White Nights, Beige Days
A Letter from St. Petersburg
by George Jackson
Choreographing for the Maryinsky ought not to be done casually, off the cuff. Due consideration is called for because of the company’s grand traditions, its gigantic size (about 200 dancers and countless support staff with their attendant entropy (i.e., resistance to change), and its current circumstances (a sort of dual directorship that observers have called an unending duel). Also taken into account must be the particular charge that comes with a commission and, if the piece is to outlast one season, the company’s long range repertory needs. READ MORE
Not Made in Japan
Big Dance Theater at Jacob's Pillow
by Lisa Rinehart
Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson are storytellers with a fondness for irony and a sharp eye for imagery. Their collaborative group, Big Dance Theater, has tackled with zeal the likes of Flaubert, Twain, the Bible, and Tanizaki, creating movement theater saturated in beauty, humor and soul. Their latest effort, "The Other Here," a co-commission by the Japan Society in New York and the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, is no exception. Lazar and Parson interlace modern fables by Japanese writer Masuji Ibuse with traditional Okinawan dance, Japanese pop music, and the pseudo mysticism of a contemporary insurance sales conference. Dance theater and a sales conference? Yes indeed. Lazar and Parson morph one of Ibuse's protagonists into a hawker of life insurance and, taking inspiration from the transcripts of an annual gathering of top life insurance salesmen, probe the hokey underbelly of corporate financed motivational speaking. These are strange bedfellows, but Ibuse's tales of a master's maltreatment of a lazy servant ("Life at Mr. Tange's"), and a friend's guilt over the stewardship of a valued carp ("The Carp"), somehow parallel the irony of pumping up insurance salesmen to sell policies to the unwitting. Lazar and Parson use the prodigious talents of their company, and almost every performing art there is, to make an engaging East meets West riff on mortalityREAD MORE