Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence Dance Company will perform GRACE at this year’s Fall for Dance Festival at City Center (photo by Paul Kolnick)
NY City Center
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
September 28 – October 10
Tickets: $10
212-581-1212
www.nycitycenter.org
The annual Fall for Dance Festival at City Center runs September 28 through October 9, but you better not wait to get tickets, because they go extremely fast — not only because they offer a chance to see some great dance companies but also because they cost only ten bucks apiece. This year’s lineup includes performances by Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Gallim Dance, Madhavi Mudgal, and the Miami City Ballet, and that’s only the first two nights. Other programs feature Company Rafaela Carrasco, the New York City Ballet, Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company, and Companhia Urbana de Dança (9/30 and 10/1), Shu-Yi & (Dancers) Company, the San Francisco Ballet, Emanuel Gat Dance, and Paul Taylor Dance Company (10/2-3), Keigwin + Company with Juilliard Dance, Corella Ballet Castilla y León, Russell Maliphant Company, and Jason Samuels Smith & Friends (10/6-7), and Tero Saarinen Company, Dresden Semperoper Ballett, American Ballet Theatre, and Ronald K. Brown / Evidence, A Dance Company (10/8-9).
Husband-and-wife filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash follow a flock of sheep herded by a family of Norwegian-American cowboys on their last sojourns through the public lands of Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in the gorgeously photographed, surprisingly intimate, and sometimes very funny documentary SWEETGRASS. In 2001, Castaing-Taylor, director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, and Barbash, a curator of Visual Anthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, found out about the Allestad ranch, an old-fashioned, Old West group of sheepherders who still did everything by hand, including leading hundreds of sheep on a 150-mile journey into the mountains for summer pasture with only a few dogs and horses. Director Castaing-Taylor uses no voice-over narration or intertitles, instead inviting the viewer to join in the story as if in the middle of the action, offering no judgments or additional information. The film begins with shearing and feeding, then birthing and mothering, before heading out on the long, sometimes treacherous trail, especially at night, when bears and wolves sneak around, looking for food. Slowly the focus switches to the men themselves, primarily an old-time singing grizzled ranch hand and a cursing, complaining cowboy. Castaing-Taylor and Barbash spent three years with the sheepherders and in the surrounding areas, amassing more than two hundred hours of footage and making to date nine films out of their experiences, mostly shorter work to be displayed in gallery installations or for anthropological reasons; SWEETGRASS is the only one to be released theatrically. It’s a fascinating look at a something that is destined to soon be gone forever. The film is closing out 92YTribeca’s monthly Eat This Film! series with a special screening September 15, introduced by Castaing-Taylor, Barbash, and local sheep farmer Eugene Wyatt.