Vanessa Manko
VANESSA MANKO was the former Dance Editor for the Brooklyn Rail.
Inspire Me, Baby
By Vanessa MankoThe Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired by Francine Prose, HarperCollins (2002)
Dancing on the Rail
By Vanessa MankoDance and politics may seem like disparate fields, but choreographers have long been delving into the world of politics with dances of protest and dissent.
Dancing on the Rail
By Vanessa MankoMay and dance are a perfect match. Warmer weather. Greener grasses.
In Conversation
Dancing on the Rail
By Vanessa MankoAs the first male dancer in Trisha Browns company, Stephen Petronio danced in such seminal Brown pieces as Lateral Pass, Opal Loop, and Set and Reset from 1979-1986. He continued on to found his own company in 1984
De Keersmaekers Dancing in the Rain
By Vanessa MankoAnne Teresa De Keersmaekers 70-minute long Rain, which had its New York premier at BAM in mid-November, is nothing short of a tour de force. Loosely based on a novel by Kirsty Gunn in which a young boy drowns, the Belgian choreographer experiments with ideas surrounding the act of breathing, artificial respiration, and the ebb and flow of water.
Cunningham Chances It
By Vanessa MankoMerce Cunningham has been leading dance audiences into uncharted territory for the last fifty years, and the October performances at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) were no different. When Cunningham broke away from Martha Graham and began choreographing his own works, eventually forming a company in the 1950s, he created a more sparse movement vocabulary in which dancers seemed wholly unaware of each other; remote and self-contained.
OConnors Earthbound
By Vanessa MankoTere OConnor has longed worked in the realm of dance and text, exploring ways that movement and words might form a symbiotic relationship and thus a coherent unified work of art or dance play as he defines it. But in more recent works, the choreographer has chosen to move away from the text-based and toward pure dance. Last years premiere of Winter Belly and Choke at Danspace Project, for instance, marked OConnors change in direction.
Walk, Run, Amble, Saunter Everyday Movement is not so Everyday
By Vanessa MankoSix figures, placed equidistant apart, walk in unison down a street. Another figure emerges from behind to cut a diagonal across the formation. More "bodies" enter this streetscape, joining the flow of motion. Others pause, standing still to check the time, before moving on again.
D.U.M.B.O.s Dancing
By Vanessa MankoModern dance and ballet stalwarts are visiting Brooklyn this fall, but if tickets to William Forsythes Ballett Frankfurt (BAM, Sept. 30, Oct 2.Oct. 5), Merce Cunninghams 50th Anniversary Season (BAM, Oct.16-18), and the acclaimed Suzanne Farrell Ballet (Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts, Oct. 12) are out of your price range, then you might opt for the Third Annual D.U.M.B.O. Dance Festival.
A Choreographer in Search of A Style
By Vanessa MankoWhen one is offered too many choices, making a decision can be near impossible. When it comes to dance, any young choreographer working today has much to draw upon in terms of choosing a style, tone, or technique with which to work.
Waltz Toward the Apocalypse
By Vanessa MankoSasha Waltz, an increasingly renowned German choreographer often compared to Pina Bauschthe reining doyenne of danztheaterpremiered her latest work Körper (Bodies) at BAMs Next Wave Festival in November. Körper is a series of oftentimes witty and sometimes disturbing interconnecting vignettes. Each reveals the choreographers ingenuous and inventive ways of grappling with the conundrum that is the human body.
Making a Splash
By Vanessa Manko"Hell is other people." So goes the iconic existential adage proclaimed by Garcin in Jean Paul Sartres No Exit. Yet for choreographers Katie Workum and Leigh Garrett, hell is not only other people, but other people in a Miami condominium complex. Such is the premise of "The Miami Project," a new collaborative experimental dance and performance piece presented in February at the Williamsburg Art Nexus (WAX). Bronzed sun-bathers, terry-clothed go-go dancers, a hip-swiveling tennis player, and a Romeo from Brooklyn named Jerry Debruglio-uglio (my best stab at the spelling) are just some of the characters to be seen in this hilarious, absurd, but very smart work loosely adapted from Sartres famed existential play. Think, Sartre meets Esther Williams at the Copacabana.
Feast
By Vanessa MankoA police horse stable may not immediately make one think of hybrid-performance bridging dance, installation art, costume design, and architecture, but for Julia Mandle it did. The result is Feast, a site-specific work that takes place in a former stable on the waterfront in DUMBO using Platos Symposium as its basis for exploring human desire or eros.
In Conversation
MARK MORRIS with Vanessa Manko
Mark Morris would rather write about his work than have other people do it.
Dancing on the Rail: Let the Festivals Begin
By Vanessa MankoFor me the approach of fall is signaled by the glut of press releases that I begin to receive in the last few weeks of August. Each envelope is thick with pages devoted to dance venues fall seasons, companies national and/or international tours, a choreographers most recent premier, or, as is the case in September, the fall festival line-ups of which there are now two.
