Bunraku in Boston
Boston hasn’t had a chance to see bunraku in more than 20 years, so the National Puppet Theater of Japan’s two performances in October, sponsored by the Japan Society of Boston at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, were a treat for the fortunate few who could get tickets. There was a short play about a heroine who pulls herself up an ice-covered ladder, seemingly without assistance from her managers, in order to save her lover by ringing the town fire bell. The longer work presented a woman and her blind husband who did everyday things like sewing and playing the shamisen. The evening included an informative hour-long lecture-demonstration by a narrator, a shamisen player, and a head puppeteer from the company, with translation by Japan Society president Peter Grilli.
Seán Curran Company
At first, Seán Curran’s dance looks like a formal exposition of movement, but after a while you begin to imagine webs of social interactions, relationships, and hidden histories. Curran, who started as a Boston Irish stepdancer, brought his 10-year-old company to the Tsai Center in October under the auspices of the Celebrity Series. The program included pieces set to Leos Janácek’s On an Overgrown Path, Handel arias and recorded criminal confessions, and Thom Yorke’s The Eraser, and though Curran himself doesn’t dance much anymore, he performed the astonishing solo St. Petersburg Waltz (2005), to music from Meredith Monk’s Volcano Songs, suggesting over nine riveting minutes a whole village full of characters, or a single character’s intense inner life.
Related:
Quo vadis?, Hit and miss, Theatrics, More 
- Quo vadis?
“Next Generation” is the kind of ballet-program title that might have you asking yourself what happened to “This Generation."
- Hit and miss
Boston Ballet didn’t need Mark Morris’s blessing in 1999, and it doesn’t need it now.
- Theatrics
There’s got to be more to the future than the spectacle of gaudier and gaudier soulless cyberbodies.
- Stairway to Paradise?
It’s a mark of Mikko Nissinen’s ambitions for Boston Ballet that last night’s benefit Gala Performance at the Wang Theatre ended with such a défilé .
- Setting the Wang on fire
Burning down the house” is a metaphor, but at the Wang Theatre last weekend, the Boston Fire Department was on hand to ensure that it remained one.
- L’Allegro, fuss and feathers, and the ICA blues
This year we were looking forward to dance performances at the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater in the new ICA.
- Postmodernizers
Last weekend I had a chance to check in on two important latter-day postmodernists, Susan Marshall and Seán Curran.
- New & newish
Helen Pickett’s Etesian , which opened Boston Ballet’s “Grand Slam” program of contemporary works last Thursday, began with a lone dancer adrift on a sea of darkness.
- Sight and insight
“New Visions” is the kind of title ballet-company directors come up with for programs that are sort of new and are hoping for vision.
- The reign in Spain
If only the company could return to the local appreciation its international achievement deserves.
- Both ears and the tail for this Carmen
"World Passions," the collection of four works that Boston Ballet opened at the Opera House last night, was more pleasant than passionate until Kathleen Breen Combes sashayed out as the title character in Jorma Elo's Carmen .
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Topics:
Dance
, Entertainment, Music, Barbara Lee, More
, Entertainment, Music, Barbara Lee, Guillaume de Machaut, Leos Janacek, Meredith Monk, Saburo Teshigawara, Tommy Neblett, Concord Academy, Japan Society of Boston, Less
