The Theatre of Life: Jill Johnston

 

Jill Johnston, c. 1970    

The Essential Jill Johnston Reader

Edited by Clare Croft

Duke University Press, 2024

Everyone knows that post-modern dance began at Judson Memorial Church in the early 1960s, but few people today remember what actually happened there. Luckily, the Village Voice was on the story, 

and sent its most daring critic to cover it. Jill Johnston’s columns of the 1960s and 70s have now been collected in a book, an invaluable chronicle of dance in the context of a social/sexual/political sea change.   

Columbia 2025: The Students' Turn to Roar

-- By Tom Phillips 

B'way and 114th  

Students held the upper hand yesterday in the first big protest of the school year at Columbia.   Acting president Claire Shipman was forced to call the NYPD to clear a pro-Palestinian occupation of Butler Library, and at least two people were carried out on stretchers among 75 arrested.  Hundreds of students then staged angry protests at both ends of 114th Street, cursing the officers who pushed them off the blocked streets and onto the sidewalk.  Students on Amsterdam then made an end run down to 111th Street, turned right,  and marched up the middle of Broadway with exhausted police bringing up the rear.  

The scene was in sharp contrast to last year's bust at Hamilton Hall, carried out by an army of cops who blocked off the entire campus, clambered into Hamilton as if it were a medieval fortress under siege, and then occupied the university for the rest of the academic year.   

This year, things are different.  

• Shipman makes no sense when she claims that non-Columbia people were among the occupiers of Butler Library: there's no way anyone gets onto the locked-down campus without a Columbia ID.  The chief security guard at 116th Street last night described Shipman's claim as "false information."  
• The students clearly hold the moral high ground, alongside Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, as they contend with illegal detentions by an increasingly unpopular Trump regime.  
• Columbia's crackdown on faculty and student speech looks cowardly in the light of Harvard's stand against government intrusion,   
• Israel's war crimes in Gaza justify the protests, and expose the Republican campaign against campus antisemitism as exactly what  Claire Shipman originally called it: "Capitol Hill nonsense."  

Shipman is out of options. With students on their high horse, another police occupation would be a bloodbath.  It's too late to join Harvard's resistance.   All she has left are lies --- the protesters aren't Columbians, the problem is antisemitism, ICE is nice, etc.  As a former TV journalist who believes none of this nonsense, elected to make the medieval trustees look modern, Shipman's best course is to resign before they axe her.  And then? 

Listen up, Columbia, here is an idea that could save you: 

Let the University Senate choose the next President.  Let it be a president with academic stature,  committed to academic freedom.  Give the University back to its rightful stewards: faculty, staff, and students.  Roar, Lions, Roar.  

 

Copyright 2025 by Tom Phillips 

 

The Dance a Coup Couldn't Cancel

US Patriots at the Pyramids 

The White House’s first wave of assaults on government-funded programs left many defunct or disabled. But at least one group managed to carry out its plans, without federal funds and in defiance of an order to stop. These intrepid and inspired artists are the performers of Time Lapse Dance, led by New York choreographer Jody Sperling (center, above).

With a grant from the US Embassy in Cairo, the company spent three years planning a tour--- to perform for children and young people at Egypt’s Hakawy International Arts Festival. On Sunday, January 26th, the day before they were to depart, Sperling woke up to a message from the State Department: her grant was terminated and she must stop the program immediately.  It was a short phone call, she says. She was in shock.  The costumes were all packed, the plane tickets purchased.  She began a frantic round of fund-raising, and re-negotiating contracts with her Egyptian hosts.  “They can’t stop us from going,” she said.  Long story short: the cancelled tour went on. 

