan and French actress extraordinaire Juliette Binoche
perform a duet 'In-I'
at BAM (through the 26th);
a love story with an immense wall of Rothko-like color
designed by Indo-Brit artist Anish Kapoor as backdrop, foil, screen. The
conceit behind this collaboration 'an actor dances and a dancer
acts' unearths in varying degrees unknown talents in both
performers. More interestingly, the two bring a linear,
literal narrative to the stage by recounting the joys and travails
of a modern love affair through dance and text. With his
charateristic modern spin on the Indian Kathak tradition,
Khan displays his signature nimble arm movements and liquid grace,
and Binoche moves with considerable agility for someone new to
dance.
It's a story of passion and frustrating, perhaps, in its ultimate capitulation....
Born
in Italy, the Netherlands-based Emio Greco is a genius of
movement, a choreographer who pushes the limits of the body in new
and idiosyncratic ways. At the Joyce, beginning September
29, Emio
Greco/PC
will present the second in the choreographer's Dantesque trilogy: [purgatorio]
POPOPERA.
For their trip to purgatory Greco made his dancers learn to play
the electric guitar. The guitar music accompanies Michael
Gordon's fine score and also functions as an extension of the body
itself. Here, purgatory emphasizes the possibility of
redemption and catharsis, purification through suffering.
Greco's quirky movement vocabulary is whiplash quick and intense,
twisting body (and sound!) in ways remarkable, a consciousness of the
dancers' in-between space, literally fra cervella e movimento
(between brain and movement). It's a sophisticated,
postmodern riff on Dante where story and body meet with jarring
and felicitous results…. See:
[purgatorio]
POPOPERA: Emio Greco/PC See:
'In-I'
:Akram Khan, Juliette Binoche
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