A Mixed Bag at FringeArts

Kali and I went to choreographer Brian Sanders' JUNK's performance of "Hush Now Sweet High Heels and Oak" (I know it doesn't make any sense), part of the Philadelphia FringeArts festival in Center City Philadelphia last night. The capacity crowd was pumped, and the dancers/gymnasts/aerialists gave it their "all," but Kali and I would give JUNK's performance a mixed review. When the performers were dancing, tumbling, and executing some spectacular climbing and rope work, the show soared, but there were a few too many spots that dragged or were utterly confusing (zombie apocalypse in a swamp; what was that all about?). Such unevenness is par for the course for FringeArts, but this was not Brian Sanders' best work. Oh, by the way, the image accompanying this post has been retouched: the dancers, male and female, performed in nothing more than g-strings. Mind you, I'm not complaining...

Shades of Blue

When I took these images yesterday afternoon, I had originally intended to entitle this post "Tawny," but in looking over the images, and others, below, I decided to call it "Shades of Blue" instead.

Kali and I haven't walked in "my" preserve for several weeks because it's been so muddy.  But yesterday Kali didn't have to go to work, the skies were cloudless, and the paths had dried enough so that Kali wouldn't complain about muddy shoes, so we hit the trails for a late afternoon walk.

We've hardly had any snow this winter, so most of the native grasses are still standing tall and beautiful.

Most of the early spring birds have arrived now - especially flocks of Red-winged Blackbirds and a few American Woodcocks.  Just last Sunday, a pair of American Kestrels hovered over the fields in search of rodents hiding in the high grass.  Though we may be in for a snowstorm tomorrow, spring's approach is unmistakable.

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Last weekend (Saturday, February 23), Kali and I drove 2-1/2 hours to Baltimore for the American Craft Council Show at the Baltimore Convention Center.  This is the largest fine art craft show in the country (650 craft artisans), and it was spectacular (as always).  Since Kali and I are in our de-accession stage of life, we only bought one decorative piece for the wall, a piece of jewelry for Kali, and a holiday gift for Kali's boss.  We look at the show as if we were going to a craft museum, since all of the work is of the highest quality.

In the "blue" motif - a detail from "Aspens," an etched and illuminated glass wall sculpture

And, finally, just last Saturday evening, we attended a performance by Parson Dance, one of our favorite contemporary dance companies.  The image below is from the first piece that the company performed, "In the Round" (2012), and it was breathtaking.  Even when the dances weren't as spectacular as "Round," the dancers were so perfect that they elevated the works to high art. Bravisimo!

A "Plague" of Robins

Late last week, I commented on a post by Grizz at his Riverdaze... blog that American Robins (Turdus migratorius) had, so far, failed to strip the tiny fruits from my crabapple tree as they usually do much earlier in the winter.  Well, the major winter storm that buried New England and New York only left three inches of snow here in the northern Piedmont, but it was enough to send the overwintering robins into a feeding frenzy.  As I shoveled the walks and drive on Saturday morning, hordes of robins descended on the crabapple tree and feasted.

Just a few of the dozens of American Robins gorging themselves on crabapples

Winter has been pretty mild so far this year, so the birds have found alternate sources of food in the thickets where they hide.  I suspect that crabapples don't have much fat content, so the overwintering berry eaters prefer other fattier fruits.  But winter's winding down now, and the birds have harvested much of the other available fruit; they must be becoming desperate.

My dependents eat even before I do (but I have admit I brewed coffee first)

A Red-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta candensis).  These northern visitors were more numerous at the beginning of winter, but a few have hung around all season.

A few more snowy images.  This was our first substantial snowfall of the season.

