In no particular order and in no way comprehensive, I bring you some high, low and frivolous items from the year in performance:
1. Worst Failure to Play Ball: Gerard Mortier and New York City Opera.
2. Best Offer NYCO is Likely to Get in Mortier’s Disastrous Wake: “CC+NYCO=A Way Forward.” Well, unless the beleaguered company manages to pull this off. If La Cieca says it’s so, chances are it shall be so - we knew George Steel couldn’t be serious about Dallas.
3. Most Upsetting Recent Victim of the New York Real Estate Market: The Ohio Theatre. 
4. Best Impersonation of a Feminine Hygiene Commercial: This one is arguable - lots of competition out there - but the winner is … Pina Bausch’s “Bamboo Blues”! The billowing fabric, the soft-focus choreography, the unctuous music. Sometimes the Queen of Tanztheater gets that not-so-fresh feeling. And let’s not even touch her treatment of the subcontinent.
5. Cruelest Jilting Part 1: Alexei Ratmansky leaving New York City Ballet at the altar. The invitations had been sent out and everything.
Alexei! Come back!
6. Cruelest Jilting Part 2/Best Thing to Happen to One of the Big Ballet Companies in Ages: Ratmansky saying “I do” to American Ballet Theater. Can he make “America’s National Ballet Company” relevant again?
7. Most Traumatic Stage Flashing: Ian McKellen in “King Lear” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Yes, this did happen in 2007. But the memories lingered in ‘08. Nothing prepares you for something like that.
8. Most Frustrating Dance Festival That Everyone Loves: Fall for Dance, and its utter refusal to acknowledge progressive contemporary choreographers.
FIAF kicks FFD’s ass
9. New Interdisciplinary Festival with the Most Potential: FIAF’s “Crossing the Line.” Great artists, curators with vision, and it gets better: there’s French money behind this sucker. In an economic meltdown, European support is a New York presenter’s best friend.
10. …speaking of New York presenters… Saddest Ongoing Construction Trend: small New York performance venues mortgaging their souls to build state-of-the-art theaters. Will Dixon Place be the newest club member? New and fancy and bigger ain’t always better - especially if you can’t pay the electricity bills.
11. Best Little Interdisciplinary Theater That Could: The Chocolate Factory. NTUSA, Eleanor Bauer, “1965UU,” the free chocolates at the door - there’s always something good on offer at the CF which, thus far, has managed to avoid the supersize me urge.
Paul Lazar in Mac Wellman’s “1965UU”
12. Most Wrongheaded Grant-Giving: Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and Nonprofit Finance Fund. $15.125 million given to just 10 “leading/pioneering” (highly questionable: Misnomer? Jacob’s Pillow? Alvin Ailey?) arts organizations, at a time when funding is drying up and organizations are dying? Oy.
13. Best New Club/Most Shameless Self-Promotion: The WNYC Performance Club! Join us on Saturday, or in January. And have happy, happy holidays!
Update: Here’s the on-air segment: http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/119735
December 19th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Great list, Claudia! I’m with you on the FIAF and of course the Chocolate Factory…here are some of mine -
1. Best show I didn’t see: DV8 at Montclair State. Can somebody please get this venue some marketing?
2. Best New York show in another city: Gatz at the MCA in Chicago. I already loved the two Scotts and now it’s bordering on obsession.
3. Biggest disappointment: Goat Island’s the Lastmaker. I don’t care about their illustrious past and complicated creative process - it was boring.
4. Best-ever use of kids in a dance: Yasuko Yokoshi’s Reframe the Framework. I love seeing how Yasuko reinvents her work with every new piece, and this was one of the most honest pieces of dance I’ve ever seen.
5. Best performances for democracy and revolution: El Museo’s Arte no es vida and Creative Time’s Democracy in America performances were outstanding and nuts and oddly educational. Bring it on!
Happy new year!
Megan
December 19th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Hey Megan! Happy New Year to you as well - I think you said you would be joining us in January for Young Jean Lee? Hope so. I like your list, too - totally agree on Yasuko Yokoshi. That show was gorgeous, and so smart. And on DV8, which I didn’t get to see, either; was stuck covering other stuff. I heard mixed things about it, but am sad I didn’t get to decide for myself.
Goat Island I adored, but from what I’ve heard I’m in the minority on this one.
Do you know Sharon Hayes’ work? She took part in the Creative Time show - didn’t get to see here there, but her protest march/performance piece at the New Museum was one of the best works I saw last year. If I had done a straight up best/worst shows, she definitely would have been on it: http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/17/sharon_hayes
December 19th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Hey, Claudia -
Is there a contact email re: the club or are you doing it all through the blog?
