6 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
ILLUSTRATION BY DROR COHEN
The organizers of the Kaatsbaan Summer Festival have taken advantage
of the wide-open space at their disposal—a hundred-and-fifty-three-
acre property in Tivoli, New York—and their proximity to the city to
create an outdoor summer dance festival, a rarity in 2020. Every weekend
until the end of September, the festival presents a half-hour show for a
socially distant, masked audience of up to fifty. Week three (Aug. 15-16)
is hosted by Christopher Wheeldon, who directed and choreographed
“An American in Paris.” For the occasion, Robert Fairchild (the star of
that show) and Chris Jarosz perform Wheeldon’s moody pas de deux
“Us.” Lloyd Knight, one of the festival’s artistic advisers—and one of the
most striking dancers in the Martha Graham Dance Company—has
co-created a duet with Tamisha Guy, who dances with the company
A.I.M. And the tapper Claudia Rahardjanoto performs a solo. Tickets are
free, but registration is required. It’s well worth the drive.—Marina HarssOUTDOORDANCE
1
DANCE
Battery Dance Festival
Broadcast on YouTube this year, rather than set
in a park with a view of New York Harbor, the
festival, Aug. 14-22, remains impressively ro-
bust, diverse, and international, with fifty-two
works, twenty-eight of which are premières.
Each evening has a different theme, includ-
ing dances from Africa, the Middle East, or
Europe; female choreographers; Black voices.
The lineup for the Indian-dance program, on
Aug. 15, looks especially stellar, boasting the
likes of Bijayini Satpathy, Kapila Venu, and
Aakash Odedra.—Brian Seibert (batterydance.
org/battery-dance-festival)
Drive East 2020: Sanctuary
One of the (few) advantages of watching dance
on a screen is that you can see performances that
take place far, far away. Normally, this excellent
festival of Indian dance brings dancers from India
to New York, but this year (Aug. 9-16) the virtual
format takes the viewer to the dancers, who are
in Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi, and Assam, as well
as San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. As
a result, the offerings are especially varied. On
Aug. 13, at 6 p.m., Anwesa Mahanta, in Assam,
performs sattriya dance, a style developed by
monks as a form of devotion to Krishna. The
broadcasts, which are all live and ticketed, will
be shown only once. Dancers and musicians need
to eat, too.—Marina Harss (driveeast.org/tickets)SF Ballet @ Home
San Francisco Ballet’s latest virtual offering,
premièring on Aug. 13 on the company’s so-
cial-media channels, is “Dance of Dreams,” a
film directed by Benjamin Millepied. Lasting
around six minutes, it’s short but sumptuous.
The music is lush—“Scène d’Amour,” from Ber-
nard Herrmann’s score for “Vertigo,” recorded
remotely by members of the ballet’s orchestra.
Four well-known choreographers—Justin Peck,
Dwight Rhoden, Janie Taylor, and ChristopherWheeldon—contribute a distinctive solo or duet,
which principal dancers and soloists perform
with a sense of release. Yet the attention stealers
are the tourist-brochure settings: the sea cliffs
of Sausalito, the fluted columns of the Palace of
Fine Arts, the Golden Gate Bridge in fog.—B.S.
(sfballet.org/sf-ballet-home)Urban Bush Women
The Joyce Theatre streams Urban Bush Wom-
en’s “Women’s Resistance,” Aug. 13-21. The
eleven-minute segment—an excerpt from “Les
écailles de la mémoire” (“The scales of mem-
ory”), a 2008 collaboration between the group’s
founding artistic director, Jawole Willa Jo Zol-
lar, and the Senegalese matriarch of contempo-
rary African dance, Germaine Acogny—offers
exactly what its stand-alone title advertises. In a
performance filmed at the Joyce in January, the
company’s powerful women face off against an
unseen aggressor, punching, kicking, leaping,
and sitting into what looks like a martial form
of the twist.—B.S. (joyce.org/joycestream)“Virtual Works & Process”
Since April, Works & Process Artists has com-
missioned dozens of short videos from illus-
trious dancers and choreographers, all created
while social distancing. This week’s additions
feature couples. The New York City Ballet
principal dancers Adrian Danchig-Waring and
Joseph Gordon offer a retro music video for a
synth-pop song by the duo HIPS, in which lan-
guid bed-and-bath shots build to bravura moves
en plein air. Alejandro Cerrudo and Ana Lopez
make witty use of cinematic reverse motion:
tissue paper, dancing to Bach, lands on faces or
between kissing lips. That’s cute, but not quite
as adorable and affecting as a video released
earlier this month by another City Ballet couple,
Ashley Laracey and Troy Schumacher. Theirs
is a sped-up day in the life of dancers at home
with infant twins.—B.S. (worksandprocess.org)1
MUSICBang on a Can Marathon
CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL Earlier this month, the
New York City composers collective Bang on a
Can undertook, eagerly and cautiously, live per-
formances in the presence of an audience, on the
spacious grounds of the Massachusetts Museum
of Contemporary Art. Now it returns with fresh
vigor to the live-streaming platform that it has
adopted throughout the pandemic. The group’s
latest online marathon, its third, features a dis-
tinguished phalanx of artists, including Jeremy
Denk, Oliver Lake, Shara Nova, and Tyondai
Braxton. Scattered throughout the six-hour
concert are no fewer than eleven newly commis-
sioned pieces receiving their world premières.
The event is presented free of charge; donations
are encouraged.—Steve Smith (Aug. 16, from 3 to
9, at marathon2020.bangonacan.org.)Bard SummerScape:
“Upstreaming”
OPERA Known for presenting fringe pieces loosely
tethered to mainstream opera history, Bard Sum-
merScape has a way of making every obscure
revival feel interesting and urgent. Having scut-officious and satirical. Raque Ford’s gestural
paintings on translucent polypropylene are sus-
pended from the ceiling by chains; Joel Dean’s
alphabet-themed symbolist canvases convey a
strangely ghastly yet whimsical realm. Guada-
lupe Maravilla’s shrinelike mixed-media sculp-
ture, titled “Disease Thrower #4,” which merges
references to pre-colonial Central American
rituals and personal mythology, is the show’s
immersive climax.—J.F. (ppowgallery.com)