Juniper's Best of 2024, Part One
Music & Theatre & Dance, oh my!
2024 was full of some great stuff: music, books, performance, and more. I haven’t done a little wrap up like this in a while! My last one was for 2020 – another wild, ambivalent year. Ambivalence is just what years look like these days haha ha. 2024 was brat, it was f*cked, it was going through stuff. 2025 is off to a shaky start itself, but – ya know! through the horrors, we persist!! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But– I loved these things in 2024. Part one because this has been languishing in my drafts for months now, and I’d rather get this much out!
Music
I don’t have an album of the year, but definitely had an album for each season.
Winter: The Past is Still Alive, by Hurray For the Riff Raff.
Honestly, just kidding– this is my strongest contender for my album of the year. The songs are just so well-made. Sturdy yet vivid, like majestic trees in the sunlight.
Runners Up: Blue Raspberry, Katy Kirby (Partially wrote about this one over at my former blog: there’s something about Katy Kirby’s phrasings that feels sharp. If I could assign Blue Raspberry a tarot suite, it’s the Swords – from the laceration of the Three to the devastation of Ten); Autopoietica, Mon Laferte (big bus/work album. I love the way it veers between genres, she can do anything.)
Spring: Look To The East, Look To The West, by Camera Obscura
I have loved Camera Obscura for over twelve years, ever since they were my moody high school soundtrack. This is their first album in literally over a decade; I was sure they were broken up for good after their keyboardist sadly passed away. (also like, weird terf allegations were discouraging. argh!!) East, West is mellow, satisfying indie pop, great for a day on the water. Favorites are “Pop Goes Pop” and “We’re Gonna Make it in A Man’s World.”
Runners Up: Heartless Things, Rachel Sumner (clever and evocative songwriting from one of my faves); Cowboy Carter, Beyonce (HERE FOR COUNTRY BEYONCE); O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack (HERE FOR OLD-TIME) (aside: i’m trying to make a playlist called “frog boiling” that would go from old-time to hyperpop)
Summer: brat, by Charli XCX
Naturally. From the pulsing strut of “von dutch” to the fragility of “I think about it all the time,” the deadpan stare of “spring breakers” to the whirling swoon of “Talk Talk” – that bonkers piano break in “mean girls” !! – brat fits in so much, all within Charli’s signature style of outsider pop and club music. My favorites, “everything is romantic” and “sympathy is a knife,” capture for me what catapulted brat up into the heights – a perfect mixture of musical experimentation and earnest emotion.
Runners Up: Only God Was Above Us, Vampire Weekend (they are BACK baby – great for a neighborhood walk!); Charm, Clairo (yumm yummy groovy and beckoning); Big Ideas, Remi Wolf (Soup and Motorcycle on repeat)
Fall: Imaginal Disk, by Magdalena Bay
I wrote about this in my last post, but yeah, damn I love this album. Music to blast off to, to imagine what a cloud’s eye view looks like. There’s a synth that comes in midway through “The Ballad of Matt & Mica” that gets me every time. It sounds chunky, gleeful, eager; it sounds like a parallel universe knocking at the door of ours.
Runners Up: I Got Heaven, Mannequin Pussy (god what a damn rush – see the title track); What a Relief, Katie Gavin (I literally couldn’t get Inconsolable out of my head for days)
Various loves for tracks:
“Right Back to It” by Waxahatchee (yeeeeeah) – “I Got Heaven” by Mannequin Pussy (goes so fucking hard) – “One Fine Day” by the Chiffons (Carole King’s opening piano is such a rush) – “SPEYSIDE” by Bon Iver (I formally apologize to Bon Iver for singing nonsense lyrics to this song before I learned them) – “Love Song” by softcult (we love some sappy fuzzy shoegazy stuff!!) - “Kingdom Come” by Cindy lee (so catchy, so intricate and ghostly)
Live Performance
Concerts
some big. some small. yay live music ;)
I finally got to see Camera Obscura in concert, thank god. (Loving bands that will never tour again is a trend for me. Examples: The Hush Sound and Smith Westerns. R.I.P.)
Saw Hurray for the Riff Raff at Battery Park with a spectacular sunset overhead
Didn’t see Chappell Roan but I did scream “LETS FUCKING GO” at the Ethel Cain set at All Things Go.
R.I.P. to Rockwood Hall
Dance
I mainly saw tap dance and shows with my friend Noa in them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Music From the Sole, dir. Leonardo Sandoval, at the Joyce Theatre. you know it’s gonna be a great show when a live band marches through the aisle. brilliant, heartwarming performance by a company that channels Brazilian-influenced rhythms through incredible tap dance and live music.