View down to the pond behind my residence

The old-field just beyond my front lawn

My Prius is all flocked up

The east end of my residence, added in 1833 to an existing 1791 house

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British contemporary dance/movement company Motionhouse performed Scattered in Philadelphia on Saturday night. For 70 uninterrupted minutes Kali and I were mesmerized by seven young dancers interacting very, very vigorously with a "half-pipe" curved wall onto which was projected a video exploring water in all its forms. The piece worked so magically well that I honestly expected the performers to be soaking wet after an extended set in which they played on a virtual waterfall. Bravo, Motionhouse!

Pilobolus

Pilobolus sp.

You may have seen Pilobolus featured in an automobile commercial on television.  The troupe of artists, having fashioned themselves into the shape of a car (A Honda or Accura, if I recall), slowly uncoil their expertly intertwined bodies and reveal the construct to have been human origami.

The company, beginning it's 40th anniversary season, was named by one of its co-founders after a fungus (genus Pilobolus) being researched in his father's biophysics laboratory at Dartmouth College, where the group started.

 

Pilobolus was in town last evening beginning a four-day run, and Kali and I went to see them as part of our contemporary dance series.  I’m giving the performance a mixed review.  There were five pieces, and I think that the first and last were the best.  I fell asleep during the third piece, “Duet,” between two women who intimately juxtaposed their bodies for what seemed to be forever, but Kali liked it and my sleepiness may have been partially attributable to the warm auditorium and the fact that I had taken an antihistamine late in the afternoon.

There were two “shadow” pieces in which a translucent screen separated the audience from the backlit performers.  The first was short and fun.  My initial reaction to the second was, “Oh, no!  Not another one!”  But the piece, a sort of animated comic strip, grew on me, especially because the dancers occasionally came from behind the screen and performed in view of the audience.

The last piece, “Redline,” was classic Pilobolus and incredibly intense, energetic dance.  it blew the audience away.

Unfortunately, Pilobolus doesn't always know when to stop.  Too often, once they've made their point with a dance, they expand it until it becomes wearing.  That was cetainly the case with the three longer pieces last evening.  Nevertheless,  Pilobolus continues to explore  new movement paradigms and their programs are never boring.

A Mixed Bag of Dance

Kate Weare's Bright Land

Kali and I attended a contemporary dance performance on Saturday evening featuring two new and relatively small dance companies, Kate Weare and Monica Bill Barnes.  Each company performed one 40-minute-long piece, and each company consisted of four dancers, two women and two men in Weare's company and four women in Barnes'.  Weare's company performed first, offering a composition entitled Bright Land set to a medley of bluegrass revival music.

For the first two-thirds of Bright Land, I was absolutely transfixed, and I imagine that most of the relatively modest audience was, too, because you could have heard a pin drop in silences between the musical pieces.  During this section of Bright Land, all four dancers were on stage at all times, usually dancing ensemble, but sometimes pairing off.  Some of the best parts of the piece showcased the dancers in partnerships marked by surprising, elegant lifts and circlings in service to taut, tango-like dance dynamics.  I found myself thinking, "I could watch these people dance for the rest of the night."

However, as the end of the piece approached, the stage was occupied alternately by only one or the other of the couples, not by all four dancers.  The mysterious electricity generated by the group quickly dissipated for me, so that by the end of the piece I had largely lost interest in what was going on.

Bright Land

Following an intermission, Monica Bill Barnes' company took the stage offering the audience Another Parade.  The dancers all wore turtlenecks and A-line skirts, and used the loose-fitting turtlenecks to tease the audience with reveals of navels and shoulders.  It was all witty, good-natured, tongue-in-cheek fun, but it just didn't hold my attention or interest.  The moves finally became too repetitive and predictable.  The evening culminated with the dancers impressing four hapless audience members to join them onstage, and all gave it a go, but what's the point of such silliness?

Monica Bill Barnes' Another Parade

In terms of full and honest disclosure, I have to report that Kali found the entire evening extremely compelling, and she couldn't understand why I didn't agree.  I told her that the evening was hardly a waste of time - I intensely enjoyed a quarter of the performance - but she took that to mean that I didn't appreciate the show, and that I'm too uptight.  Our local newspaper also gave the performance a glowing review.  I guess I am just too uptight.

