Thursday, July 06, 2006

Why I don't like modern dance

Five of these excerpts of dance reviews come from the new issue of The New Yorker (yes, The New Yorker). One's a fake. Which one?

No Googling allowed.


1) ... "Primate," danced to a score by Philip Hamilton inspired by Indonesian monkey chants, delivers high-wattage jolts with convulsions, crashes, and mimed cannibalism.

2) ... "Streb vs. Gravity" ... involves a motorized winch, a springboard, a waxed floor, a teeter-totter, swinging cinder blocks, a high-tension truck strap used as a tightrope, and a thirty-five-hundred-pound metal hamster wheel.

3) Developed in consultation with geophysicists, the work draws its structure from the layers of the earth--crust, mantle, core. Performers gather in a suspended orb or dance in the dark, captured by heat-sensitive cameras.

4) "The Rite of Spring" answers Stravinsky's score with salsa dancing, which works surprisingly well.

5) That little dance [is] named for a tiny fungus that can shoot its spores eight feet.

6) The audience takes a while to get used to the sight of a three-hundred-fifty-pound man dancing with a seven-pound chihuahua, but when the piece is over, everyone has the same thought: Why hasn't this been done before?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Number 1 or Number 6. If I have to choose then I think number 1.

punkinsmom said...

It's gotta be the monkey one that's fake.

Now give me a banana.

unclewilly said...

Four?

Anonymous said...

I'll go with 4.