It's the Last Week at the Pillow
If you haven’t been to Jacob’s Pillow yet this summer, now’s your chance. The festival is ending with a double bang: the Martha Graham Dance Company in the Ted Shawn Theater, and Abraham.In.Motion in the smaller venue, the Doris Duke Theatre.
The Graham company will perform her 1984 Rite of Spring, Lamentation Variations (I hope they will include the one by Doug Varone because it has a painterly kind of melancholy that I love) and the new work by Nacho Duato. His piece for men, with images of torture, is harrowing. Actually the word is disturbing, so be prepared.
While the Graham program is bound to be dark, Kyle Abraham’s piece Pavement…well, it’s also dark. But in a different way, and so full of slinky dancing—and images of racial profiling, as in randomly handcuffing people and pulling them down to the ground—that it’s very today. Learn more about Pavement in this charming “Choreography in Focus” I did with Kyle.
Abraham.In.Motion in
Pavement. Photo by Carrie Schneider, Courtesy A.I.M.
Can’t afford the tickets? There is great stuff to see for free at the Pillow. I just attended a brilliant “PillowTalk” with Ninotchka Bennahum about her new book, Carmen: A Gypsy Biography, moderated by Suzanne Carbonneau.
The Inside/Out series is always fun to watch from the benches (or boulders or logs or grass) in the woods just the other side of the road from the main campus, at 6:15. Here’s the schedule this week:
Wednesday: A Palo Seco Flamenco
A young group that combines strong tradition with innovation
Thursday:Bill Evans Dance Company
The venerable and highly musical Bill Evans’ troupe
Friday: LAVA
Sarah East Johnson’s quasi-acrobatic group that celebrates girl power
Saturday:August Wilson Center Dance Ensemble
A very young, high-energy, 2012 “25 to Watch” from Pittsburgh. (I saw a terrific piece they did by Kyle Abraham last summer.)
Click here for more info on the Inside/Out series. —Wendy Perron