Another Parade

Movement Weekend

Great dance weekend.  Saturday night, a new contemporary dance company, Keigwin + Company, was in town performing their Elements cycle of dances related to water, fire, earth and wind.  Larry Keigwin choreographed 15 pieces with new moves, imaginative costuming, interesting music, and lots of humor and O'Henry-esque surprises.  The dancers gave it their all, and the audience (and I) clearly appreciated their efforts.  You know a company's done a great job if you leave the theater energized and motivated to move more and get into better shape yourself.

Brian Sanders / "Urban Scuba"

Then, Sunday afternoon, it was back downtown for a matinee of contemporary dance and physical theater created by Philadelphian Brian Sanders in his 18-3/4 Anniversary Season of JUNK.  Sander's company uses found objects -  ladders, bicycles, and trash cans -  as well as carefully fabricated objects incorporated into dances and movement pieces.  JUNK was a retrospective of 18 pieces gleaned from Sanders' 18-3/4 years of producing dance, and nearly all were spectacular.  The dancers were in perfect physical condition and incredibly strong: I'm heading to the gym!

"Urban Scuba"

 

Parsons Dance / Remember Me

David Parson's dance company, Parsons Dance, was in town for four performances last weekend.  The program consisted of two works.  The first was one of Parsons's signature dances, Caught, which never fails to elicit a gasp out of newcomers and heartfelt admiration from those of us who have seen the work performed several times.  The dance, a solo, involves a dancer moving around a blackened stage fleetingly illuminated by stobe lights so that the dancer appears to be flying.  It's magic.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said of the second piece, Remember Me.  Critics have savaged this piece, but audiences generally love it.  I went into the performance with an open mind, ready to prove the snobby New York dance establishment wrong.  Unfortunately, the critics did get it right (in the opinion of Kali, several other aficionados, and me who talked after the performance).

Remember Me is a collaboration between Parsons Dance and the East Village Opera Company, which supplied two singers for the endeavor.  The work consists of a simple romantic love triangle played out to the tune of thirteen of the most famous operatic arias performed live on stage.  But, did the producers use the arias as written?  Oh, no; instead, they pumped them up with near-ear splitting rock guitar background music.  Then Parsons's dancers performed the story, which was insultingly shallow and maudlin.  Woman wooded by two men rebuffs Man A, who then proceeds to rape her.  When Man B finds out about the woman's soiled past he, in turn, rebuffs her, and she proceeds to die of a broken heart.  Then, she is resurrected and lives happily ever after with Man B.  Maybe this kind of thing would have worked in the Middle Ages or at the hands of a master like Shakespeare, but contemporary audiences are just a little bit too cynical to buy this.  Or, maybe not, since it's a popular hit.  DVDs of the performance were completely sold out, and a quick trip to NYC to restock resulted in another sellout.

The dancers certainly couldn't be faulted.  They were expert and performed flawlessly and tirelessly, as they always do. Parson Dance is among the best companies on the contemporary dance scene.  That's why a piece like Remember Me was so disappointing.   

Phantasmagoria and More by Paul Taylor

One of our favorite contemporary dance ensembles, the Paul Taylor Dance Company, performed on Saturday evening.  The evening featured two revivals and a new work, Phantasmagoria, which proved to be a disappointment.

Phantasmagoria, first performed at Wolf Trap this summer, was the second of the three pieces.  The music, by "anonymous Renaissance composers," was spiked with modern percussive sounds.  Taylor based the fragmented, satirical work on Pieter Bruegel the Elder's earthy peasant painting The Wedding Dance.  Then, as if to take us through the history and geography of dance, he introduced an Indian "Adam and Eve" garbed in stereotypical gaudy costuming wielding a cheesy bright green plush snake.  An Irish step dancer came clogging out to bagpipes.  A nun confiscated the plush snake and found a lewd use for it.  And, finally, a leper-like creature infected the other dancers with the plague.  This could have been a rollicking piece had the preliminaries been strong enough to support a real send-up with a clear through line but, alas, none of those fell into place.