Obsessed with Light

 

Loie Fuller 

                                                                    
                                    

"God said, 'Let there be light.'  And there was light."  Genesis 1:3

"Edison's here to stay."  The Bee Gees 

"We don't know what light is.  We can't even see it until it strikes something."   Jennifer Tipton 

The last of these quotes comes from the New York's leading theatrical lighting director.  And it represents the mystery at the heart of a dazzling new documentary, "Obsessed with Light." The film is about an obscure character in the history of dance -- Loie Fuller, a "western gal" from Kansas who became a sensation in Paris a hundred years ago.  But ultimately it is about the miracle of human creation -- what we do with the light God gave us, and the light we make for ourselves. 

Fuller created exotic dances that she and her company performed in outsize costumes, with a home-made apparatus that extended their arms into wings.  And she lit them with early electric light, through a hand-painted color wheel.  The poet William Butler Yeats was mesmerized:        

When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound 
A shining web. a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air 
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round 
Or hurried them off on its own furious path... 
                              --- Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen   

Yeats's poem was about a world gone wrong -- emerging from the disaster of World War One only to whirl heedlessly into even greater catastrophes. And today, as we hurtle into the second coming of  President Trump, Loie lives.  

Her mantle, her floating ribbon of cloth, has been picked up by New York choreographer Jody Sperling and her Time Lapse Dance company.  They bring Loie to life in the film, performing new works and lighting them with contemporary technology that Fuller could only dream of.  The finale is a dazzling solo by Sperling in which the dancer disappears and all we see is light playing on her whirling robe. 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, wrote Yeats in his "Second Coming."  Turning is what Sperling and her dancers do, turning themselves into instruments of fabric and light, a light that is not overcome by the darkness.  Time Lapse Dance has taken up the cause of the Earth.  They dance as trees, or wind, or covered with plastic bags, as garbage.  Sperling calls them "eco-artists," in residence at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, a nearly 150-year-old organization that stubbornly clings to its dreams of creating a better world.  Following in Loie Fuller's footsteps, Sperling and her troupe will be touring and teaching in Egypt next month at the invitation of the US Embassy in Cairo.   

Fuller's apparatus, made of wood, serves to bridge the gap between humanity and nature--- doubling the reach of human beings, endowing them with godlike presence.  In the shadow of the pyramids, Time Lapse Dance will be dancing for civilization to survive its obsessions, for humanity to save its home.    

Meanwhile "Obsessed with Light" -- a labor of love by directors Sabine Krayenbuhl amd Zeva Oelbaum -- has been picked up for distribution in the US and Canada, and held over at the New Plaza Cinema in New York.  It is exhaustively researched, elegantly shot in its interviews with Tipton and other artists inspired by Fuller, and most of all brilliantly edited, mixing new material with snippets of Fuller in black and white and color.  Loie would be thrilled, and so will anyone who cares about dance, film, life, light, and this world.   

-- Copyright 2025 by Tom Phillips
 

Hip-Hop Conquers K-Pop

"Trivial Perfection" Photo by Richard Termine

Japan Society’s 2025 Contemporary Dance Festival offered a gender sandwich Saturday night, reflecting some of the current cultural turmoil in east Asia. An all-male troupe from Korea opened the program, and an all-female ensemble from Japan ended it. In between was a pas de deux from Taiwan, with a twist or two.

The K-boys — five guys who call themselves C.Sense, short for crude sensibility —won the audience and the night hands down, or rather hands up, with a precision workout they called “Trivial Perfection.” In T-shirts and gym shorts, they turned simple movements into complex forms and moving shapes — pyramids, spirals, implosions and explosions. They started with finger-flexing, proceeded to arm-flapping and hand-slapping and then body-slamming — chest to chest like football players. The wild card was the fifth guy, an androgynous musician who sat quietly at a keyboard for most of the piece, creating a background stew of hums and pings. Toward the end he picked up an electric guitar and broke into a corrosive, heavy metal blues break a la Jimi Hendrix. The four dancers responded, each with his own break-dance variation. It was like self-expressive American culture breaking into the traditional collectivism of east Asia. Hip-hop has conquered the world, and K-pop has embraced it.

