Resurrection: Pete Townshend on Tommy

Since it is Easter, it seemed appropriate to turn to a rock opera with its own Christ story that continues to be resurrected: The Who's Tommy. Deirdre Kelly spoke to its creator Pete Townshend last fall when the production was enjoying a successful run at the Stratford Festival.

Adventures in Art, Expedient Creativity and Spirituality: Interview with Pete Townshend

Last June, critic Deirdre Kelly reviewed the Stratford production of Pete Townshend's rock opera Tommy in Critics at Large as "a feast of the senses." She went on to elaborate that "this new Tommy is spectacular, harnessing the latest in digital technologies for a series of punchy LED rear-screen projections which firmly anchor Tommy in its post-war, middle class British setting. The two-hour plus show also employs automated set pieces that tilt, fire and explode – not unlike a Townshend guitar solo." Speaking of the composer, Pete Townshend, the founder of The Who, Kelly had an opportunity to talk with him for The Globe and Mail a few weeks ago. The paper ran a portion of her long discussion with the artist. Here today, we supply the rest. Townshend discusses a range of subjects including autism in relation to Tommy, the spiritual guidance of Meher Baba, the generational conflict in post-War Britain and the continued relevance of Tommy today.

Houdini of the Dance

For those who never considered choreography as the art of the magic, you need to read Deirdre Kelly writing in Critics at Large about Claudia Moore.

Now You See Her, Now You Don't: Dancer Claudia Moore

Claudia Moore (photo by Tamara Romanchuk)

By calling her latest show Escape Artist, Claudia Moore conjures an intriguing picture of herself as a kind of Houdini of the dance. Technically an illusionist, the death-defying escape artist alluded to in the title strives to be free of restraints, be they handcuffs, straitjackets or cages in a sea of sharks to name some of the claustrophobic situations these suspenseful performers have been employing since their arrival on the pop culture scene at the end of the 19th century. Moore, a seasoned dancer who is artistic director of her own MOonhORsE Dance Theatre company, obviously loves the concept. But her solo show of four commissioned works which played at Toronto’s Dancemakers Studio in the Distillery District during the last weeks of October (including a Hallowe’en performance where the audience was invited to come in costume) did not take the shackle and bust theme literally. In other words, no real chains only imagined ones.

The Return of the Thin White Duke

When David Bowie Is arrived last year at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, it was a great opportunity to let three of our reviewers from Critics at Large address from their specific area of interest which included fashion (Deirdre Kelly), music (John Corcelli) and cultural (Kevin Courrier).

David Bowie Is X 3

Pop icon David Bowie is the subject of the David Bowie is exhibit currently at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Three of our critics, Deirdre Kelly, John Corcelli and Kevin Courrier, attended the show and each of them contribute their thoughts to this review.

It was the summer of my 15th year and my mother, to get me out of the house, and perhaps also to make me realize there was a wonderful world waiting for me outside it, sent me to London, England, where she had some friends who would put me up for a few hot weeks. I already knew the British capital to be the crux of all things cool. I was a Beatles fan, and, well, pretty much a fan of everything else with an English accent. But The Beatles were long over by 1975, and I was on to the next big thing which, to my constantly changing teenage self, meant glitter rock in the form of Marc Bolan of T. Rex, David Essex, Elton John (before he became respectable), Queen and – of course – David Bowie. Bowie was the pin-up in my bedroom, and I choose the word deliberately because he was, at the beginning of his career, not a boy, not a girl, but a deliciously subversive blend of both.

Quick Communication: The Celebrity Photography of Albert Watson

As much as some deride celebrity journalism, the uncanny mystique of stars and our fascination with them isn't easily dismissed. Celebrity photographers, like Albert Watson, have also created iconic images that can nail an epoch and those who shape it. Back in 2012, Deirdre Kelly spoke to Watson for Critics at Large.