The last piece, Cloven Kingdom, was the program's most coherent.  Although created in 1976, it was not as dated-looking as the as the opener, 1981's Arden Court, a bare-footed contemporary ballet.  The women in Cloven Kingdom danced in long, stretchy, elegant gowns which seemed to hearken back to Martha Graham's oeuvre.  By this third piece, the troupe had found its footing as the dancing--especially by the men in tuxedos--was superb.

Artsy Weekend

Lucinda Childs' Dance (1979), with film by Sol LeWitt and music by Philip Glass

My wife and I had an artsy weekend. We started on Saturday morning with a 6-mile circumambulation of Lake Galena, a water supply reservoir and recreational area in Peace Valley County Park near Doylestown, Buck County, Pennsylvania. The walk is fairly boring; most of it is along the lakeshore though developed picnicking, boating, and fishing areas or along the crest of the earthen fill dam that holds back the waters of Neshaminy Creek to create the lake. We walk the lake almost solely for exercise.

Canoes brought ashore at Lake Galena

Some parts of the trail near the upper end of the lake pass through young woodlands and old fields, and are therefore more enjoyable. At the very upper end, where Neshaminy Creek enters the lake, an old highway bridge (closed to traffic) spans the creek. There, we joined a small crowd watching a big fat Northern Water Snake lolling in the warm shallows. A smaller specimen investigated riparian vegetation a short distance away. That's where I found out that I had failed to recharge my camera battery...

After our walk, we headed into Doylestown proper for the community's annual arts festival. We're art festival junkies, and this was B-quality work at best--lots of vendors with lots of acceptable work but nothing exciting, innovative, or of the best quality--with the exception of a woman who made beautiful and inventive women's coats. We did buy a quirky birdhouse that we'll mount on an old snag outside our house next spring.
Sunday we got a gentle rain in the morning--not enough to really relieve the terrible dryness we're experiencing, but better than nothing. It was our first rain in three weeks, and it let up by noon, though the day stayed cloudy and cool.

In the afternoon, we went into central Philadelphia to see a performance of Dance, a revival of a dance by choreographer Lucinda Childs that debuted in 1979. The work was part of the Live Arts/Philly Fringe Festival that's in full swing. The festival endeavors to present avant-garde and unusual performance pieces. Dance certainly was avant-garde when it was first performed; American and European audiences booed it off the stage. But, contemporary dance has evolved considerably since 1979, and the 1-hour piece now just feels a bit outdated.

The most interesting aspect of the piece was the juxtaposing of live dancers with film of dancers projected onto an upstage scrim. The filmed dancers and the live dancers, all attired in stark white outfits, performed exactly the same steps at the same time. It was fascinating to watch.

The piece was set to a score that choreographer Childs commissioned from Philip Glass, the minimalist contemporary composer. We never want to hear another piece of music by Philip Glass ever again. Glass's music is highly--highly--repetitive, almost to the point of monotony. My wife asked if I remembered that the U.S. Army had tried to get rid of Manuel Noriega in Panama by blasting him with incessant loud rock music; she said they made a mistake--they should have used Phillip Glass's music! Of course, it might have driven him insane, first. There were so few changes in the music that I don't know what cues the magnificent dancers were using to synchronize their movements.

Bad Boys of Dance

Rasta Thomas' Bad Boys of Dance

Think dance isn't manly? Most male dancers have ripped, highly muscular bodies, the strength and power of a top athlete, and the stage presence of an actor. Rasta Thomas' Bad Boys of Dance (Saturday evening) drove home those points by skipping the tights, ballet slippers and classical music. The troupe of six guys, including artistic director Thomas, danced in T-shirts or bare-chested, in tight jeans or black pants. They wore jazz shoes or no shoes. They danced primarily to rock music.

