Apr 29
When German expressionist choreographer Susanne Linke visited Senegal in 1998, her collaboration with the men of Compagnie Jant-Bi produced Le Coq est Mort(The Cock Is Dead). And this Euro-African dance theater production, coming to Gammage Auditorium on Wednesday, April 11, is a 70-minute tour de force worth crowing about.
Apr 29
Audiences for STOMP, the dance and percussion spectacle that swept the globe in the 1990s, range in age from toddler to octogenarian.
It’s no accident these hooligans of dance have such broad appeal. Before STOMP, there was stomp from A to Z: Appalachian Stomp, Kansas City Stomp, Louis Armstrong‘s Mahogany Hall Stomp, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown‘s Okie Dokie Stomp, and Zydeco Stomp. I can still do the Dovells‘ Bristol Stomp — the rage for pre-Beatlemania teens. By the time STOMP, the phenom, arrived, the stomp concept was stamped on our collective consciousness like an S.O.S. laid out in gunpowder on a beach.
Apr 29
The Philadelphia Inquirer has just been sold. I may be out of a job soon, but I just did a rum run to Delaware and came home with with a Bordeaux Rose, Chateau de Cornemps, an Abbyville Fume Blanc from Napa Valley and a Vin Gris de Cigare, from Bonny Doon vineyards, all in the $10-12 range. If you don’t know whether I’ll still be working perhaps you can tell me which of these I should drink first?
Apr 27
Apr 21
By Merilyn Jackson
For The Inquirer
‘It’s a dream that has become a reality,” Senegalese choreographer Germaine Acogny said of the creation of Les écailles de la mémoire (“The Scales of Memory”). The work took the United States by storm during a 2008 tour that culminated at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Acogny’s all-male, Senegal-based Compagnie Jant-Bi and Brooklyn’s Urban Bush Women danced its visceral Afro-European choreography.
Apr 21
By Merilyn Jackson
For The Inquirer
This year’s installment of Philadelphia Dance Projects Presents opened Friday night with part one of the Local Dance History Project/Next Up series, tracking the city’s dance past into the future – what was, who was, what will be, and who will be dancing it.
In a preshow video at the Performance Garage, Philadelphia Dance Projects executive director Terry Fox said, “It’s important that dancers be remembered as part of the landscape of this city,” and what followed painted small pictures of that landscape.
Apr 21
By Merilyn Jackson
For The Inquirer
Although deep into work with the Philadelphia Dance Company and her own dance school, Joan Myers Brown saw a problem that she could not ignore.
Back then, in 1988, Brown also served on the board of Dance/USA (a national service organization based in Washington, D.C.). She noticed that such dance organizations were not interested in audiences of color, and they really did not want modern dance, preferring to focus on major ballet companies.
Apr 21
By Merilyn Jackson
For The Inquirer
Philadelphia Dance Projects Presents’ second weekend at the Performance Garage provided some unexpected links between dance in the past and the present. The director of the PDP, Terry Fox, once was a key independent choreographer on Philadelphia’s modern dance scene. She showed two of her video “fillers” made with David Rosenberg for WHYY in 1980. In the first, “Pounding the Pavement,” Fox demonstrates a simple set of movements, turning her head right to left, rocking from the ball of the foot to the heel. She is standing at the corner of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, and it doesn’t seem much like dance until you see nearby pedestrians doing it. Very catchy. Very cheeky. READ FULL STORY
Apr 21
SHARON GEKOSKI-KIMMEL / Staff Photographer
Christine Taylor , left, rehearses “Significant Soil.” Jeanne Ruddy, at left in right photo, who premiered the dance 10 years ago, demonstrates the use of the coil for Taylor and Janet Pilla (right), who will perform it for the anniversary run at the Wilma Theater.
As she endured treatment for breast cancer 13 years ago, dancer/choreographer Jeanne Ruddy read T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. But as she recovered, it was his Four Quartets that gave her solace, particularly the end of the third section, “The Dry Salvages”: We, content at the last/ If our temporal reversion nourish/ (Not too far from the yew-tree)/ The life of significant soil.
Apr 21
By Merilyn Jackson
For The Inquirer
Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers opened their second engagement at the Painted Bride Thursday night, once again to a sellout crowd. Not surprising as this small company, in just a few years since its move from New York, is at the pinnacle of Philadelphia’s outstanding dance community.
The program, called Autumn Skin: Journey of East/West, introduced two very different-looking works married by the choreography and spirit emblematic of artistic director Kun-Yang Lin.
