Print_header

Performing Arts: Dance
American Moderns

When

Wednesday May 14 (7:30pm)

Friday May 16 (7:30pm)

Saturday May 17 (2 & 7:30pm)

Sunday May 18 (2pm)

Friday May 23 (7:30pm)

Saturday May 24 (2 & 7:30pm)

Sunday May 25 (2pm)

Where
Auditorium Theatre (50 E Congress Parkway, 312.922.2110 ext 0)
Price
$25 - 140
Details
http://joffrey.com/
Picture-17_event_full

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