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By Debra Cash Tap superstar Savion Glover effortlessly bridges the jazz and rap generations. Improvography is a word coined by the late Gregory Hines. Neologisms are about grabbing the power to make definitions; they assert that language is not specific or expressive enough to make your meaning clear. When tap dancer Savion Glover uses “Improvography”…
Read MoreA new novel by a Chinese dissident provides a comically stinging vision of his homeland.
Read MoreA new book gives a philosophical analysis of American culture’s obsession with nonsense.
Read MoreA novel by a Nobel prize-winner from Iceland presents a journey into the center of a resolutely antic imagination.
Read MoreUrban Bush Women go back to the past in the name of a more communal and compassionate future. By Debra Cash View Gallery The names of Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. Dubois, Shirley Chishom and Ossie Davis roll down like a mighty stream. On stage, Amara Tabor-Smith of the Urban Bush Women reaches across space, at turns…
Read MoreIn this moving memoir, the daughter of celebrated psychologist Erik Erikson meditates on how fame and ego shatter the foundations of family life. “In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson” by Sue Erikson Bloland. (Viking) By Debbie Porter Sometimes, the lives of the famous resemble fairy tales: an…
Read MoreBy Tess Lewis A new novel captures the atmosphere of post-1956 Hungary from a child’s point of view. The Swimmer by Zsuzsa Bank. Translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo. (Harcourt Books) In tales of exile, the stories of those left behind are rarely told. This is hardly surprising because the abandoned, when they…
Read MoreThe challenge of building a new dance audience lies in presenting, and contextualizing, thought-provoking work
Read MoreSci-fi master Samuel Delany’s latest novel is a mystery set in the ancient world. Phallos, by Samuel R. Delany. (Bamberger Books) By Vincent Czyz Samuel R. Delany is best known as “l’enfant terrible” who published his first novel at age 20 and then went on to win science fiction’s most prestigious awards — the Nebula…
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Dance Commentary: Trust Art, Not Theory
By Debra Cash A retrospective chronicles the four-decade career of radical dance giant Yvonne Rainer. Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961-2002 at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts in Cambridge, MA What Rainer has been doing isn’t hard to see, as long as it isn’t theorized into academic incomprehensibility. Over time she has been called a…
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