DANCE
TUESDAY - SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1 - 5, 2019
7:30 PM

Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker: Rosas Danst Rosas
New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan

$35-$50
https://newyorklivearts.org/event/rosas-danst-rosas/

Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's breakout piece from 1983. Now let me go all personal on you. We all have performances we saw that were signal events for us, that turn out to be exactly what we like (even if we didn't know it before), and that stay with us the rest of ours lives. This piece provided one of mine. I was at what I think was the U.S. premiere of the work in 1986, at BAM. (The start of the performance was delayed because the chairs that de Keersmaeker brought with her for the performance from Belgium — chairs loom very large in this piece — got held up at customs, and BAM had to scramble to find a bunch of replacements.) But once it started, it was, I realized, just what I'd been waiting for — even if I didn't know it. The piece had all the concision and rigor of the Minimalism that I and everyone else was obsessed with then — but, rather than the usual Minimalist chill, it was suffused with very strong emotions. Subsequent viewings have disclosed that the sight of a bunch of young women clomping around the stage in heavy shoes with great determination and agency no longer generates the frisson it did in the '80s; now we expect such things (that's a good thing) — but that's all this work has lost.

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT: There's a great Jewish mash-up restaurant (Ashkenazic, Sephardic, Middle Eastern) in Buenos Aires, because why not? Now Meshiguene is doing a residence at Intersect by Lexus. As far as I'm concerned, this place is sheer heaven. I've never seen so many variations on gribenes on a menu before. And — this is, in my experience, unprecedented — you don't even feel sick after eating it!