And they showed off--big time. They pumped up the volume and sailed through the air in grand jetes. They lifted a leg high above their heads, and turned and turned in pirouettes until the rotations slowed down naturally, then ended in a split jump.

They mixed a little tap, some hip-hop, touches of jazz, and quite a lot of acrobatics--aerials and amazing handsprings. But mostly the dance was strong and confident.

Thomas' wife, Adrienne Canterna-Thomas, was a guest artist, and the pieces during which she joined the boys were some of the more interesting of the evening.

During some of the group pieces, the dancers got so involved with trying to pump up the audience that the performance devolved from concert dance into something more like an aerobics class. The strongest sections were solos and the more carefully choreographed group numbers.

In the end, the Bad Boys of Dance offered more tricks than artistry. But they were also a heck of a lot of fun!

STREB in Performance

"Airlines" from Elizabeth Streb's Brave

Although we had ticket's to the STREB's newest work called Brave on Saturday evening, an impending snowstorm along the East Coast led us to exchange our tickets for last night's performance (February 4). What a show!

Not exactly dance, and not exactly Cirque du Soleil, Elizabeth Streb (who was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Award in 1997) calls her company's performances Extreme Action Events. We were treated to 10 such Action Events last night executed by eight incredibly athletic Actioneers.

Some of the Actioneers

The best Action Events included "Polar Wander"during which the Actioneers interacted with an I-beam suspended mid-length from a steel cable and set awhirl, "Airlines" in which the Actioneers slam danced on a two-part concentrically-arranged circular stage that rotated in opposite directions, and the finale, "Super Position," that included a finely-balanced hamster wheel for playful adults. I'm sure I would have killed myself if I had tried it, but the Actioneers made the movement look so effortless and fun.

"Super Position"

There were only two klinkers out of the ten Action Events: "Falling" in which the Actioneers fell face first from increasingly greater heights onto thick foam pads (intimidating but not inspired), and "Robot" in which choreographer Streb accompanied a foot-tall robot onto stage while the robot executed some amazingly complex movements (unfortunately, the robot kept tipping over on its back).

"Robot"

This has been the finest series of dance performances I have had the opportunity to enjoy in the ten years that we've had this subscription series. I hope the rest of the season will be comparable.

Rivernorth Chicago Dance Company: Superb, As Always

Rivernorth Chicago dancers Cassandra Porter, Christian Denice, and Hanna Brictson in Tuscan Rift

Rivernorth Chicago came to town this week and gave a performance that affirmed my contention that this company is among the (if not the) most consistently inventive, delightful, and technically skilled contemporary dance companies performing today. The entire evening of seven dances was wonderful (with maybe one exception--Ella--danced to an energetic scat medley by Ella Fitzgerald), but two stood out above the rest: the first dance, Evolution of a Dream (2009), and the fourth, Forbidden Boundaries (2009).

Evolution of a Dream was a wee bit too frenetic and spastic for my anal-retentive demeanor, but the music was great, the energy was intense, and dancers were spot on. My wife turned to me after the applause died down and asked, "How are they going to top that?"

Well, they topped it with Forbidden Boundaries, a high point in a many splendored evening. The dancers were clad in sheer white blouses over white Speedo-tight shorts and halter tops. The bodies were perfect--especially that of Christian Denise (pictured above), who is incredibly well built but yet almost impossibly flexible. The dancers' blouses billowed like clouds that instantly transformed into restraints as partners yanked the blouses over the heads and shoulders of the dancers or bound their arms with the stretched sleeves. The piece built to a dazzling climax as the dancers finally rejected their restraints and boundaries, casting them onto the floor

I've seen Rivernorth Chicago three times before and have never been disappointed. The standing ovation they received on Saturday evening was more than well deserved.