A Conversation with Photographer Albert Watson

Jack Nicholson, from Albert Watson's Icons series, 1998 (All photos courtesy of the IZZY Gallery)

New York City-based celebrity photographer Albert Watson is a master of his profession. His images have appeared on more than a hundred Vogue covers and countless other publications from Rolling Stone to Time Magazine, many of them featuring now iconic portraits of rock stars, including David Bowie and Eric Clapton, in addition to Hollywood actors like jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood and other notable high-profile personalities, including Steve Jobs, Mike Tyson, Kate Moss, Sade and Christy Turlington. Exhibited in art galleries and museums around the world, among them the Museum of Modern Art in Milan, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, Watson recently made his Canadian debut at Toronto’s IZZY Gallery (106 Yorkville Ave; izzygallery.com) with a retrospective show called ARCHIVE, which closes on December 27. Aged 70 and with a career spanning 40 years, Watson is one of the few internationally acclaimed photographers still working exclusively in film, processing it himself in his dark room. All of his hand-processed images now hanging in Izzy Sulejmani’s gallery are for sale, enabling collectors as well as fans of Watson’s work to own something by one of the 20 most influential photographers of all time, according to Photo District News. “Photography is quick communication,” he told critic Deirdre Kelly during a recent visit to his New York City office lined with some of the images for which Watson is celebrated. “People easily get it.”

Here’s more of their conversation.
  

Photographer Albert Watson (Photo by Gloria Ro)

dk: These are wonderful digs you’ve got here in TriBeCa, close to the Hudson River and flooded with natural light. I am assuming this is where you work?

aw: We don’t shoot here, no. I no longer have a studio of my own. We had a huge one in the West Village from 1987 to 2008, about 26,000 square feet. But I sold it to a hedge fund guy. Now, we don’t actually have a studio. We don’t need one. About 25 or 30 years ago, light in a space was fairly important. But nowadays you can replicate the light in a studio with technology. The business has changed, which is why we moved here. We’re now much more focused on supplying work for galleries and museums – fine art work and producing prints and making platinum prints. We make all our prints in the office and rent studios when we need them. Everyone told me that I would miss having my own studio. But I’ve spent my whole life working in Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, Milan and other centres, including Toronto, and I’ve become quite used to photographing in other people’s studios. Where I work doesn’t have to be my own space.

The Man Who Loved Women

Deirdre Kelly is usually the dance critic for Critics at Large. But last summer she turned her attention to one of her favourite painters, Gustav Klimt, and reviewed an exhibition of his work in New York.

Klimt Revealed: 150 Anniversary Exhibition in New York City

"Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I," Gustav Klimt, 1907. Oil, silver, and gold on canvas.

It quite literally was a dark and stormy afternoon when I slipped recently into New York’s Neue Galerie, seeking shelter from a sudden summer downpour. I had never before ventured through the ornate doors of this tiny museum devoted to German and Austrian art, even though I had walked past the former 19th century mansion where the Neue Galerie is housed – close by the Metropolitan Museum of Art – countless times. I was again heading to the Met this past July when the clouds burst open, making me change my plans. I am glad that I did.

On show was the Gustav Klimt 150th Anniversary exhibition (until Monday, Aug. 27), the only large-scale tribute to the Viennese painter, born July 14, 1862, in North America. In Austria, tributes to the Symbolist painter known as one of the founders of the Vienna Secession movement, a uniquely Austrian interpretation of art nouveau, are more pronounced. There, several internationally acclaimed museums, among them the Albertina, the Belvedere, the Kunsthistorisches, the Leopold and the Wien Museum, continue to honour the painter with various exhibitions highlighting different aspects of Klimt’s artistic legacy. The Neue Galerie show is smaller, if not more intimate than these others, showcasing just 12 items in a multi-media show that includes the cufflinks made for the artist by the Austrian architect Josef Hoffman in 1906.

Precision

The fact that for choreographer, Wayne McGregor, dance could also be something of a science experiment in his piece Entity, served as part of what fascinated critic Deirdre Kelly last year in her review in Critics at Large.

The Science Of Dancing: Wayne McGregor’s Entity

Entity, choreographed by Wayne McGregor (Photo: Ravi Deepres)

Talk about a ‘Eureka!’ moment: A dance performance that is also a science experiment, the focus of study being the body in motion. Audiences, put your thinking caps on.

