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As part of its third program at the Joyce Theater, Pilobolus unveiled a work that broke the company’s artistic mold. For “Contradance,” receiving its New York premiere on Monday evening, two former dancers choreographed a production without the assistance of one of Pilobolus’s artistic directors.
Matt Kent and Renée Jaworski (the group’s rehearsal director and artistic associate) tell a story of two misfits who find a connection one soulful night. “Contradance” also features music by Dan Zanes, who leads a family-oriented, Grammy-winning band. While the work doesn’t herald a fresh choreographic voice within the Pilobolus family, the pairing of Mr. Zanes’s music and Liz Prince’s costumes lends a certain dreaminess to the production.
The dance for six — it was created in collaboration with Winston Dynamite Brown, Eriko Jimbo, Jun Kuribayashi, Nile H. Russell, Annika Sheaff and Christopher Whitney, as well as others — focuses on an outcast (Mr. Kuribayashi, who is never too far from his rocking chair) and a demure young woman (Ms. Jimbo). Her friends, who clamp kazoos in their mouths like cigars, try to prevent her from getting too close to the stranger. The couple nevertheless find love: as Mr. Zanes puts it, “two misfits on the endless sea, drifting so easy and free.”
Eventually, the boy-meets-girl routine grows tiresome; often Mr. Kent and Ms. Jaworski don’t have enough material to fill the music. Poised on the rocking chair — which, at one point, becomes something of a boat — the couple sway back and forth. Ms. Jimbo holds a tattered umbrella and suddenly, held aloft by the other dancers, she and Mr. Kuribayashi soar through the night.
In the end, “Contradance” is too naïve for adult consumption. (There’s also something about the dance that resembles a Kindle commercial.)
Far more enthralling is “Gnomen,” a dance for four men choreographed in 1997 by Robby Barnett and Jonathan Wolken, in collaboration with the original dancers. On Monday Mr. Brown, Mr. Kuribayashi, Mr. Russell and Mr. Whitney — as if linked by strands of silk — moved through rigorous, sculptural positions with a startling airiness. The theme of an outsider is present, but here the result has weight.
Pilobolus continues through Aug. 7 at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 242-0800, joyce.org. -
HOBOKEN, N.J. — John McCauley, gaunt and scraggly, clutched an electric guitar at Maxwell’s here on Monday night, finger-picking a lone song, “Houston, TX,” by himself. His band, Deer Tick, had spent the past hour digging into roadhouse country and rawboned rock ’n’ roll, with a bluntly effective fervor. This solo interlude seemed like an unscheduled detour, announced on the fly. But it was a clear, vital moment in an unfocused show.
“Houston, TX” comes from “Born on Flag Day” (Partisan), Deer Tick’s winningly ragged 2009 album, and in the original arrangement it’s a lilting shuffle, offered in tribute to the Bakersfield sound. Here, Mr. McCauley made it more desperate, nearly unmoored. His voice — tart, coarse, with a liberal pinch of twang — felt painfully exposed, adding weight to his lyrics about cutting loose from an exhausted love affair.
“There’s nothing left,” he sang, “and I am sure that it’s a sign/That maybe I’m about as good as gone.” The shift from “sure” to “maybe” in those lines felt awkwardly true to the song, and so did a later jolt of self-reproach: “I ain’t gonna talk like a gentleman, no/‘Cause I’m sick of always letting myself down.” Pulling back from the microphone as if repulsed, Mr. McCauley yelped that last word again: “Down! Down!”
Since forming Deer Tick in Providence, R.I., late in 2004, Mr. McCauley has been both its engine and its engineer. Last month brought “The Black Dirt Sessions” (Partisan), another album stocked with his cagey, questioning songs. But Deer Tick, whose current tour will end on Aug. 13 at Webster Hall in Manhattan, seems to be in some kind of flux: this show included just a handful of tunes from the new release, most of them tossed off or hurried through. And the band’s frontman often took a backseat.
He surrendered the wheel mostly to Ian O’Neil, the other guitarist in Deer Tick, and increasingly its other songwriter. “Hope Is Big,” one of Mr. O’Neil’s better songs, took the form of a heaving country waltz. Elsewhere he leaned more toward snarling honky-tonk, as on a stomping cover of Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene.” Mr. O’Neil was merely serviceable as a singer, which at least put him ahead of the band’s Amish-bearded drummer, Dennis Ryan, whose take on Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” was pure stunt work, a floppy salute to Jack Black.
Stunts can be fine, and Deer Tick delivered a few that worked: a furious romp through ZZ Top’s “Cheap Sunglasses,” for one, and a perfectly smarmy alto saxophone solo by Rob Crowell, the band’s keyboardist, on “Ashamed.” That song had the crowd singing along with its chorus: “And oh, what a crying shame, what a crying shame/What we became.”
It would be wrong and too facile to apply that lamentation to Deer Tick, which has a lot going for it as a band. But with the way things are headed, Mr. McCauley might consider a side project: solo acoustic, perhaps, so he could move along without actually moving on.