Ayodele Casel’s solo in the Max Roach Centennial, at the Joyce Theatre. Duetting with archival recording of Max Roach, Ayodele Casel ventures out to the furthest reaches of her tap dance palette. I got the sense of her calling on great hoofers past, not giving a shit about presentability (she throws out a neat stomp time step for the audience like a bone to a dog), and just tunneling in to her form to incredible effect
“!!simon says~~!;):))$$” by Noa Rui-Pin Weiss and Miranda Young at the BRIC. “high five if– ” ~ fringe and tassels ~ no free feet footage ~ i’m biased cuz Noa’s my friend but this duet is so good. it’s not only great dancing – it’s great performance, playing with audience expectations of what choreographic humor looks like, what task-based performance looks like, and what glistening looks like. Venmo @ dancerfeet
Double bill: Kingdom by Jade Manns / Immaterial Supreme by Glenn Potter-Takata, at Danspace
i’ve seen various iterations of Manns’s choreography and her production of Kingdom in December was my favorite yet. her style is one of steady, patient accumulation: her dancers form suggestive tableaus, one after the other, that build up in your mind as you watch. they could be animals, they could be biblical scenes. this time around, an extra dancer walked around the others, spectating along with us. it lent a sense of indifference, or complicitness, or helplessness, to the movement.
Glenn Potter-Takata puts together such inventive contrasts of old and new. One example, from an earlier work of his: him muttering a Buddhist prayer while holding a Pikachu charm. Immaterial Supreme ran in the same vein. It begins with him under a gigantic, mic’d up tarp. sitting up, coiling into himself, he gasps for air as the feedback from his movement crackles overhead. I thought of a frozen lake surface; I thought of Neo in The Matrix.
Still/Here, revival at BAM
Also wrote about this in my last post, and while it wasn’t my perfect dance show, the depth of feeling it plumbs – its full-throated call for grappling with our mortality while we’re still alive – will stay with me a long while.
Theatre
Cats: The Jellicle Ball, at the newfangled Perelman Center. It shouldn’t work but it did. The Jellicle Ball will live on forever in my heart. an ode to ball culture and trans foremothers past. I walked up and laid my hand on the catwalk during intermission and it felt like approaching sacred ground. Like witnessing a trace of artistries which were and are very much endangered
Our Town, on Broadway. My favorite play yet, and my first time seeing it staged. I cried!! a lot!!! Thornton Wilder, you sick, sick man!! how dare you make us perceive the fragile wonder that is mundane human life!!! great casting and staging choices in this production. noticed how Protestant leaning the cosmology of this play is this time. but what lingers with me are the small details – of neighbors shucking peas together, of the morning light on outside walls, of gravestones on a hillside
Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists, at BAM. This play is about a family in some unspecified future. In this family, turning 28 involves a special tradition: They kidnap a government fascist and the birthday baby gets to murder them. The latest would-be murderer has some qualms. It’s a play exploring lives of people resisting fascism, and the ethics of killing evil people – of killing at all. “Isn’t murder the ultimate form of silence?” It’s very much in the vein of Brecht’s theatrical plays, which aimed to shock audiences into awareness and political action. Kudos to this show for making an audience erupt in outcry; I watched this production a couple days after the election and the energy was palpable.
Illinoise, on Broadway. The case can be made that Illinoise is just a Justin Peck sneaker ballet that’s been transposed to Broadway and blown up to Broadway scale, but it’s so much more than that. The live arrangements of Sufjan Stevens’s immortal songs, the tender writing of the accompanying zine, and, of course, the furious, fantastic dancing all mix into something new. I sobbed.
Sweeney Todd, on Broadway. Saw early on in 2024 so I can’t recall much BUT Julien and i had a great time. Surprisingly great choreography by Steven Hoggett – I usually expect a lot of park-and-bark for Sondheim shows, just given the vocal acrobatics involved, but that may be just my limited experience.
The Notebook, on Broadway. Oh I can’t believe this straight ass romance made me cry on the first day of pride. yet another Broadway production with live running water on the stage (thinking of The Outsiders and also Caroline, or Change a few years back). Joy Woods is amazing and she will definitely be blowing up.
White Christmas, at the Gateway Theatre. Fantastic regional production, with a special shoutout to Billy friends in the cast and the wonderful (tap dance!!) choreography by Mary Giattino, after the fashion of the inimitable Randy Skinner.
Did you listen to or see any of these? Did we share any favorites? Talk to me!
I’ll return in February with my favorite books and movies of 2024. Take care.