Entity is the name of the brain puzzle of a dance in question, and it is an entirely new choreographed creature, owing its genesis to the mind as much as the body.

Choreographed in 2008 by Wayne McGregor (choreographer-in-residence at the Royal Ballet in England, and represented by his 10-member strong Random Dance troop, the resident company of Sadler’s Wells in London), the hour-long piece concludes its month-long Canadian tour in Toronto tonight at Harbourfront Centre: Run to get a ticket.

The result of 10 years of scientific inquiry, Entity is a hybrid born of a question (What happens inside the brain when people dance?) and of a collective desire, by both the choreographer and the international cast of extraordinary dancers, for extreme movement exploration. This exploration is made even more complicated by the fact each dancer has a distinct stage personality and presence.

Stepping Through the City of Light

While Paris might not be the dance capital, as Deirdre Kelly points out in Critics at Large, The Paris/Toronto Project has revived the city of light's stature.

Vive la difference: The Paris/Toronto Project (Opposites Do Attract)

It can't be dying, - it's too rouge, -. (Photo by Guntar Kravis)

Paris hasn’t been a dance capital since Marie Taglioni donned wings to dance La Sylphide more than 150 years ago, at the height of the Romantic era. Ballet in any event has always been the city’s strong suit, developed largely by the French court. Modern dance, a New World dance form, was invented by the barefoot American dancer Isadora Duncan who so hated the high-reaching artificiality of classical dance that she created a school of movement grounded in the earth and earthly concerns. Paris never really made that leap, not in ways significant enough to wrest back its reputation as a dance innovator. And so it came as a surprise when Toronto Dance Theatre (TDT), the city’s main exponent of the modern dance tradition as directed by Christopher House, announced that it had recently looked to Paris as the source of new creation for its own troupe of barefoot dancers, inviting French choreographers Alban Richard and Emmanuelle Vo-Dinh to Toronto to collaborate on the making of two new works. It felt like the dance equivalent of that old expression, bringing coal to Newcastle: what could Paris give what Toronto already had? Plenty, it has turned out.

What makes the Paris/Toronto Project such an artistic success is the very fact that the choreographers are from Paris, their foreignness giving them the advantage of being able to create here without the burden of knowing local dance traditions that might otherwise have compelled them to follow some kind of prescribed plan or pathway. As a result, each work on the program that opened last Thursday night, and continues through to Saturday at Winchester Street Theatre, represents a complete departure from anything TDT has done before, both in terms of movement vocabulary and ideas. It’s probably why the dancers, still the same solid troupe as before, look so different, in a heightened sense of the word, performing them – appearing bolder, more robust and fully present in the works at hand. This artistic experiment, sponsored on both sides of the Atlantic by government agencies representing both Canada and France, has definitely paid off. The choreographers surpass all expectations by creating works that are decidedly avant-garde while the dancers are newly inspired. They, for one, will now always have Paris as a fresh influence on their collective performing style: vive la difference.

Forever Young

Who says that as dancers hit middle age, they should turn in their shoes? Certainly not Deirdre Kelly in this piece on the subject published in Critics at Large.

Oldies But Goldies: Toronto Heritage Dance Recycles Vintage Works Into Something New

Patricia Beatty

The heads in the audience, for the most part, were gray and nodding as around them swirled pre-show chatter touching on the weather, doctor’s appointments and 25th anniversary reunions. It was definitely an older crowd that gathered inside Toronto’s Winchester Street Theatre (80 Winchester Street) on Thursday night for an evening of dance, an art form notorious for its love affair with youth. Many in the house were ex-dancers whose own leaping days were far behind them. They had come not entirely for nostalgia’s sake, although the event gave reason enough for reminiscing: the program at hand promised an evening of revivals by local dance pioneers as well as the welcome return to the stage of some beloved local dancers, long retired. But more enticing (and worthy of a late night) was that this modern dance show, while celebrating the past, was actually something novel, marking as it did the debut of Toronto Heritage Dance, the new kid on the Canadian dance block with a backpack jammed with history.

