Dance
LIGHTLY NOW: Gabrielle Lansner Dances Summer at Sitelines
One of the joys of summer in the city is the traditionally indoors getting a shot at existing outdoors. Films, parties, meals—for three months each year, New Yorkers get to take them outside. Since 2004, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s site-specific dance series, Sitelines, presented as a part of the River to River Festival, has given John Q. Lunch Hour the chance to see dance in his neighborhood, free, on the grass and among the trees.
As part of Sitelines this August, the New York-based gabrielle lansner & company presented Turning Heads, Frocks in Flight on the wooden jetty in South Cove, Battery Park City. Described by Lansner as “an exuberant dance and dancing parade inspired by a series of colorful and fanciful dresses by artist Caterina Bertolotto…A celebration of freedom and personal transformation,” the performance did come off as something of an I Am Woman fashion show as the strikingly diverse company walked and emotionally vogued in synchronous lines over an arched bridge and around the jetty, where the audience was seated along a low curved wall.
As we were leaving, the man who had been sitting next to me crumpled his brown lunch bag into a ball and said, “Well, that was nice, wasn’t it?” before shooting it into a wastebasket. “Yes,” I said. “It was.”
Contributor
April GreeneApril Greene, the Rail's dance editor, lives, writes, and bikes in Brooklyn.
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