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Performing Arts: Dance

Joffrey Ballet: American Moderns

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Last we checked, high-modernist dance peaked at 1972's Stravinsky Festival, and what followed hasn't improved much with age — which makes Paul Taylor's Cloven Kingdom all the more remarkable. Arcangelo Corelli's über-baroque score fights for its life against an angry onslaught of pots and pans (expertly mashed up by John Herbert McDowell), while the dancers — men in tuxes and tails, women in pastel gowns and giant, mirrored headpieces — ceaselessly bust ass, running and leaping with classical elegance and rabid-beast mechanism. It's relentlessly energetic and uncompromisingly bizarre, a high point of both the period and Taylor's career. Also on the program are works by Twyla Tharp, Lar Lubovitch, and Mehmet Sander.

– Zachary Whittenburg

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