The brainchild of veteran dance producer Nenagh Leigh in collaboration with Patricia Beatty, Toronto Heritage Dance aims to use work from the not-so-distant past (the oldest work on the current program is just 40) to jumpstart new creations for the 21st century. The idea, elaborated Leigh during a brief intermission chat, is to get audiences used to the idea of preservation as a means of fostering a re-invigorated dance future. Vintage is all the rage in fashion, film and home decor. So why not apply the trend to locally made dance? 

Sex and Dance

Our dance critic at Critics at Large, Deirdre Kelly, published her latest book this past fall and David Churchill spoke to her about its genesis.

Deirdre Kelly Discusses Her New Book: Ballerina: Sex, Scandal, and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection

Deirdre Kelly (Photo: John Cullen)

Deirdre Kelly has been obsessed with dance and the ballerina since she was three years old. Much of her professional writing life has been devoted to looking at ballet and dance. Now, in her new book, Ballerina: Sex, Scandal, and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection (Greystone Books: an imprint of D&M Publishers), she pulls back the curtain and gives us a rare peak behind the scenes at what it means in the past and the present to be a ballerina. She sat down with David Churchill recently to discuss her book and the history of the ballerina. Tomorrow, we will run an excerpt from her new book.

Taking Flight

When the veteran Alvin Ailey American Dance company, a vehicle for African American dancers since 1958, came to Toronto, Deirdre Kelly took the opportunity to wax eloquent on their artistic legacy in Critics at Large.

Rocka My Soul: The Ecstasy That is Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/02/rocka-my-soul-ecstasy-that-is-alvin.html

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Robert Battle's The Hunt. Photo by Paul Kolnik

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has landed in Toronto, and with an enormous amount of noise in the form of screams, cheers and ear-splitting hurrahs. The arrival of the New York-based troupe on our side of the border has always been cause for celebration; there’s no beating the potent physicality of the dancers, or the raw, often visceral connectedness an audience member feels for the choreography, often by a range of modern and contemporary dance artists.

But this time, there was added incentive for the standing ovation that greeted the company when on Thursday it gave the first of four scheduled performances at Toronto's Sony Centre of the Performing Arts. The run concludes today with matinee and evening performances of a mixed program. Since July, the 30-member ensemble has been guided by newly appointed director Robert Battle, a former dancer turned choreographer whose association with the Ailey company stems from 1999 when he was first appointed artist-in-residence.

Pop Fantasies

If our obsessions with pop, as fans, can create a multitude of fantasies, it's fitting that choreographers can put those fantasies to dance as Deirdre Kelly points out in this Critics at Large review.  

Love Lies Bleeding: A Pop Ballet That Really Pops

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/11/love-lies-bleeding-pop-ballet-that.html

The artists of Alberta Ballet rock out to "Benny and the Jets" in Love Lies Bleeding

Jean Grand-Maître took the stage at Toronto’s Sony Centre on Tuesday night, just moments before Alberta Ballet would perform the area premiere of his full-length Love Lies Bleeding, set to and directly inspired by the music of Elton John. Microphone in hand, Grand-Maître genially asked the capacity crowd how many had come to the ballet for the first time. A roar rippled through the auditorium and the Canadian choreographer smiled. It was a sign that his mandate of creating pop ballets for the Calgary-based company since becoming director in 2002 was indeed working: bums in seats, but more importantly, bums attached to people who might not otherwise be caught dead watching men in jock straps pointing their toes in an undulating sea of ballerinas. But as if wanting to quell any lingering reservations, Grand-Maître told the audience not to worry: “This is not really a ballet,” he continued. “It’s more like a rock concert. So sit back, relax and unleash your inner pop star.”

