Red Dye #40

Red Dye #40

How often do you get to see the very first performance of an exciting new modern dance company? How often do you get to see them for free? You have your chance on Friday and Saturday! Show is at 10 pm, so you will feel slightly scandalous for being at such a late-night event. You will feel like an insider, and it will be true. “Red Dye #40″ (REDDance premier concert) will be held in the Dance Studio Theater at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. REDDance’s creators are Meredith Cook and Amanda Jackson, soon-to-be MFA students and both super-talented choreographers and performers. I’m especially excited to see Lisa Niedermeyer’s new work, Ink, that is set on Amanda.

P.S. The end of graduate school is swallowing the blog. Will return to a more regular posting schedule sorta soon. In other news, Widening the I will sorta soon be based in DC.

16 minutes of air

Sarah Jane Pell, “Undercurrent,” 45cm transparent dome containing 16 minutes of air, 2007.
I am completely in love with this image, and with the artist/researcher/aquabatics instructor who produced it. (Thanks to Gina Sawyer for bringing her up.)

90 years of Merce

Fabrications 1987 (c)

Originally uploaded by The Merce Cunningham Dance Company

How cool is it to have Sonic Youth play at your 90th birthday celebration? Merce Cunningham turns 90 on Thursday and he’s still creating new work. Amazing. You can’t get to New York for the official event at BAM? I’d recommend reading Carolyn Brown’s memoir Chance and Circumstance as a good way to celebrate. Brown was a dancer with the company for a solid 20 years and her tales from the early days will make you feel like you’re in the bus with John Cage, stopping along the side of the road for picnics and mushroom searches. The second half drags a bit but the writing is luminous and the whole thing is filled with insights about Merce’s work, the relationship between Cunningham and Cage, the New York avant garde in the 50s and 60s, and a slew of other interesting veins. Honest, restrained, fascinating. (Gia Kourlas wrote a little review and conducted an interview with Brown back when the book came out a couple of years ago, if you just want a tiny taste.) Happy birthday to Mr. Merce. Thank you for all you have given us and well wishes for more years and more beautiful dances.

New Yorker roundup

Have you gotten hopelessly behind on your New Yorker reading this year? Let me assist by offering my very subjective top 5 articles of recent months.

Walton Ford's Nila

1. Atul Gawande on our horrific practice of keeping prisoners in solitary confinement. For years. By the tens of thousands.
2. D.T. Max on David Foster Wallace. Devastating and memorable.
3. Mariana Cook’s A Couple in Chicago. A small, moving portrait of a relationship, originally published in 1996.
4. A selection of John Updike’s poetry. More satisfying than the snippets from longer pieces, the poems are complete on their own and present gorgeous visions from the last days of a life.
5. Calvin Tomkins profile of the visual artist Walton Ford. Super-interesting ideas on the relationship between humans and nature.

*bonus favorite bit from Joan Acocella’s review of the Miami City Ballet in New York: “[Jennifer] Kronenberg and Jeanette Delgado are big-time stars, but a number of the women in the company–Patricia Delgado (Jeanette’s beautiful sister), Katia Carranza (a Mexican powerhouse), Amanda Weingarten (a comer, still in the corps)–dance as though they think they’re stars. Someone told them they could be, and that makes all the difference.”
Go Amanda! A comer for sure!