Fantastic Arts Weekend

Doug Elkins and Friends performing Fraulein Maria

Choreographer Doug Elkins assembled a group of 13 dancers and re-imagined The Sound of Music as the spectacular Fraulein Maria, a 70-minute movement extravaganza that we attended Saturday evening. Excerpting the best music from the film, he developed dance set pieces to complement the music. The show verged on vaudeville, and it could very easily have stepped over that threshold. But in Elkins's skilled hands, it never took that fatal trip. Instead, most of the dances were humorous (but not slapstick) takes on the film music--truly inspired and very well performed by the "friends." A tall brunette female dancer and a well-built black male dancer (who was one of three Fraulein Marias in the show) were particularly skilled and masterful (they appear on the right and left, respectively, in the image above). Though an absolutely frenetic--nearly spastic--hip-hop version of "Climb Every Mountain" was the show stopper at the performance that I attended, I actually thought that the dance conceived for "Do, Re, Mi" was far more powerful, interesting and entertaining; it built and built in intensity until reaching its near-orgasmic finale. Bravo!

Fraulein Maria has been preformed fairly frequently in New York since it was created in 2006, and will be preformed there again this winter. I can understand why it keeps getting reprised. It's fun, engaging, and will surely become a milestone in the contemporary dance repertoire.
Also this weekend, we attended the 33rd-annual Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in central Philadelphia. This is a high-end show (i.e., expensive [admission was $15 per person to benefit the art Museum] ) with 193 top-notch artisans. Of course, the pieces were all highest quality, and priced accordingly. We really didn't expect to buy anything; attending the show is equivalent to visiting a fine museum. Nevertheless, my wife did purchase a maroon cashmere scarf ($148) to keep her neck warm during the upcoming cold weather.

In evaluating the show afterward, both of us agreed that we enjoy the huge but slightly more accessible American Craft Council show in Baltimore held at the end of February each year.

After we left the show, we went to Philadelphia's famous Reading Terminal Market, a huge space filled with butchers, bakers, and produce vendors, plus a lot of small restaurants. We had dinner at a creperie there--an interesting and out of the ordinary meal, for a change.

Motion without Passion: BodyVox

Sure enough , it poured--I'm talking deluged--last Saturday night. I predicted in my last post that rain forecast for the weekend would bring down the leaves right at the peak of their color. Well, I was wrong about bringing down the leaves (at least not all of them; there's still a lot of attractive foliage on the trees), but it sure as hell rained on Saturday evening, just as we were headed to see a performance by the Portland, Oregon-based BodyVox contemporary dance company. By the time we arrived at the theater, the torrent had slackened to moderate wind-driven showers, but en route we had to ford innumerable raging creeks and pond-sized puddles in the roadways where the storm drains couldn't handle the volume of water--and all for a fairly mediocre evening of dance. Perhaps, given the weather, it was fitting that BodyVox was performing its extended work called "Water Bodies." Each dance comprising the work ostensibly had a water-related theme, though the connection was tenuous in some of the compositions.

The compositions were, without exception, clever. Many were accompanied by video projected on a screen behind the dancers. A few pieces were exclusively video footage of dances performed in a swimming pool.

Unfortunately, the performers seemed to be going through the motions mechanically rather than dancing; there was no joy--or, if the dancers were enjoying the movement, they certainly didn't communicate it very effectively to the audience. It's not that the dancers were wooden or unskilled; it was more that the choreography was at fault. Furthermore, the music was an irritant; it was too loud (don't I sound like an old guy?), cacophonous, and uninspired. It seems to me that when I first started attending contemporary dance performances, the music often was minimalist dissonant bangs and shrieks, but more recently choreographers have chosen more appealing music. BodyVox is trapped back in the Dark Ages of dissonance. In fact, one of the pieces I enjoyed the most related to doomed couples dancing on the deck of the Titanic; it was set to Jean Sibelius's Valse Triste.

Probably the best piece of the evening was performed by one of the co-artistic directors and founders, Jamey Hampton. A bathtub rolled onto stage, and Hampton (who had been hidden inside the tub) stood up in the tub. A soundtrack began that sounded like dripping water, and the dripping came faster and faster. Gradually, the dripping morphed into dance music and Hampton boogie-oogie-oogied in the tub. It was great fun, very creative, and he had some wonderful dance moves.