"Rocket Man": Yukichi Hattori, Company Artists

For the next two hours that is pretty much what happened. The crowd screamed, it sang, it clapped along; some in the house could be seen even dancing in their seats. At the end, it rose en masse to give the ballet an instantaneous standing ovation on top of prolonged applause. To ballet purists it was a somewhat different story. The choreography is more borrowed than original: Bob Fosse meets the cross-dressing Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, meaning lots of crotch thrusts and drag queens galore. Such details have entertainment value, but don’t necessarily advance the art form. Still, there was plenty to like, even admire. It is one of the few ballets to foreground men in ballet as opposed to women and for that is to be applauded as something rare indeed. It also has at its centre an aerial number, choreographed by Adrian Young, which literally sets the dancers flying, a wonder to behold. But the ballet scales heights in other ways: Love Lies Bleeding is the Alberta Ballet’s Tommy, a reference to the ballet inspired by The Who’s rock-opera of the same name created for Montreal’s Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in 1970 by resident choreographer by Fernand Nault, a work that first put Canadian ballet on the international map. So while not a new invention, Love Lies Bleeding is ballet for the masses whose popularity may bode well for the future of the art itself, enticing even more bums down the line to wiggle in their seats.

Legacies

Going up against tradition always poses risks. But when you're the National Ballet, risks become par for the course as Deirdre Kelly pointed out in her review of their production last winter of Romeo and Juliet.

You Don’t Want the Dancing to Stop: National Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/11/you-dont-want-dancing-to-stop-national.html

Guillaume Côté and Elena Lobsanova in  Romeo and Juliet. Photo by Bruce Zinger.

Creating something new from something established and old always poses a challenge. You have tradition to contend with, not to mention people’s expectations. This is perhaps especially true when dealing with a master like Shakespeare as Russian-born choreographer Alexei Ratmansky has done with Romeo and Juliet. 

The former artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, now into his second term as artist in residence of New York’s American Ballet Theater, revisits not only literary tradition but also music and dance history.

A commission to commemorate the 60th anniversary season of the National Ballet of Canada, which is performing the new three-hour work at Toronto’s Four Seasons of the performing through Saturday with alternating casts, Ratmansky’s Romeo and Juliet is a tremendous accomplishment.

Gestural Language

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

While dance is in part about interpretive movement, it is also about narrative. In the case of the Sashar Zarif Dance Theatre, as Deirdre Kelly smartly points out in Critics at Large, it is also about memoir.

Searching for Identity: Sashar Zarif Dance Theatre

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/05/searching-for-identity-sashar-zarif.html

Katherine Duncanson, Sashar Zarif, Viv Moore, Marie-Josée Chartier, Sylvie Bouchard (Photo: Mahla Ghasempour)

The lights dim, the theatre fills with darkness, smoke and the sound of a hollow wind banging a door against its frame. A figure emerges from the shadows, moving slowly into view. With his hand he touches his open mouth before pushing the hand forward, palm-up, as if offering up to the audience the words he softly sings under his breath. With this simple gesture, Toronto dancer and choreographer Sashar Zarif sets the stage for his Solos of My Life, presented in conjunction with Toronto independent dance producer Danceworks whose three-performance run at Harbourfront’s Enwave Theatre in Toronto ends tonight. The title is misleading as the hour-long piece isn’t a solo, but more a series of danced vignettes performed with (in alphabetical order) Sylvie Bouchard, Marie-Josée Chartier, Katherine Duncanson and Viv Moore, women meant to embody the people he has known, loved, maybe even feared in his life: dance as memoir.

Sashar Zarif (Photo: Mahla Ghasempour)

Story-telling in dance has a long tradition, with mime and song often used to give meaning to the wordless art of the body. In telling his personal history, basically a narrative exploring his forced migration from his Persian homeland and the subsequent search for identity, Zarif goes further, employing a self-created form of gestural language that pulls from ancient Indian dance traditions as well as from the modern dance: Think deep-seated second-position plies meshed with percussive Kathak-inspired foot stomps and dancing eyes. Add bum-jumps, crab-crawls and sky-writing and you get the point. Almost.

Sashar Zarif (Photo: Dani Tedmuri)

While there’s much to admire here – the commitment of the individual performers for one, not to mention the evocative sound-score featuring created and partly performed live by Zarif with a heavily costumed Duncanson in collaboration with the always-fascinating Eric Cadesky and Arun Srinivasan’s dramatic lighting design – Solos For My Life come across as movement experimentation that lacks a clear idea as to how its results are to be ingested, analyzed, interpreted by the viewer. As such, it’s a personal journey that very much remains personal, rarely succeeding in striking a chord of empathy with the viewer as a result of being ultimately unclear about what it is trying to say. To compare it to a written narrative, what the so-called stories embedded inside this work might be served by, this is an imaginative recreation of a life that is richly atmospheric and populated by interesting characters – not the least being Zarif, a compelling performer with an empathetic stage presence – but whose weak thematic core undermines a sense of focus and relevance, qualities that might have prevented the piece from drifting without an evident conclusion: a work with too much beginning and middle and not enough end.

