Dance: A Selection

Is the Holocaust too big for art? It depends on the artists. In A Selection, which debuted in New York City recently, the members of Pilobolus team up with children’s authors Maurice Sendak and Arthur Yorinks to compress the ultimate nightmare into an indelibly fearful fable about a troupe of traveling players who miss the last train out of Nazi Germany. Otis Cook gives the performance of a lifetime as a lewdly smirking stranger dressed in death-camp gray who meets them at the station. The music is by Hans Krasa and Pavel Haas, two composers who died in Auschwitz; and the set, by Sendak, has the jarring simplicity of a bedtime story gone terribly wrong.

–By Terry Teachout