I got to have a little chat with Sharon Hayes at the CT show - the installation there was fantastic, but unfortunately I missed the New Museum performance. For some reason I’m not getting the performance listings for the New Museum - I’m trying to stay on top of their site but I seem to miss them more than I catch them. Keep us posted!
Will you be catching Annie-B later?
Megan
December 19th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Moving forward it’s happening pretty much via the blog, although I’m still trying to work out the best method for communication. All club posts are listed under the Performance Club tag. The Jan. event is Young Jean Lee at the Kitchen, and should be easier for people to attend as it’s spread over several weekends.
I won’t be seeing Annie-B’s show - please let me know how it is if you go. I’ve never met Hayes. Hope to someday.
December 20th, 2008 at 12:12 am
Thank you thank you thank you for #4! I’ve been searching for some bit of a sensible review. God, I couldn’t believe that was Pina Bausch. I left half-way through. The elevator music, the predictable gimick-props, the tedious long hair and gowns, the comedic hetero-domestic bliss, and yes, that over-arching neocolonial feel–a european on a cruise around india perhaps? Wow.
December 20th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Re: wrong-headed grant giving. Claudia, do you have a list of companies that would have been more worthy beneficiaries? As they say, money attracts money.
December 22nd, 2008 at 11:07 am
Your welcome, Erika! And rest assured, you’re not alone: I’ve heard from A LOT of (smart) people who left at intermission.
Hey Maria, thanks for your question. There are so many companies and organizations that can’t be supported enough. For starters, Nos. 3, 9 and 11 on this list; the loss of the Ohio Theatre is a tragedy for this city, and for the art form of theater. Movement Research also comes to mind … But of course everyone’s list would vary slightly: the thing to ask, it seems to me, is where can the money do the most good? Will focusing an incredible amount of support on individual companies like Misnomer (which doesn’t seem to be doing anything that a lot of other performance groups aren’t investigating, in terms of technology, and in artistic terms isn’t particularly interesting) or Ailey (which is, more power to it, already doing pretty darn well for itself) be the best thing for the field, or simply a great thing for these companies?
This is a huge and complicated issue, and I will be the first to admit that I’m rendering it in overly crude terms. But… I think that “money attracts money” is perhaps not the best way to approach how we support the arts - that’s not really a good model for non-profit, is it? These small, struggling presenters I mentioned in No. 10 are a good example - they’re broke, at best, and often because of bad financial decisions as much as anything else. But the work they do to help the form advance is vital. An institution like Dance Theater Workshop is a good one to look at: huge amounts of debt as a result of a new building, the impoverished field in which it operates, its commitment to artists, poor fiscal management, etc. Financial issues are crippling its ability to operate: if the big autos get a bailout, why couldn’t DTW (definitely with strings attached, in terms of the board establishing and sticking to a viable financial plan)? We should be doing everything we can to support the vision of a brilliant curator like Carla Peterson, DTW’s artistic director. Everything.
January 2nd, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Hi Claudia-
Your information regarding Dixon Place is incorrect. They may have taken awhile to build their space because they did so as they had available funds and it was a pretty smart move if you ask me. Opening a new non-profit venue with no debt in NYC -How often does that happen?
There are no ‘mortgages’ or other debt as you imply and their bills are being paid on time. It is confusing to many of us who work with them why you won’t change your post to reflect the correct facts. Perhaps you should contact them directly instead of listening to rumors.
Kirby
January 2nd, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Hey Kirby,
Thanks for the comment - I do trust the sources I have, which are not rumor-mill sources.
My larger point is that I am dismayed by the drive so many institutions have to grow in terms of bricks and mortar, often at the expense of their original artistic missions. This problem is exacerbated by debt, but not necessarily caused by it. Much of what I’m talking about happens after these new spaces are up and running, or when they have no rainy-day fund to deal with things like notoriously slow/frozen gov’t funds.
January 5th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
re: Dixon Place
Although Ms. La Rocco may not know all of the details surrounding Dixon Place’s recent, struggling, and rather amateur, capital campaign. I did receive the following solicitation today from the venue, which incidentally, had to be sent to me THREE separate times. Hello Dixon Place! I want you to do well, I really do, but come on… it’s really not that difficult to cut-n-paste a paypal link.
“We invite you now to help us once again as we endeavor to stay on track. As some of you know, a large portion of our capital project was funded by a generous donation of stocks and mutual funds. Much of this was used for construction, but the remainder was intended to serve as a cash reserve for the increased operating costs of the new space. When the stock market tanked, we lost most of that reserve.”
Smells like organizational trouble to me.