Through the Looking Glass

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland has captivated readers for so long that its various manifestations in film, music ("White Rabbit"), and dance, continues to bring enchantment. The National Ballet's production of the work last year even prompted Deirdre Kelly's review to come in the form of a 'letter' to Carroll.

Tumbling for Alice: National Ballet's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/06/tumbling-for-alice-national-ballets.html

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Photo by Manuel de los Galanes)

Letter to Lewis Carroll:

Took a tumble down the rabbit hole on Saturday night, courtesy the National Ballet of Canada’s vivid presentation of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and what a wonderful experience it was. Bumped into the most delightful creatures, a lot of them born of your own imagination – the white rabbit, the nasty queen of hearts, the grinning Cheshire cat, and, of course, Alice, dear sweet Alice, who fell first down the dizzying spiral towards that veritable garden of visual delights punctuating the journey.

Your marvellous book, Alice in Wonderland, was the inspiration behind it all, and who knew such a literary classic would lend itself so delightfully to both a balletic translation and original score? Composer Joby Talbot has created a brilliant, bubbling, boisterous piece of music that readily captures the kaleidoscopic character of own multi-tone prose-style and verse.

Singing the Body Electric

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

What makes dance so exciting is how the performers, with the help of a great choreographer, can make the body seem even more physically expressive than what already holds in our imagination. Deirdre Kelly had such an experience last year while watching the Paul Taylor Dance Company perform Polaris.

Larger-Than-Life: Paul Taylor Dance Company

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/04/larger-than-life-paul-taylor-dance.html

 "Polaris" Photo by Lois Greenfield

The wonderful thing about well-trained dancers? Just how wonderful they are. You can’t take your eyes off them, or stop marvelling at their ability to seem larger-than-life and super-human, creatures propelled into greatness by the strength and skill of bodies leashed to the hand of an expert teacher and choreographer. Such was the thought inspired by watching members of Paul Taylor Dance Company perform earlier this week at the Markham Theatre, located north of Toronto, as part of the New York’s troupe’s recent, four-city Ontario tour.

J.C. on Broadway

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Who would have thought that a musical that came to define the shift from the Sixties counter-culture into the Jesus culture of the Seventies would still be popular today? But the Stratford Festival's production of Jesus Christ Superstar was a huge success last summer. It recently opened to mixed reviews on Broadway but here are Deirdre Kelly's observant views on the original show.  

Jesus As Heartthrob: Stratford Festival's Jesus Christ Superstar

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/07/jesus-as-heartthrob-stratford-festivals.html 

 Paul Nolan as Jesus (centre). Photo by David Hou

It’s not often I sit in the theatre, head bowed. But toward the end of director Des McAnuff’s powerful re-staging of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Stratford Festival (one of Canada's preeminent theatre companies located in Stratford, Ontario, southwest of Toronto), that’s exactly what I was doing. From that position I could see that my hands were also clasped on my lap as if in prayer. It was involuntary. I was raised Catholic – in the beleaguered Catholic enclave of Derry, Northern Ireland, no less – and so visions of Jesus hanging on the Cross move me in ways of which I’m often not aware. Faced with actor Paul Nolan suspended high above the stage, arms outstretched like the crucified Christ, instantly conjured the yearning of childhood when I used to pine for Jesus, just as the nuns taught me to do. I recalled, sitting there in the darkness of Stratford's Avon Theatre, how before I was 10, I wished for a time machine to whisk me back to Garden of Gethsemane so I could warn him to make a run for it by dawn. Jesus, in other words, was the first big love of my life, the one person I’d do anything to save for all the saving he was said to be doing of me. It’s that idea of Jesus as heartthrob that McAnuff plays up in his revival of the 1971 Tim Rice/Andrew Lloyd Webber rock opera based loosely on the Gospels’ account of the last week of Christ’s life, and it’s an idea that works miracles. This Jesus Christ Superstar is a hit. It plays at Stratford now through October.

