Matt Hanson - Page 2

Sir Kenneth MacMillan silenced the Bard to the wordless storytelling of corporeal movement. His three-act Romeo & Juliet remounted at MetOpera this June 20-25, ennobled by three decades in American Ballet Theatre repertory.

Fade in. Orgasm. Poem. Fade out. There is comedy. There is tragedy. And then there is the story of how Oscar Wilde was duped for his lust over an English Lord.

Recently honored as a Lower East Side Community Hero, pianist Mimi Stern-Wolfe walked onstage on the evening of May 25th 2016 at the Center for Jewish History in NYC. She is the founder and artistic director of Downtown Chamber Players and the recipient of the 2015 Clara Lemlich Award. And she did not speak a word. Her fingers recited history in Tango, Charleston, Waltz, Foxtrot, Blues, Maxixe.

One century ago, 200,000 New Yorkers mourned in the streets, representing the best-attended funeral procession in the history of the city to date. This May, the global Jewish community remembered Sholem Aleichem, for his centenarian yortsayt (Yiddish for "death anniversary").

In old England, life revolved around the pub, the brothel, and the stage. At times the bar scene feels like all three. That ambiance is in full color with the Stripped tour, the latest from the raging musical iconoclast Peter Murphy.

Wendy Osserman spoke to BWW on the phone from New York. Osserman is a bright, youthful 74-year-old, reflecting on a life that exemplifies her peerless character as a fixture of downtown New York dance since the late '60s. Her light-hearted, joyful voice touched on themes ranging from her first memories dancing as a child in front of the mirror, to producing a dance festival on the Greek island of Paros while considering the current crisis of human movement in Greece. The Wendy Osserman Dance Company will perform two world premieres at the Theater for the New City from April 20-23, featuring her new solo work, 'Timed' alongside her classic, 'Udjat' inspired by ancient Egyptian motifs. With a comfortable modesty, she speaks to overcoming the challenges of being a woman in the dance world and of the irresistibility of her continuing aspirations as the leader of a company signature that she has fostered for the last four decades.

John Irving is the epitome of the modern American storyteller. His ability to render the passage of time in prose fiction is peerless--a testament to his success as the author of 13 novels spanning more than four decades. His 14th novel, Avenue of Mysteries, named after the street in Mexico City that famously leads pilgrims to the Lady of Guadalupe, is chock-full of that singular knack for dark humor that has made Irving a household name.

Momentous is a strong word, yet not so strong as carbon, the sixth element in the Periodic Table of Elements, inspiring the literary masterpiece known by the “scandalous” title, as its author Primo Levi confesses, The Periodic Table. Named in 2006 by the Royal Institution of Great Britain as the best science book ever written, Levi outcompeted Charles Darwin, James Watson, Richard Dawkins, Oliver Sacks and Bertolt Brecht, to name only a few.

The Exalted, written by the celebrated poet and performer Carl Hancock Rux is told in the spirit of German expressionism, centering on the anarchist German-Jewish writer Carl Einstein, today considered a founding voice in the evolution of seminal Modernist art movements.

The best part of living in New York is that some of our most radically creative artists are performing. Unadorned studio spaces such as Shetler Studios on West 54th Street in midtown Manhattan host exclusive gatherings, where all of the high pomp of the fine arts strips down in an air of charming modesty.

In the memory of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Steven Isserlis and Robert Levin proved faultless, performing the first of two all-Beethoven programs at Boston's prestigious Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

The classical music of India encompasses all of the subtle and blaring complexities of modern life in continuity with millennia of cultural tradition. The rhythmic nuance of vocalization, in unison with ancient instruments, truthfully dramatizes the frenetic synchronism of contemporary street life from Delhi to New York.

Indonesia Pusaka is a largely Jakarta-based ensemble comprised of eight folk dancers and twelve classical pianists. In Javanese, pusaka means "heritage". For the first-ever performance of Indonesia Pusaka at Carnegie Hall, the riotous Indonesian composer Jaya Suprana sat himself onstage. Regally adorned in gold-enmeshed robes to mirror the priceless Carnegie Hall decor, the ingenious Indonesian voice of classical music composition turned bellies upside down with laughter.

After nearly 300 years, with all of the epochal invention and revolutionary soundscapes to emerge from Western music, Bach is still heard with increasing relevance. Brad Mehldau, known foremost as an improviser, is the first jazz artist to serve as Carnegie Hall's Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair. He has gone further, describing Bach as "radical" even today.

Jazz education is America's oral history, and the composers of jazz, contemporary and classic, are as the wise, sagely men and women who have carried the sacred knowledge of the people since time immemorial.

In 2013, the book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” was published under the genre, Crime. For his research, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning, Occupy Wall Street Journal newspaperman Chris Hedges walked the sacrifice zones of West Virginia. He chronicled the brutally honest, grassroots American reality of people versus capitalism in hard-bitten, fastidious prose while listening to multigenerational landowners and land defenders like Larry Gibson.

She is the young woman counting rhythms silently, whispering mysteriously and distantly on the metro ride home after work. He is the young man moving to a different rhythm behind the cashier, his head bobbing like a life raft on the high seas, far from land. They are the emerging artists, the millennial, contemporary, twenty-something generation of up-and-coming thinkers, movers, shakers, dreamers, drifters and lovers.

With King Kreon in exile, the birds of Thebes had their fill. The air was bitter with the stench of unburied corpses lying on the battlefield. Two of those peck-eaten bodies were brothers who killed each other for their father's throne.

There's a powerfully resonant, special quality to the lifelong oeuvre of a jazz master, such as in the inimitable example of bassist Ron Carter. In the 1960s, integral to the rhythm sections of Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis, his artistry may have seemed shadowed by the towering giants of the music that was to give voice to the Great Migration, the most significant movement of peoples in U.S. history.

The glowing fountains at Josie Robertson Plaza, plumed with a dazzling vibrancy, welcoming a throng of silvery faces. Among them sauntered an impressionable following, the young and economically diverse New Yorkers who only know the now-infamous House Un-American Activities Committee by rote.