Quiggin Posted November 1 Posted November 1 (edited) Brian Seibert delves into the history and construction of the dance "Still/Here" that launched hundreds of discussions on the interface of dance and politics, and weighs the work's virtues and problematic strategies ("Some questions remain about the potentially exploitative inclusion of the volunteers, and whether those questions are cleared away by the metaphor of dancers as the spirit of survival.") Quote Nothing distorts culture like a culture war. Bill T. Jones’s “Still/Here” was the most controversy-generating dance work of the 1990s, but watching a 30th anniversary revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday was a bit like watching Toto draw back the curtain. “Still/Here” is just a dance: a sophisticated, good-looking dance — but one that, removed from the context of its origin and reception, is surprisingly ordinary ... Arlene Croce, the dance critic of The New Yorker, refused to see the work but wrote about it anyway, decrying it (and Jones) as a particularly coercive example of what she labeled victim art. Then came a battle of responses by major cultural figures in opinion essays and letters to the editor. It's interesting for me to read a description of the actual dance after all these years, which sounds less interesting than the works I saw downtown at PS 122, such as those by Ralph Lemon and by John Bernd, who acted out small scaled demonstrations of his everyday process of staying alive while living with AIDS. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/arts/dance/bill-t-jones-still-here-review.html Also had wanted to say that Seibert's account sets Arlene Croce's original non-review in a different light. Edited November 1 by Quiggin
miliosr Posted November 10 Posted November 10 If anyone is interested, we had a long discussion of Arlene Croce's "Discussing the Undiscussable" on the occasion of its 20th anniversary: "Discussing the Undiscussable" - Modern, Contemporary, and Other Dance - Ballet Alert!
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