Paul Nolan (Photo by David Hou)

McAnuff’s Jesus is a long-haired, falsetto-voiced, enigmatic bisexual-seeming rock star: early David Bowie crossed withMötley Crüe. It’s not a far-fetched comparison: the original London cast featured in the role of Jesus Ian Gillan, lead singer of Deep Purple who went on to briefly front Black Sabbath. Judas Iscariot was played by Murray Head, most recognized as the singer of the international hit (from the musical Chess written by Rice and ABBA's Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus), “One Night in Bangkok.” Here Judas is played by Josh Young, a darkly handsome actor and singer with a gorgeously shaped and musky voice – the sound of incense burning – and a Jim Morrison swagger. This show isn’t a musical as much as a resurrected memory of rock lords past.

Maybe that’s also why I was journeying within myself while watching it.

I am old enough to remember when “I Don’t Know How to Love Him”, one of several hit songs spawned by Jesus Christ Superstar, was climbing the pop charts and getting ample airplay during my pre-teen summer. I also (confession time) was once in a school production of Jesus Christ Superstar directed by a way-cool priest at Toronto’s St. Michael’s College (we girls were bused in) and starring a young Mary Ellen Mahoney as Mary Magdalene. I was 15 and in the chorus, playing variously a harlot, a palm waver and a leper. When Stratford musical director Rick Fox got those electric guitars wailing again, I was fully back in the 1970s, remembering when Jesus seemed an improbable subject for a rock opera, but proved to be an “exact fit”: The world’s first pop idol.

Pina Bausch: A Choreographic Maverick

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

One of the most important qualities a critic needs to have is the ability to take the audience inside a work, to deepen both their understanding of it and where possible deepen their love for it. In this terrific piece by our dance critic Deirdre Kelly, she not only takes us further into the movie but also its subject.

Performing Without Inhibition: Wim Wenders' Pina

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/12/performing-without-inhibition-wim.html

"Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost."

                                             Pina Bausch

Watching Wim Wenders' hauntingly poignant and unique film about the choreographic genius of Pina Bausch, I was reminded that when I was younger I didn’t want to run away and join the circus; I wanted to join Tanztheater Wuppertal, the internationally acclaimed German dance troupe that Bausch directed from 1973 until her untimely death in 2009.

I saw her extraordinary dancers, culled from all corners of the globe, for the first time in 1984 during a rare visit of the troupe to Toronto. The piece was The Rite of Spring, and the stage was covered with spoil (dirt, peat and other detritus) that turned to mud soon after the dancers started marking it with the sweat of their extraordinary effort. Together with the approximately 2,000 spectators who thronged to the theatre that night, drawn by Bausch’s reputation as an award-winning dance artist, I watched spellbound from the edge of my seat, eyes wide open, a lump in my throat.

Kinetic Spitfire

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

For the first year, Critics at Large covered pretty much all of the arts except dance. Truth told, none of us could write about it with any authority. So it came as a welcome surprises last spring when we were approached by one of Canada's best dance critics, Deirdre Kelly. Naturally, her first piece was a splendid portrait of a veteran Canadian choreographer.

Louise Lecavalier: Still Crazy (But More Glorious) After All 

These Years

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/04/louise-lecavalier-still-crazy-but-more.html.

Louise Lecavalier & Keir Knight (Photo : Massimo Chiarradia)

Dancer Louise Lecavalier's new company is Fou Glorieux, which roughly translated as "glorious craziness." And the craziest thing about it? How mind-blowingly good it is. Fou Glorieux is contemporary Canadian dance at its most kinetically expressive, if not poetically potent. The reason is Lecavalier, the diminutive dynamo whose kamikaze dance style helped make Édouard Lock's La La La Human Steps an international cause célèbre throughout the 1980s and 1990s when she was the Montreal choreographer's hard-bodied, platinum blonde star and muse.