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Twyla Tharp's 50th

11/28/2015

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Preludes and Fugues, photo by Sharon Bradford
I once read that the urge to dance necessarily comes from a place of joy. The way a dog shimmies when it is excited to see its owner or the way a baby laughs while kicking its arms and legs are examples of an innate drive to move in euphoric moments. The fact that weddings involve dancing and funerals mostly involve sitting (today that is—in the Ancient world the Egyptians and other peoples staged funerals as celebratory rebirth ceremonies with lots of dancing) would also support this claim. Intuitively, this evolutionary biology theory seems plausible, for I certainly never feel like dancing when I’m sick or depressed.

Twyla Tharp seems to understand this idea, and her propensity for shimmying and shaking feels right so much of the time—like when she uses jerky phrases to undercut the serious perfection of music like Bach’s, as she does in her new piece Preludes and Fugues, to excerpts from his Well-Tempered Clavier I and II which I saw at the David H. Koch Theater last weekend. The messy humanness of these interpolated tics marries so well with the sanctity of the Bach—music that is so beautiful it hardly seems like it could be man-made.  How can one not spasmodically rejoice that something so perfect exists? Great music (and great art in any form) can indeed tingle the spine and make one involuntarily shiver.  

Preludes and Fugues was one of four new pieces Tharp made for her 50th Anniversary Tour. The troupe performed for ten weeks all across the country, but the Koch Theater—its final stop—could not be a more perfect setting for the program. The choreographic bookends which opened each half of the show, First Fanfare and Second Fanfare (to annunciatory brass compositions by John Zorn), echoed the Fanfare for a New Theater which Igor Stravinsky created for the inauguration of the building in 1964. In fact, the massive chandelier which hangs over the auditorium is meant to evoke

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Adventures in Pop Culture

11/7/2015

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Katy Perry with Olivia Boisson, Jenelle Manzi, me, and Gretchen Smith
I participated in a very unusual gig this week—dancing back-up for Katy Perry at the David Lynch Foundation benefit for Transcendental Meditation at Carnegie Hall.  The experience was as trippy as it sounds. But I could certainly get behind the cause: I do a lot of yoga and I do believe in the power of meditation. Although I don’t know how to “TM” (it was used as a verb by all of the performers) I would be interested to learn. Also, I love Twin Peaks!

When Maria Kowroski and Martin Harvey—the dance world’s most beautiful couple and imminent parents-to-be—asked me to participate in the number they were choreographing for Katy I did not know what to expect, but I said yes in a heartbeat.  I was thrilled to be a part of their first choreographic endeavor.  And I am of course a big fan of Katy Perry’s music (who isn’t?) and also of her tongue-in-cheek humor: see the “California Gurls” video, etc.

My boyfriend and I throw an annual Super Bowl party, and I must have replayed Katy Perry’s performance five times in a row last year, much to the dismay of the die-hard football fans in attendance.  I was secretly hoping to be cast as the infamous Left Shark for the Carnegie Hall 

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    Faye Arthurs
    - Faye Arthurs

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