If a ballet is remounted eighty-five years later with new choreography, music, costumes, and (obviously) a new cast, but in the same basic setting, is it a revival, or an entirely new production? Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s Filling Station raised that question in two performances at the Mobil on 8th Avenue and Horatio Street in Greenwich Village, presented by The Kitchen. With his collaborators, Lutz-Kinoy created a new entity connected only by title and rough structure to the 1938 ballet by the same name choreographed by Lew Christensen, with libretto by Virgil Thomson.
WITH THE WINDING TITLE of her latest dance, Mapping a Forest While Searching for an Opposite Term of Exorcist, the choreographer Mina Nishimura suggests she’s looking for a role, a word, which she has so far grasped only by way of its inverse. As the audience filed into Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church before the show, the work’s title was projected across one wall. If an exorcist expels spirits from a body, or a space, would Nishimura and her collaborators be inviting spirits in, summoning the supernatural into their bodies and the space of the church?It sometimes seemed that way, if