In March, the Boston dance community celebrated the 80th birthday of teacher/choreographer CLAIRE MALLARDI, who taught Radcliffe students and practically everyone else in modern dance for more than 40 years. Another beloved teacher/choreographer, MARCUS SCHULKIND, was the 2009 winner of the Boston Dance Alliance Dance Champion award. We lost a favorite personality in March with the unexpected death of DR. MICHAEL SHANNON, who originated the role of Drosselmeyer in BalletRox's Urban Nutcracker.
Although they took place in Manhattan, two highlights of the year for me were the massive MERCE CUNNINGHAM MEMORIAL at the Park Avenue Armory and MEREDITH MONK's Ascension Variations at the Guggenheim Museum. Besides honoring Cunningham, the memorial performance brought the dance company of today together with alumni and students to perform Cunningham's choreography, and a huge audience to revisit and celebrate their work. The evening was a living testimony not only to Cunningham's long creative life but to his influence on us all.
Monk, who sang a short epilogue at the Cunningham memorial, produced her own enormous music-movement piece, one with roots in her 1969 breakthrough work, Juice, which also took place at the Guggenheim. Wordless and almost intangible, Monk's company and two big New York choirs literally transported the audience through time and space in the coiling rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright's museum.
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- Good and evil
From L. Frank Baum's 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz came the 1939 film; from Gregory Maguire's 1995 book Wicked came the 2003 Broadway hit of the same name.
- Fresh fruit and vegetables
The bleakest months of New England winter are ahead of us, so the prospect of leaving your toasty house to see art may not be at the top of your to-do list.
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Boston's weekly theater listings
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Woyzeck isn't a play, it's a Rorschach inkblot test for directors and theater companies.
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Boston's weekly theater listings: January 1, 2010
- Cries and whispers
Mental illness is a touchy subject, one that needs to be handled sensitively on stage or not at all.
- Review: Emanuel Ax at Jordan Hall
I don't want to imply that everybody who's anybody was at Jordan Hall Friday night to hear pianist Emanuel Ax's Celebrity Series recital — but that was Yo-Yo Ma sitting two rows in front of me.
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It's hard to imagine being dwarfed by the titanically insignificant Willy Loman.
- Bleep the faith
If you were young and had brain space to spare in 1985, those vacant folds were likely soon flooded with the vast audial ephemera of the Nintendo era.
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Few filmmakers have suffered from the life-imitates-art phenomenon as has Terry Gilliam.
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Photos: Passion Pit live at House of Blues Boston, January 6, 2010.
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Dance
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