The overall performance lasted less than two hours. I commented to my wife that the evening was short (compared to that offered by some other damce companies). Her response? "Thank goodness." I agreed.

Daniel Kirk, sexiest of the BodyVox performers

Tapdancing to Eleanor Rigby?

The stage lights went dark, then came back up in deep crimson. Each of the eight dancers, dressed in a tux, stood on stage riveted by a spot. Then the music came up--loud--the unmistakable intro to Eleanor Rigby. So it began: three minutes of complete awe and bliss, the full company of Thank you, Gregory, tap dancing to Eleanor Rigby Sound ridiculous, corny, silly? Hardly! This was no polite Ginger Rogers/Fred Astair duet; this was hard-charging, stage-stomping, sweat-dripping syncopated tap dancing, and it was great! I wanted to see it again and again.

Thank you, Gregory, which I saw last Friday evening, was conceived as a tribute to Gregory Hines, who died six years ago. It was that, and so much more: a cavalcade of tap dancing from the first recorded images to its incarnation on the contemporary stage presented by an amazingly talented cast of eight dancers, four of each sex. Plus, Maurice Hines, Gregory's brother and longtime dance partner, who is a showman par excellence.

Keep your eyes and ears open; if the show comes anywhere near you, GO!

Doug Varone stumbles

My wife and I went to a performance by Doug Varone and Dancers last week. We both like contemporary dance a great deal and have a season subscription to a contemporary dance series in our city, so you'll be hearing more about dance as the season goes along. Varone's company performed four dances, but only the first was worth watching. Lux, with music by Philip Glass, premiered in 2006. It started a bit slow with a solo by Eddie Taketa, but it gradually built as the intensity of the music built as well, with more and more dancers on stage until the entire company of eight was performing as an ensemble. The dancing was inspired, and the music was engaging. A winner! Unfortunately, we should have gone home after the first dance. The second piece was a duet called Home which portrayed the trials and tribulations of a relationship; wow, that was insighful. Other audience members with whom we spoke during the intermission seemed to agree that the work was tired, tedious and trite.

After the intermission, Paul Verone danced a duet with Daniel Charon called Polonaise #44. The music was an unaccompanied piano work of the same name by Chopin. I might be labeling myself a boor here, but I don't much like unaccompanied piano music. (When I was in graudate school, my advisor used to listen to classical music in his office next to mine from sunup to sundown, and the plink, plink, plink of unaccompanied piano got old really fast. It hasn't improved with age.) I thought that the piece looked a lot like improv and, while most of our fellow audience members thought it better than Home, that wasn't saying much. The evening closed with another full-company ensemble piece called, enigmatically, Boats Leaving. I was unable to engage with this dance, either. I found myself paying attention for a while, only to discover that I had drifted off; this happened repeatedly. My wife reported the same reaction.

Varone addressed the audience during the intermission. He probably shouldn't have. He told us more than we wanted to know, and he tried to explain his motivation for creating Boats Leaving. For the life of me, I didn't see how his motivation translated into the dance. Varone does a lot of work choreographing for opera and stage. Those influences definitely inform his dance pieces, which are stagey and posed. Based on Lux, Varone can definitely engage his audience, but you'd never know it from the final three pieces.

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It's been unseasonably cold for the last several weeks. It snowed a bit on Saturday evening, and Sunday was really cold and windy. One of the nice things about the arrival of winter, though, is that the sunrises and sunsets have been spectacular. The sky at sunrise generally has had a few clouds that glow with brilliant orange on the eastern horizon, and the higher clouds reflect pink hues, all surrounded by deep blue. In the evenings, the clouds are mostly gone, and the red sunsets grade seemlessly up to the zenith from red to deep indigo flecked with early stars.