Spielberg’s West Side Story offers a compelling account of contemporary problems while giving the original plot added detail. Spielberg brings West Side Story down to earth. Robbins and Wise, on the other hand, created magic.
Author - Gay Morris
Gay Morris is a New York based art and dance critic and historian. She is the author of A Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945-1960 (Wesleyan); editor of Moving Words/Re-writing Dance (Routledge); and editor, with Jens Richard Giersdorf, of Choreographies of 21st Century Wars (Oxford University Press). She is a frequent contributor to the website danceviewtimes and for a number of years was a corresponding editor for Art in America.
★★★★✰ This year is Twyla Tharp’s 80th birthday, so to celebrate, she decided to offer a concert and invite some of the country’s starriest dancers to join her...
★★★★✰ Some will argue that the original cast embodied an authentic postmodernism that has been lost. But Dance, as it currently exists, offers an unusual means of observing past and present simultaneously, which, in itself, is rewarding.
Featuring performance by Dorrance Dance, Contra Tiempo, Ballet Hispanico, Brian Brooks / Moving Company, Archie Burnett, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, LaTasha Barnes, STREB Extreme Action and Boston Ballet, Houston Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet appearing under the banner Ballet Coast to Coast.
★★★★★ For this viewer, Brian Brooks’ concert at Jacob’s Pillow provided a powerful reentry to live dance after eighteen months of making do with shadows on screens.