* ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER (Through Sunday) This is the last weekend of this vibrant company's annual City Center season, with the last of the programs of seasonal novelties tonight.
I'm Australian, so fall firmly into the former camp, and decided to head down to the Thames' finest Antipodean novelty bar for last night's 'Straya Day celebrations.
The program began with the novelty of the night, the New York debut of the Yi-Jo Lim Sun Dance Company from South Korea.
That explains the big novelty of the evening, a "Catherine Wheel Suite" by Ms. Tharp, which rightly came at the end of an otherwise less choreographically arresting program.
In Opus 111, the most mystical of the series, I began to yearn for more shadings in the middle ground between utmost vehemence and utmost lyricism; the effect of swinging from one extreme to the other lost novelty as the evening went on.
"You have to understand the novelty of the morning paper.
Many studies have attempted to identify the morphodynamic control of iterative organization and how such patterning mechanisms change during development to generate evolutionary novelty [ 6, 7, 21, 35- 37].
The novelty on the New York Philharmonic program last night at Philharmonic Hall, with George Szell conducting, was Rossini's Overture to "Il Viaggio a Reima," rarely heard here.
On a little chalkboard beneath the usual selection was a description of the night's novelty drink, just for us: STATE OF THE UNION SPECIAL THE EXECUTIVE ORDER Campari, Gin, Mango, Apple Cider The "O" in "Order" was drawn to resemble the famous Obama logo.
Performing a diverse selection of songs spanning almost a century of the American musical and interspersing these works with charmingly playful patter, she gave ample room Saturday night to novelty numbers that allowed this dramatic singer a rare opportunity to flex her musical comedy muscles.
