THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019 7
ILLUSTRATION BY JULIEN POSTURE
What happens when a great modern-dance master dies? The company
founded by Paul Taylor, who died last year, is just beginning to find the an-
swer. Taylor’s successor at the helm, the dancer Michael Novak, has reframed
the fall season, at the David H. Koch, Oct. 29-Nov. 17, as a retrospective:
“Paul Taylor: Celebrate the Dancemaker.” During these three weeks, the
dancers of Paul Taylor Dance Company—five of whom are new—will per-
form nineteen Taylor works, including “Post Meridian,” from the sixties. (It
hasn’t been seen in three decades.) “Post Meridian” is one of several pieces to
feature designs by the painter Alex Katz, four of which—“Sunset,” “Scudo-
rama,” “Private Domain,” and “Diggity”—make up a special program that
will be performed just once, on Nov. 11. There are three new works, too, from
Kyle Abraham, Pam Tanowitz, and Margie Gillis, and starry guest perfor-
mances at the company’s gala, on Oct. 30: American Ballet Theatre’s Misty
Copeland in “Black Tuesday,” and the recently retired Michael Trusnovec
in a solo created for Taylor, in 1959, by George Balanchine.—Marina Harss
MODERN DANCE
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Roe Ethridge
Kreps
DOWNTOWN Photography is indiscriminate: a pic-
ture is a picture whether it lands on your phone,
in a magazine, or on the wall. Few photographers
working today understand the fickle nature of
their medium better than Ethridge, whose strong
show—his ninth with Andrew Kreps—inau-
gurates this gallery’s handsome new Tribeca
digs. The subjects of these big color images—the
soap-opera vixen Susan Lucci, a school bus, the
nonbinary model Oslo Grace, wilting carnations,
and Samoan traditions with the techniques of
Western contemporary dance, performed in a
highly athletic, explosive style. The three pieces
on the program for the company’s Joyce début
represent a swath of its current repertory and
include “As Night Falls,” set to Vivaldi, and
“Crying Men,” a narrative work that delves into
themes of violence, stereotypical masculinity,
and loss.—Marina Harss (Oct. 29-Nov. 3.)
Grupo de Rua
BAM Howard Gilman
Opera House
Hip-hop, born in America’s urban spaces, has, in
the last three decades, become a lingua franca in
the world of dance. In Brazil, it is the technique
of choice for several top-level troupes, including
Companhia Urbana de Dança and Bruno Bel-
trão’s Grupo de Rua, the latter of which comes
to BAM this week. In “Inoah,” named after the
town in Brazil where the company is based, the
all-male ensemble explores a dark landscape
of dejection and conflict, accompanied by a
cavernous soundscape and the squeaks of the
dancers’ tennis shoes. Beltrão has said that he
made the piece partly in response to the current
atmosphere of violence and unrest in Brazil
under the Presidency of Jair Bolsonaro.—M.H.
(Oct. 31-Nov. 2.)
Sam Kim
Danspace Project
Though it was billed as a solo, Kim’s 2016 work
“Fear in Porcelain” featured four performers,
challenging the solo form and expressing Kim’s
discomfort with it. In her new solo, “Other An-
imal,” she’s the only one onstage. But it is still a
collaboration with another artist: the filmmaker
Stacey Steers, whose beguiling, collagelike an-
imations, studded with images from silent-era
cinema, Kim projects onto the altar of St. Mark’s
Church.—Brian Seibert (Oct. 31-Nov. 2.)
Brendan Fernandes
Noguchi Museum
Which was the true torture device, the gruelling
technique of Martha Graham or the strange set
pieces that Isamu Noguchi made for her? It’s a
question raised by the artist Brendan Fernandes,
who, on most Saturdays through March, arranges
dancers amid an installation at the Noguchi
Museum for an hour-long performance named
after Graham’s core method, “Contract and
Release.” Similar to “The Master and Form,”
Fernandes’s exhibition for this year’s Whitney
Biennial, which looked at the fetishization of
ballet practice, this piece is both conceptual
and kinky. The dancers use models based on
Noguchi sculptures for tests of Graham-inspired
endurance.—B.S. (Nov. 2. Through March 7.)
Ephrat Asherie Dance
Joyce Theatre
As a b-girl, Ephrat Asherie honed her craft
in underground clubs, where she earned the
sobriquet Bounce, and her works for the stage
retain the loose, playful, accepting vibe of club-
dance utopia. The most unorthodox aspect of
her piece “Odeon” is the music, which is by
the fin-de-siècle Brazilian composer Ernesto
Nazareth (arranged by Asherie’s brother, the
jazz pianist Ehud Asherie, and played live).
Nazareth’s was a hybrid style, playing on the
border between classical and popular, and Ash-
erie meets it with her own hybrid style, mixing
in breaking, house, vogue, and West African ele-
ments. The parallel makes sense, and the match
of moves and music is incongruous enough to
feel fresh.—B.S. (Nov. 5-7.)
the Verrazzano Bridge, writhing snakes, a bottle
of ketchup—are diffuse, but, collectively, they
convey the inundation and the randomness of
today’s image world. Ethridge is not only an
artist; he also shoots editorial and commercial
campaigns, a dual identity with a rich history
reaching back to Man Ray. Here, as in his past
exhibitions, outtakes from his for-hire projects,
including a peppy group portrait of all-Amer-
ican youth, for the streetwear label Telfar, are
indistinguishable from the work he shoots for
himself.—Andrea K. Scott (Through Nov. 2.)
Arghavan Khosravi
Lyles & King
DOWNTOWN In the sharp-edged dreamworld
of Khosravi’s paintings, women inhabit sym-
bolically dense, spatially tricky scenes. Using
trompe-l’oeil, shaped canvases, and found tex-
tiles, the Iranian painter—who arrived in the
U.S. in 2015 and now cannot return, thanks
to Trump’s travel ban—forges a melancholic
lexicon to reflect on both women’s status in
her native country and her own feelings of dis-
location. Fragments of classical statuary and
bright-red cords (with their dual implications of
