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Dance
American Moderns

When

Wednesday May 14, 2008 (7:30pm)

Friday May 16, 2008 (7:30pm)

Saturday May 17, 2008 (2 & 7:30pm)

Sunday May 18, 2008 (2pm)

Friday May 23, 2008 (7:30pm)

Saturday May 24, 2008 (2 & 7:30pm)

Sunday May 25, 2008 (2pm)

Where
Auditorium Theatre (50 E Congress Pkwy, 312.922.2110)
Price
$25 - 140
Details
http://joffrey.com/
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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