Today both Punxsutawney Phil and Potomac Phil predicted six more weeks of winter. Staten Island Chuck claimed that spring is right around the corner. Ya don't even know which groundhog to believe any more. It's pathetic. But down in the rich dirt of DC, a new flower pushed up to reveal its beautiful blossom this week.
Sarah Lane and Herman Cornejo debuted in Jerome Robbins' Other Dances. We've heard from some of the Haglund'eelers in the DC area. Whereas the earlier cast was panned , this cast was deemed by H.H.'s cognoscenti as truly sublime. We have pictures. Now, these pictures seem a little blurry for a good reason. They kind of have the quality of a command/shift/3 screen-print from a moving video. That's all we know. Don't ask questions. Don't pester us for details. If something turns up somewhere someday, you know Haglund will point you to it. In the meantime, let's hope ABT considers adding Sarah and Herman in Other Dances to the spring gala
Thanks much to our H.H. readers in DC for these treasures.
Thank you for the great photos, Haglund. I attended this performance as well, and sublime doesn't begin to express the beauty and lyrical, emotional expressiveness of the performance by these two great artists. I was hoping against hope that someone in the audience would be smart enough to pull out their camera and capture some of it for us. This is the kind of dancing, and the quality of dancer, that we expect to see at ABT all the time, rather than the mediocrity we are so often subjected to. It is deeply frustrating to me to know that management would feel it necessary to schedule "out of town" what they surely know is world-class quality dance which belongs in New York. It's as if they were ashamed to have so much true talent in the company. I'm hoping that what they saw on stage Wednesday evening was enough to convince them to let these two perform in New York in the spring and/or fall. Today, more than ever, we need this kind of transcendent art in our lives.
Posted by: LLF | February 02, 2018 at 09:51 PM
Thanks, LLF. Glad (and jealous) to hear that you were able to see this Other Dances.
McKenzie's denialism is why he scheduled Sarah & Herman out of town for OD instead of during the Fall Season. He's chosen to deny the reality that Sarah is a far superior artist than his gooperina Boylston. One of these days soon, audience members are going to up-chuck when they see McKenzie's gooperina come on stage -- no offense intended to Staten Island Chuck.
Posted by: Haglund | February 02, 2018 at 11:24 PM
These two were simply made for Other Dances!
Posted by: Gerry | February 05, 2018 at 11:34 AM
Thank you, Haglund, for this great review and for linking to Lisa Traiger's review in DC Metro Theatre Arts- I had never read her before. Her panning of Other Dances was graceful and I really enjoyed how she wrote about the Millepied and Wheeldon pieces.
Posted by: Eliza | February 07, 2018 at 12:43 PM