The Brooklyn Rail

Holding Space

By Jen George

Each June, New York City observes Pride Month by celebrating and commemorating the LGBTQ community with vibrant events and exhibitions of all kinds. This year, among innumerable festivities, New York Live Arts facilitates “The House Party,” part of a multi-faceted celebration and remembrance of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company Co-founder Arnie Zane. Artist Zoe Leonard displays her work Strange Fruit at the Whitney, and discusses its themes of mortality and discrimination with the Brooklyn Rail. The annual Pride March floods 5th Avenue, and devotes a moment of silence to members of the community lost to AIDs and discrimination. The Joyce Theater provides a week of queer programming with performances from both Madboots Dance and Sean Dorsey Dance.

Another Song, Another Feeling

By Rennie McDougall

“You go for the obvious,” Charles Atlas told Performing Arts Journal in 1997, discussing his films that are populated with everything from Merce Cunningham’s choreography to Leigh Bowery’s drag.

Dances in a Modular “Shed”– a Prelude to the Larger One to Come

By Sariel Frankfurter

You may have heard buzz about the development of The Shed—a mammoth of a contemporary performance space being built on the Hudson Yards, visible from the end of the High Line—which is speeding along by city construction standards in time for its 2019 opening. The Shed’s austere glass-and-steel beam architecture boasts a fully mobile cover that perplexingly unsheaths itself like a turtle from its shell.

Carousel—Talent Transcends a Prickly Book

By Susan Yung

In Carousel, the stage is often crammed with props such as wooden pallets, lobster pots, and clambake detritus, leaving little space for the dancers. But Peck guides the action vertically by inserting jumps and spins; arms and legs make variegated shapes to add visual interest.

I Know You Are Here

By Erica Getto

In the summer of 1991, a construction team converged on a patch of land near New York’s City Hall. It set out to build an office space; instead, it uncovered a mass grave. As researchers sifted through bone fragments and relics from the site, they traced them back to 419 people, all of whom belonged to New York’s African community between the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In Conversation

BRINDA KUMAR and ANDREA MILLER with Gillian Jakab

Gillian Jakab sat down at the Breuer with Met Assistant Curator Brinda Kumar and Choreographer Andrea Miller to discuss the intersections of the exhibition and performance.