12 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL SALMIERI
If someone turned “The Breakfast Club” into a dance for four women, it
might look like Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s “Rosas Danst Rosas.” Clad
in gray, with sleeves that slip provocatively from their shoulders, the women
squirm, thrash their hair, pull at their clothes, or create elegant loop-the-
loops, now and then smiling slyly at private thoughts. The piece, created
in 1983, was only De Keersmaeker’s third, but its mix of formal rigor,
coiled energy, and pugnacity instantly struck a nerve. That combination is
still essential to De Keersmaeker’s style, though over the years it has lost
some of its adolescent “bad girl” edge. Members of her Brussels-based
company, Rosas, perform this classic of eighties post-minimalism at New
York Live Arts, Oct. 1-5, preceded, Sept. 24-28, by her 1982 piece, “Fase,
Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich.”—Marina HarssCONTEMPORARYDANCE
SITI Company and STREB
Alexander Kasser Theatre
OUT OF TOWN Collaborating for the first time, the
physical-stunt choreographer Elizabeth Streb and
the theatre director Anne Bogart find common
ground in “Falling & Loving.” The production,
premièring at Peak Performances, in Montclair,
New Jersey, combines six actors from SITI Com-
pany and six dancer-athletes from the STREB
Extreme Action Company. As always with Streb,
there are contraptions: bowling balls swinging
dangerously on strings; a Guck Machine, con-
ceived by Streb, that drops water, sand, confetti,
and more. But, this time, there are also words to
give the mess some meaning—love sonnets and
other phrases, by Charles Mee, that hymn the cy-
clical nature of love.—Brian Seibert (Sept. 24-29.)
Germaine Acogny
La MaMa
In “Somewhere at the Beginning,” the Senega-
lese matriarch of contemporary dance Germaine
Acogny, now in her mid-seventies, puts her ori-
gins under pressure. This multimedia-enhanced
solo, created by Acogny and the director Mikaël
Serre and presented as part of the Crossing the
Line Festival, is a kind of argument with her
father, who was a colonial administrator for
the French, and a pledge of kinship with one of
her grandmothers, a Yoruba priestess she never
met. Acogny also channels Medea, telling us that
the pillows she holds are her children and then
ripping those pillows apart.—B.S. (Sept. 26-28.)Ballet West
Guggenheim Museum
In 1924, the young George Balanchine left Russia,
never to return. Once in Europe, he was scooped
up by the enterprising Sergei Diaghilev for the
Ballets Russes. Balanchine’s very first assignment
was to re-choreograph an existing work called “Le
Chant du Rossignol,” based on a Hans Christian
Andersen tale. Dance being an ephemeral art, the
steps to “Le Chant” were eventually forgotten.
Enter the dance detectives Millicent Hodson
and Kenneth Archer, who, in 1999, brought a ver-
sion of it back to life, reconstructing it through
archival research. Until now, it has never been
seen in the U.S. At the Guggenheim’s “Works &
Process,” ahead of the work’s American première,
by Ballet West, a group of dancers from the com-
pany perform excerpts, and Hodson, Archer, and
the historian Lynn Garafola discuss the process
of reviving lost choreography.—M.H. (Sept. 29.)Dance Theatre of Harlem
Guggenheim Museum
Although this beloved troupe was founded in
1969, it didn’t make its official New York début1
A RT
“Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’:
The Untold Story”
Guggenheim Museum
This small but timely and often surprising pow-
erhouse of a historical show is pegged to a not
very good scrap of painting by a stardusted
name. The exhibition includes photographs,
documents, and art works relating to the death,
on September 28, 1983, of Michael Stewart, a
twenty-five-year-old art student in New York
City, from injuries incurred while in police
custody after his arrest, allegedly for writing
graffiti. At some point later that year, Jean-Mi-
chel Basquiat used marker and acrylics to dash
off a sketch on a graffiti-crowded plasterboard
wall in the artist Keith Haring’s studio: two
fiendish cops beating an armless, legless figure,
rendered in black silhouette. Unrelated tags of
graffitists (Daze and Zephyr are legible) and
random froths of spray paint share the surface.
The piece, known as “Defacement,” is anoma-
lous. Things are almost never shown happening
within this great painter’s characteristic picto-
rial space, which is usually cannily organized
and aggressively frontal. Three other Basquiat
paintings of police figures, all from 1981, along
with strong works by him on unrelated themes,
also appear in the show. The curator Chaédria
LaBouvier asserts their kinship, as protest art,
with “Defacement.” But Basquiat’s message
wasn’t a fight for freedom. It was that he was
free.—Peter Schjeldahl (Through Nov. 6.)“Culture and the People ”
Museo del Barrio
In 1969, when the artist-educator Raphael
Montañez Ortiz was asked to develop a cur-until 1971, in the rotunda of the Guggenheim.
Now, as part of its golden-anniversary cele-
brations, it returns to that unique, difficult
site with a lineage-baring “Works & Process”
program. The juxtaposition of excerpts from
George Balanchine’s “The Four Tempera-
ments” with “Tones II,” a recent revision of a
piece from that début show by the company’s
late founder, Arthur Mitchell, is a clear exam-
ple of model and mimicry. In Robert Garland’s
“Nyman String Quartet No. 2,” new this year,
the juxtaposition is between Balanchinian ballet
and Harlem steps.—B.S. (Sept. 30.)Fall for Dance Festival
City Center
The audiences for this popular, inexpensive
sampler are always enthusiastically apprecia-
tive, but this year’s opening program should
elicit an especially boisterous response: Misty
Copeland is on the bill. She’s dancing a new
solo choreographed by Kyle Abraham, a
dance-world star himself. The program’s closer
is also a surefire crowd-pleaser: an expansion
of Caleb Teicher’s “Bzzz,” which delightfully
mashes up high-speed tap, beatboxing, and
Appalachian flatfooting. Hubbard Street
Dance Chicago and Vuyani Dance Theatre,
from South Africa, complete the mix.—B.S.
(Oct. 1. Through Oct. 13.)