Too Much of a Good Thing
By Vanessa MankoBare-chested men, wrapped in long white towels traipse on stage. Women blow air into sacks filled with water and soap. Bubbles form. Lots and lots of bubbles.
In Conversation
Noémie Lafrance
By Vanessa MankoWith its light blue, peeling paint, remnants of broken glass bottles, cracked basin floor and graffiti, the abandoned, 50,000 sq. ft. McCarren Pool is an unlikely space for dance. But Williamsburg-based site-specific choreographer Noémie Lafrance has chosen just this site for her latest work, Agora.
Dancing on the Rail: May Brooklyn-based and Beyond
By Vanessa MankoMay offers a chance to see both works honed in Brooklyn neighborhoods and other works by choreographers far outside of New YorkAustralia to be exact.
Gabri Christa’s Dominata at Dance Theater Workshop
By Vanessa MankoThe game of dominoes is a cultural pastime in several of the cities that choreographer and dancer Gabri Christa has livedPuerto Rico, Cuba, Curaçao, and New York.
Dancenow at the Joyce
By Vanessa MankoEach September, New York Citys fall dance season commences with the eclectic and ambitious Dancenow/NYC festival. Featuring a plethora of dance works, the festival is a testament to the vitality and breadth of New Yorks dance community. No one facet of Dancenow epitomizes its essence better than the Basecamp Series at the Joyce Soho.
Dancing on the Rail
By Vanessa MankoGerman-born, Berlin-based choreographer Sasha Waltz is often compared to the reigning queen of dance theater, Pina Bausch. But Waltz would rather critics align her with New Yorks downtown dance scene. Ill do both.
In Conversation
Trisha Brown with Vanessa Manko
The Trisha Brown Dance Company, formed in 1970, celebrated its 35th anniversary season in April with two programs at Lincoln Centers Rose Theater.
Taylor Turns 50
By Vanessa Manko, Lester Tome, and Claudia La RoccoA splendid romp with dancers sprinting diagonals across the stage, arms pumping, Esplanade, in all its gleeful abandon and racing-hearts-of-first-love ebullience, manages to make the simplest of movements running, skipping, walking, jumping virtuosic modern dance, seminal in its declaration that yes, all this too can be dance.
Dancing on the Rail
By Vanessa MankoThe Radio City Rockettes have come out of their 11-month hibernation, and so, too, has the perennial classic The Nutcracker. Beyond their shared month in the spotlight, it would seem that these dance performances have little else in common.
Dancing on the Rail
By Vanessa MankoArgentine tango, Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, more Morrisif you hadnt had enoughand lower Manhattan transformed into a danscape are just some of the performances to see throughout July and August.
Dancing on the Rail
By Vanessa MankoOne could shell out $20 or more to see some of the larger dance names that will be performing in New York City this month.
Kylián: Past, Present, and Future
By Vanessa MankoThough Jirí Kylián stepped down as artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater last year, the companys first New York performance since the change in artistic guardto Anders Hellströmstill bears the fine, astute and graceful imprint of Kyliáns stewardship. In fact, the two programs at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in mid-March were comprised of all Kylián works, with one exceptiona new work by choreographer and artistic director of Swedens Culberg Ballet, Johan Inger.
Dancing on the Rail
By Vanessa MankoSome may find the enigmatic, sometimes academic, and wholly indecipherable titles of downtown dance works annoying.
Of Buds, Blooms and Battments: Stephen Petronio at The Joyce
By Vanessa Manko“Why am I always on a fast train or an airplane?” composer and songwriter Rufus Wainwright muses in his melancholy “Oh What a World,” set to the rhythms of Ravel’s Bolero.
Dancing on the Rail: Body Politics
By Vanessa MankoBill T. Jones, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Donna Uchizono, Eiko & Koma.
Dancing on the Rail: Aprils Lesson in Dance History
By Vanessa MankoTitans of American modern dance rain down over the city this April. Martha Graham, Mark Morris, and Trisha Brown together offer a veritable trip through the pages of dance history.
Dancing on the Rail
By Vanessa MankoAnniversaries are in the air this October. Urban Bush Women, the Brooklyn-based company that presents dance theater based on black women’s experiences, celebrates its 20th anniversary at Danspace Project St. Mark’s (October 810, 8:00 pm).
Dancing on the Rail
By Vanessa MankoThe New York dance world is changing. Anna Kisselgoff, chief dance critic for The New York Times, steps down after 36 years (count ’em, 36!). John Rockwell, former chief rock critic for the Times, will now assume this position of power. The Williamsburg Art neXus (WAX) closes its doors with hopes for a new space in their WAX: Phase II project.
Dancing on the Rail
By Vanessa MankoChoreographers are in the business of experimentation, endlessly searching for new movement vocabularies, fine-tuning and developing a style or merging disciplines in the spirit of collaboration and the blurring of artistic boundaries.