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Saturday, September 10, 2011

Review: Canyon

The setup was great: John Jasperse created works for top companies around the world, but never in Philadelphia.

Canyon would get its world premiere at Live Arts/Fringe, then move to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

At Friday’s opening night, the Wilma Theater was all open stage – no curtains or backdrop – with white flooring covering part of the blackness. Strips of neon yellow tape were strewn on the stage, the walls, into the audience, looking like the patterns on a computer chip.

Before the show even started, a large white box rolled around the stage, once getting caught too close to the edge. This was our introduction to Jasperse’s exploration of disorientation and sensory overload.

Canyon - set to a modern and sometimes atonal score of strings and noises by Rowe Hahn - seemed promising as six excellent dancers, including Jasperse, began running and leaping across the space. In one section, they reacted to each other’s movements as though connected by a string. A man lay on the ground, and the box rolled over him.

But while the dancing was high quality, it was difficult to discern much meaning out of the piece. The music was sometimes airport-loud and siren-screeching. The 70-minute piece dragged.
Posted by Ellen Dunkel @ 12:49 PM  Permalink | 1 comment
Comments   
  • 0 like this / 0 don't   •   Posted 1:23 PM, 09/10/2011
    I hate to be negative, but the reviewer is being too kind. My wife and I found the work to be self-indulgent and self-important. Don't expect to be entertained. Don't expect to be enlightened. This work proves that good art does not automatically derive from a good idea.
    — Pickle


1 comments
About Philly Stage
Howard Shapiro reviews and writes about theater for The Inquirer, and has been on staff since 1970. He's had many posts at the newspaper, including cultural arts editor and editor of the Weekend section. He's twice been the editor of the Travel section, for which he writes frequently. He began writing theater criticism a decade ago, and has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, an Internews fellow in Greece, and a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts' Journalism Institutue in Theater and Musical Theater, where Robert Brustein was among his mentors. He teaches arts criticism and travel writing at Temple University, and is Broadway critic for the NPR-affliated stations of the Classical Network.


Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.


Wendy Rosenfield has been writing freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She also writes the ArtsJournal blog Drama Queen. She was 2009 and 2010 Guest Critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute, a 2008 NEA Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop. A graduate of Bennington College, she is inching toward a Master's degree in Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and a Brownie Girl Scout troop leader.

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