Deer Tick will appear on Wednesday at Ottobar in Baltimore, on Thursday at the Rock and Roll Hotel in Washington, and on Friday and Saturday at Floydfest in Floyd, Va.; deertickmusic.com. -
PAU, France — In the closing moments of Tuesday’s stage of the Tour de France, just as in the old days when he dominated this race, Lance Armstrong tried to win.
Pierrick Fedrigo celebrated his stage 16 victory of the Tour de France.
He rose from his seat and began to sprint to the finish line, churning the smooth, muscled legs that helped him win seven Tour titles. But this time, unlike so many times in the past, there was no happy ending for Armstrong, the most successful rider in Tour history.
In what Armstrong says will be his final Tour, he was just not good enough.
Armstrong finished sixth on Tuesday in Stage 16, the Frenchman Pierrick Fedrigo outsprinting him to the finish line. Afterward, Armstrong spoke briefly before remounting his bike and riding to his hotel, initially with a police escort — and a grimace.
“It was hard; it’s been a while since I sprinted,” Armstrong said, his face still sweaty and covered with a film of dust. “Just not quick enough.”
Armstrong — who at 38 is one of the oldest Tour riders — had hoped to win a stage as consolation for not winning the whole race.
With four stages left, though, his chances are running out. His best opportunity for a victory was very likely on Tuesday, when he made it into an early breakaway along the 124-mile route, which included four grueling climbs. In the final stages, he will probably not be able to keep up with better climbers, sprinters and time-trial specialists.
Armstrong’s hopes for an overall victory vanished about eight days into this three-week event because of bad luck and crashes.
Several times, he was caught behind riders who had crashed. Twice he fell, including once in Stage 8, when he hit the pavement going about 40 miles per hour. That day, he finished nearly 12 minutes behind the stage winner, an example of how tumultuous this Tour has been for him, on and off the bike.
Earlier this week, Armstrong — who has 25 Tour stage victories — said he did not want other riders to let him win one final time just because they felt sorry for him.
“Back in our heyday, we didn’t give anything away,” he said. “So I don’t want anybody to say, Hey, let’s let the old man have one.”
And no one did. No matter how much power Armstrong once wielded in the peloton, there was no mercy Tuesday.
Fedrigo, the sixth French rider to win a Tour stage this year, saw his fans and family along the route and was motivated to win for them.
“I wasn’t afraid of Armstrong in the sprint,” he said.
The Belgian rider Jurgen Van de Walle, who finished seventh, sensed how much Armstrong had wanted the victory. But at the Tour, every rider wants to win, he said.
“He was a great champion and he has a strong head, and I think he didn’t want to leave the Tour without success,” Van de Walle said. “Even with the bad luck he has had, he still stayed in the Tour to prove something. But there are no gifts in the Tour.”
The overall race leaders were unchanged after the stage. The defending champion, Alberto Contador, is still eight seconds ahead of Luxembourg’s Andy Schleck, who was the Tour runner-up last year. Spain’s Samuel Sánchez is third, two minutes back.
Though Armstrong finished third last year, he lags in 25th place, 33 minutes 46 seconds back. But that is by design, he and his RadioShack team manager, Johan Bruyneel, said.
Once Armstrong’s podium hopes disappeared, he and Bruyneel decided that Armstrong needed to save his energy for a possible stage win. So after plummeting in the standings in the first eight days, Armstrong proceeded to take it relatively easy. He finished way back nearly every day — in 70th, 114th and even 130th.
On some days, Armstrong acted as the Tour’s cruise director, laughing and chatting with fans, and thanking them for coming as he pedaled to the finish line.
“Once you know you’re not going to be the best guy, then I’m going to, like I said in the beginning, sit up and enjoy it,” Armstrong when asked about his deflated effort. “Look around, look at people, listen to people. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not going to win the Tour.”
Armstrong took some flak for it. In an article in the French sports newspaper L’Equipe last Sunday, a reporter wrote that Armstrong had started the Tour as a professional cyclist, then became a tourist on a bike, then was simply a tourist. -
Bloggers under 21 come in a distant second at 20.2 percent, with the 36 to 50 bracket close behind at 19.4 percent. Only about 7.1 percent of bloggers are over 51.
As might be expected, 21- to 35-year-olds now constitute a majority of all bloggers, making up 53.3 percent of that population, according to analysis by the social media consulting firm Sysomos.
While age helps define the blogging demographic, gender does not: male and female bloggers are almost equally split.
The United States has nearly one-third of all bloggers, with more than four times that of the next country, Britain. But blogging does not always match up with Twitter use. In another report from Sysomos, Indonesia, for instance, had the sixth most Twitter users, but was not even among the top 15 for blogging representation.
Mobile phones, which can be used for Twitter, are more common in Asia than are Internet connections, said Nilesh Bansal, chief technology officer and co-founder of Sysomos. In addition, he said, “when blogging was booming, back in 2000, 1 percent of the Indonesian population had the Internet and hence they were not part of the blogging revolution.”
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