To understand the blueprint of who Daniel Alexander Jones is as a multidisciplinary artist and thought leader, we have to go back to Springfield, Massachusetts during the Civil Rights era. This working class city bursting with factories was one of the stops on the Great Migration for families and people seeking work in order to escape the racial violence in states such as the Carolinas and Virginia.
To see Holland Andrews perform is to witness the channeling deep reserves of light and darkness, for the benefit of audiences battered by all manners of emotional trauma.
“I am offering a prescription with my music,” Andrews said, “to help the potential unease in their life at that moment. What do I have that you need?”
There’s a moment in Holland Andrews’ video introduction to Museum of Calm where their brow tenses and they clasp their hands tightly, trying desperately to summon an effective description of their work. It’s a relatable feeling: the futility of attempting to represent deeply personal thoughts and feelings in words. But even before the piece begins, it’s clear to the audience that such futility, or even vulnerability, is not the slightest bit threatening to Holland Andrews—it’s a challenge.
At home on Saturday afternoon, I rolled out a yoga mat and lay down on the floor. I guided my back over a bolster, tucked a pillow beneath my neck, and pulled a blanket across my body. I wiggled my toes and let my feet fall open. I sighed. Then I waited for Holland Andrews to sing to me over the phone.
Dance show or sporting event? At the beginning of Abby Zbikowski’s exhilarating “Abandoned Playground,” which had its world premiere at Abrons Arts Center on Thursday, it’s not entirely clear. Nine dancers in uniforms of orange shorts, sneakers and heavy-duty kneepads — members of Ms. Zbikowski’s five-year-old company, Abby Z and the New Utility — warmed up on the stage of the Abrons playhouse with the focused energy of boxers preparing for a fight.
Some dance pieces begin as sparks of inspiration in the mind or heart of a choreographer. In fact, many dance works start this way. Others take shape around a particular performer. In these cases the character, movement language and essence of such a person becomes a choreographer’s raw material, and as such, the work cannot exist without said performer. This is the case in Robyn Orlin’s And so you see... our honourable blue sky and ever enduring sun... can only be consumed slice by slice, which will make its Israeli debut in Jerusalem as part of the Israel Festival.
The South African choreographer Robyn Orlin has a long history of annoying people, but from talking to her, you would never know it. She is candid to a fault, thoughtful and rather adorably scattered. Her e-mails are filled with exclamation marks and signed with x’s, denoting kisses. And yet Ms.
“Anybody out there know what Afrofuturism is?” Bill T. Jones asked in the middle of Times Square on Saturday night.
Jones is, among other things, the artistic director of New York Live Arts, an experimental performing arts center in Chelsea. It was in this capacity that he appeared on Saturday to discuss a free outdoor performance of “The Motherboard Suite,” a movement and musical work he directed for the center’s Live Ideas festival.
Over the last two decades, jazz fans have heard pianist Aaron Diehl play inventive jazz solos with Wynton Marsalis and Cécile McLorin Salvant. A different sort of audience has heard him play George Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F with the New York Philharmonic and the music of Philip Glass at Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Pianist Aaron Diehl enchanted Newport Music Festival patrons with pairings of delightful miniature vignettes in the specially constructed music tent on the lawn of the Breakers Mansion last Sunday evening. Diehl’s seemingly random series of small offerings in fact took on a grand master plan in what he jokingly referred to as his “pandemic playlist.” In his spare time, the highly acclaimed pianist enjoys flying; in the air he “gets the big picture,” while on the ground as a pilot he attends to all manner of pre and post flight details.
