6 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020
ILLUSTRATION BY ELENI KALORKOTIThere may be no greater balm for the spirit than the ballets of the nine-
teenth-century Danish choreographer August Bournonville. As Bournonville
wrote of his philosophy in his “Choreographic Credo,” “Dance is essentially
an expression of joy.” His 1842 ballet, “Napoli,” inspired by his travels to the
southern Italian city the year before, is a perfect example: a loving portrait
of a place teeming with life, in which fishermen ply their wares on the town
square, a street singer belts out a tune, and, in the end, everyone dances. The
music includes snatches of Neapolitan songs and “The Barber of Seville.”
The ballet is a jewel in the repertoire of the Royal Danish Ballet, which is
currently streaming a recording of the piece on its Web site. The staging, from
the 2013-14 season, is an update by the company’s director, Nikolaj Hübbe,
who moved the action to the nineteen-fifties and added neorealist touches.
Despite some over-the-top moments—particularly in the second act—it still
has much to offer, principally the crisp, detailed mime and dancing, and the
dashing presence of the young Danish star Alban Lendorf.—Marina HarssSTREAMING BALLET
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DANCE
Abrons Arts Center
This Lower East Side theatre has postponed
its spring season, but it has made work from
previous seasons available on Vimeo. Footage of
“Let ‘im Move You: This Is a Formation,” from
2019, is a glimpse, for anybody who needs one,
of what isn’t possible under social isolation. The
production—part of a series by jumatatu m.
poe and Jermone Donte Beacham that explores
J-Sette, a dance form developed by majorettes
in historically black colleges and adopted by
queer black men—is loose and convivial, as
much party as performance. Via a mingling
camera, viewers can soak in the atmosphere or
skip to the call-and-response moves and dance
at home.—Brian Seibert
Alvin Ailey
Unable to perform in public, the amazing
dancers of Alvin Ailey American Dance The-
atre haven’t stopped inspiring audiences.
They’ve been filming themselves dancing,
separate and isolated wherever they might
be, and then combining the footage in short
videos on Instagram. The company has also
started streaming full-length performances,
for limited periods, on its Web site. The of-
ferings—which started, naturally, with “Rev-
elations”—continue, on April 9, with Judith
Jamison’s “Divining.” In the coming weeks,
look for Camille A. Brown’s grief-defying
“City of Rain” and, especially, Rennie Harris’s
“Lazarus,” whose mix of painful searching and
pleasure in the groove should feel even more
potent now.—B.S.NYTB / Chamberworks
The company formerly known as New York
Theatre Ballet is one of the few places you
can see the work of the twentieth-century
British choreographer Antony Tudor these
days. Rigorous and taut, these ballets are all
the more intense for the contained manner in
which they are performed. The company has
put several of them online, including “Dark
Elegies” and “Jardin aux Lilas,” both from the1
PODCASTS“Dead Eyes”
Delight can come from unexpected places,
including this series from the character actor
and U.C.B. stalwart Connor Ratliff, known for
his mind-bending Twitter mega-threads (on
the œuvre of Elvis Costello, say, or of Porky
Pig) and for such roles as Chester, the creepy
Catskills grifter on “The Marvelous Mrs. Mai-
sel.” In the podcast, Ratliff delves into, as he
puts it, “a deeply unimportant question that has
haunted me for nearly twenty years”: Why did
Tom Hanks fire Ratliff from a small speaking
role in the 2001 miniseries “Band of Brothers”?
(Hint: see podcast title.) In probing themes
of opportunity, rejection, and turning failure
into art, Ratliff and his guests (including Jon
Hamm, Rian Johnson, and Aimee Mann) man-
age a level of entertainment and tonal nuance
that is, frankly, surprising, while fondly con-
necting those themes to Hanksian touchstones
such as “That Thing You Do!” and David S.
Pumpkins.—Sarah Larson“Floodlines”
Hosted and reported by Vann R. NewkirkII,
this masterly new series from The Atlantic,
released just as our full-on national pan-
demic panic began, chronicles another story
of American catastrophe and mismanage-
ment—post-Katrina New Orleans, after the
levees broke. We hear the voices of people
who lived through it, such as Alice Craft-
Kerney, a nurse at Charity Hospital, and Fred
Johnson, who took refuge in the Hyatt Hotel
and got deputized to protect it. (“The level
of fear that was in that room, I was trying
not to visualize it,” he says.) The series yields
fresh insights about institutional racism, con-
temporary media, and upended norms while
avoiding the stylistic clichés of both investi-
gative podcasts and New Orleans narratives,
and Newkirk, a warm and wise presence,
deftly balances the personable (Johnson, he
says, “has no fear of the patterned shirt”) and
the serious.—S.L.1
MUSICDJ Harvey: “Live at Rumors”
HOUSE One of the d.j.s whose career path was set
during the London acid-house explosion of the
late eighties, DJ Harvey is a master at moving
between tracks in such a logical manner that
his sets can feel like long exhalations. “Live at
Rumors”—a two-and-a-half-hour mix recorded
this past May, at a Los Angeles block party—
was recently made available on Bandcamp for
a dollar (the proceeds will be donated to coro-
navirus relief). His selections are heavy on dubnineteen-thirties. “Dark Elegies” is an exposi-
tion of communal grief—a timely theme—set
to Mahler’s song cycle “Kindertotenlieder.” In
“Jardin aux Lilas,” four people are caught in a
quadrangle of impossible love during a rather
gloomy afternoon garden party. The dancers
of this New York-based chamber company
perform the works—which can be viewed on
Vimeo—with bracing sincerity.—Marina Harss