“Nobody takes ballet any more,” sighed my companion, a former dancer, during the break after the first piece. “All they do is jump around and roll on the floor.” And sure enough, the pas de deux from Taiwan titled “…and, or…” featured acrobatic tumbles and off-balance leaps and lifts. The plot was familiar: boy chases girl and girl chases boy through every conceivable approach and avoidance. They share a nice little hug toward the end, but the conclusion is almost as ambivalent as the beginning. The innovation was in the casting —choreographer I-Ling Liu deliberately chose a small man and a taller woman — going not for gender reversal, she said, but gender equality. And in fact they seemed to be of equal strength, and were able to lift and throw each other around in turn. The dance was fast-moving, the moves were difficult and pulled off with elan, and it was performed successfully without any music. Liu said she wanted to challenge the audience to just watch the dance. We were up to it.

Japanese choreographer Ruri Mito and her eight-woman troupe closed the program on an ambitious but ambiguous note. In “Where we were Born,” Mito said she was trying to re-create the origins of life. In murky light, the women formed a moving blob that surged and swayed, peaked and fell, briefly broke up and quickly reformed. According to Mito the piece was made to be seen in the round, and it suffered on the square proscenium stage at Japan Society.  It looked like the psycho-pathology of Japanese womanhood--- non-individuals lumped together, living a primitive existence in the dark.   

I longed for the lights to come up and individual dancers to step out, but it wasn’t going to happen. So we saw one side of a blob that remains a mystery. Once again the ensemble dancing was impressive, a bit like an English sword dance where dancers are linked together, never let go and must move as a unit. But here you had little idea of what was going on inside the blob.   

"Where we were born"  Photo by Richard Termine 

         

As always, the program curated by Japan Society’s artistic director Yoko Shioya was on point — top quality dancing that reflected the current cultural turmoil of east Asia. Some Korean women are refusing to have anything to do with men, and Japan’s birth rate is cratering. Things may be more normal in Taiwan, at least until the Chinese invade. But whatever happens, hip-hop’s not going away.

Copyright 2025 by Tom Phillips 

Future News: The End of Plastic

 

Earth with Plastic Rings:  Image by Gemini 

Last night I had the strangest dream
Clear and yet fantastic --
I dreamed the the world had found a way 
To say farewell to plastic.

Aboard the Flying Saucer X
January 8, 2030

The world’s richest man has a new scheme and a new company that promises to end the problem of excess plastic waste. Elong Mush wants to shoot it into space, and make it a celestial tourist attraction rivaling the rings of Saturn. Beyond that, he says orbiting trash can also solve the world’s climate crisis

“Let’s stop kidding ourselves,” Mush told reporters at a news conference aboard his personal space station, Flying Saucer X. “Ninety-nine percent of the plastic junk we put in recycling bins ends up in landfill. And with the seas rising a foot a year, we are rapidly running out of land to fill.”

Mush’s new company is called XS, and will be run by his nine-year-old son X. The two unveiled plans to use battery-powered garbage compacters to crush plastic waste into huge cylinders, which would be shot into orbit daily by Mush’s Space-X rockets. The cylinders would be painted silver and gold to reflect the sun’s rays back into space. 

Within ten years, claims Mush, the orbiting cylinders would appear as rings around the earth — “a golden diadem for our gentle blue giant,” said X Mush, reading from a press release. The rings would be visible from any point in the universe, according to the nine-year-old, who received a replica of the Hubble space telescope as a Christmas present from his father.

X also predicted the plastic rings would reduce sunlight on earth by up to ten percent, and lower global temperatures by 2.5 degrees Celsius, solving the climate crisis. Elong Mush said the plan has the full blessing of King Donald and the royal family. He added that Prince Barron is eager to press the button that will launch the first plastic refuse into orbit. At that point, X interrupted his father, arguing that as CEO of XS, he should get to go first.  An altercation ensued and the news conference was cut short.

The remainder of this article has been redacted by the US Ministry of Culture.

-- Copyright 2030 by Tom Phillips 

Plastic Waste

Elon Musk

Space

Climate Change

Donald Trump