Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People

Last weekend I saw Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People at the MCA.  They performed And Lose the Name of Action to a bemused, stunned and sage crowd.  As I sat there with my old Milwaukee friend that just moved to something like 30 different states and then to Chicago within a year, I pointed out no less than 10 Chicago dance makers that I could name.  There were more dancers that I recognized from classes, but you get it.  Sage crowd.

Then I read this review by Laura Molzahn for See Chicago Dance... that was less than enthusiastic.  I was instantly reminded of the kerfuffle over Macaulay's review of Tere O'Connor.  Why do things have to "develop", have to elicit emotion?

I thought the piece was brilliant and that the performers were so amazing I kept staring at each of them in turn and re-reading their bios because their performances were so unaffected.  And for this reason alone I could call the performance brilliant, but there was much more.

Yes, it was 10 minutes too long, but that could've been because I was on a completely unforgiving metal chair.  The rest of the experience was a breath of fresh air in a town full of high legs and pointed toes.

The Buzz on Tere O'Connor and Deborah Hay

Here's the buzz today:
Alastair Macaulay has been bunching undies with his dance reviews at the New York Times for a bit now.  Here's the latest in undie-bunching.

D Foy's blog ranting about Macaulay and his own review of Hay's show

Macaulay's review of Hay

Macaulay's review of O'Connor

Tere O'Connor posted the following review from The New Yorker on his FB feed saying,
 "Wow, finally a review about my work that doesn't start from being perplexed! Thank you Andrew!!! 
I am so exhausted by some of these dilettante critics who have such an antagonistic relationship to any expanded idea of poetics in dance and 

continue to force their anachronistic value systems on the work- systems that many artists have clearly discarded years ago. Another thing to point out about Andrew's writing is that he asks questions about problem areas in works he has seen, choosing a sense of inquiry about artistic choices as opposed to defaulting to the incredibly toxic yet popular stance of pomposity and dismissiveness in the face of alternative choreographic authoring."

New Yorker review of Tere O'Connor's show

I love it when this happens because it teaches me even more about dance criticism.  Keep it up y'all.  It's more fun than TMZ and more educational than a MOOC.