Archive for the ‘ Dance ’ Category

Dance Review: London’s mucho macho Ballet Boyz

Author: admin

Nov 15

By Merilyn Jackson

For the Inquirer

Posted October 24, 2014 — 1:29 PM

The first time I reviewed London’s BalletBoyz in 2003 for their American debut, I said they were too cute for words. Though I did think of a few:  gymnastic, marvelous, elegant. Now I add exciting. Their new show the Talent, now touring worldwide, kicked off with its American leg at Dance Celebration’s 2014 series at Annenberg Thursday night, and it’s more than exciting. It’s thrilling.

Former principal Royal Ballet dancers, Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, left the Royal in 1999 to form their own company, George Piper (their middle names) Dances. But a BBC-imposed nickname, BalletBoyz, was harder to flick away than toilet paper off a wet jazz shoe. It stuck.

For this company iteration, they have ten breathlessly matchless men with the most exquisite foot, torso and arm articulations and noiseless landings.

In Liam Scarlett’s ethereal Serpent the men wear tights with built in kneepads for the arduous floor work. To a riveting Max Richter score, they lie on their sides, backs to the audience, waving their perpendicular arms like sea snakes. Once on their feet, their athletic lifts and drops are measured and as couples, they face off adversarially in hand-to-hand contact improv and head butts.

Facing upstage, the tallest, Adam Kirkham, begins a chain of men in descending height, locking arms around the next one’s neck and leaning back, until Matthew Rees arrives, looks them over and decides he’s not joining.

For his mucho macho Fallen, Russell Maliphant uses the beautifully driven rhythms of film score composer Armand Amar. In what could be military or prison garb, five dancers form a tight wheel turning clockwise while the other five circle around them in the opposite direction. Elevated fishdives required a third dancer to hold the chest of the upended, perfectly rigid dancer. And Andrea Carucciu’s sinewy solo, his impeccably pointed feet, mesmerized. The dark work ends as it began. No one has escaped the circle, whatever it represents.

Michael Hull lit both works creating many sculptural effects on the muscularity of the men.

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/280324685.html

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Philly dance world celebrates modern master Yvonne Rainer

Author: admin

Jan 7

Courtesy of the artist:Choreographer Yvonne Rainer will be celebrated at a mini-festival Oct. 15-19 presented by Philadelphia Dance Projects.

Updated: October 13, 2016 — 3:01 AM EDTby Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer

Beginning in 1962, Yvonne Rainer, along with other dance innovators of the last half-century, experimented at the Judson Church in lower Manhattan. They became the Judson Dance Theater, and by 1964 they spun off in their own orbits without losing touch with one another. Rainer wrote her famous “No Manifesto,” which attempted to negate American dance conventions. Rainer now says the manifesto “dogs my heels,” but some of its dictums continue to shape contemporary dance to this day.

Rainer will be celebrated Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday in a mini-festival arranged by Terry Fox, director of the Philadelphia Dance Projects, who met Rainer at the American Dance Festival in 1969. On Saturday and Sunday, there will be dance workshops on Rainer’s seminal work, Trio A, at the Performance Garage. Wednesday at Christ Church Neighborhood House brings a screening of a Jack Walsh documentary on her, Feelings are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer. Rainer herself follows with a talk, “What’s So Funny? Laughter and Anger in the Time of the Assassins.”

Walsh has been recognized for decades for his film work, and his documentary on Rainer’s life is his directorial debut. It premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2015, the same year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. The title comes from Rainer’s 2006 memoir, Feelings are Facts, a truth expressed by one of her psychotherapists.

In a recent phone conversation, Rainer spoke of her parents’ decision to send her away at around age 5 to a boarding school.

“Oh, yeah,” she readily jumped in, “that resulted in therapists most of my life. My mother was emotionally very frail. I was premature, and she hadn’t properly prepared my brother Ivan, who was four years older. He showed a lot of hostility to me, and they didn’t know how to deal with two lively children. My father went along with it. She had to get rid of us for her own sanity.”

The boarding school “was a beautiful place in Palo Alto,” she said. “My brother remembered only good things, and I remembered the punishments and regimentation. Two women who may have been lesbians ran it. It was wartime, and most of the children were there because their mothers were working and the fathers away in the army.”

Her shockingly cool and intellectual dance Trio A was created in 1966, initially as the first part of a larger work titled The Mind Is a Muscle. This dance marks her rejection of audience seduction, elaborate smiles, flourishes, and spectacle. Yet at times her work shows a possibly unconscious neoclassical sensibility, as in Trio A, when her pointed toe skitters through a ronde de jambe like a pebble skips across a pond.

She turned to filmmaking in the early 1970s. “I feel very warmly about my first film, The Lives of Performers,” she said. “I never did anything like that again. It’s much cruder in a way, and out on a limb as far as strategies go. And then, I guess, Privilege and MURDER and murder are much more elaborate, with professional actors.” Of Walsh’s documentary on her, she said, “I have nothing but admiration for what Jack did. It’s pretty inclusive, classic talking-heads documentary, and still being shown after a year.”

She turned back to choreography in 2000, when Mikhail Baryshnikov commissioned After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. “It was a very unique experience working with a dancer of his celebrity,” she said. She calls the conditions at the Baryshnikov/Mark Morris White Oak Dance Project, near Jacksonville, Fla., “very sumptuous.”

At 56, she met and began a domestic life with artist Martha Gever. “Martha is better educated than me,” she said. “I pay attention to her opinions, and I show her my work. She is very appreciative, and we’re still together.”

Is she bored with dance now? “No,” she said emphatically, “dance now is going in all different directions. Just last night, I saw the latest work of Deborah Hay. I think it’s the best thing she’s ever done. And also recently, I saw a French choreographer do a work on four hip-hop-trained women.”

Her legacy, Rainer said, is “in the hands of my current group of dancers, and my archive is up at Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. In fact, Steve Paxton and Simone Forti and I are performing Tea for Three in a gallery in Los Angeles in November, so dance goes on.”

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/arts/20161013_Philly_dance_world_celebrates_modern_master_Yvonne_Rainer.html

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At 45, Ailey troupe still young

Author: admin

Nov 11

 

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By Merilyn Jackson
For The Inquirer
Posted on Sat, May. 15, 2004

Last week, the United States Postal Service honored four great American choreographers with stamps of their own: George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey. Ailey, who died in 1989 at the age of 58, was the youngest of the honorees.
His now-legendary 45-year-old company, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, thrives and balances on the maturity of former star and current artistic director Judith Jamison and the exuberant youthfulness of its spectacularly gifted company of 30. The audience that packed the Academy of Music Thursday night gave the Ailey-ens a roaring, hooting stamp of approval.

Two Philadelphia premieres, Alonzo King’s Heart Song and Robert Battle’s Juba, had the rib-pumping, bravura styles these dancers can deliver. The 2003 Heart Song is King’s second work on the company; audiences may recall his sensational Following the Subtle Current Upstream performed by the company here two years ago.

With its costumes and scenic design by Robert Rosenwasser, Heart Song is an instant classic. Dwana Adiaha Smallwood and Asha Thomas twirl out in sculpted, lit-up tutus that say 21st-century ballet and set the scene for solos, duets and large ensemble dancing to come. Among these exceptional dancers, many stand out: Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell for her truncated rapid moves in a duet, Benoit Swan-Pouffer for his high-flying jetes, and Matthew Rushing and Jeffrey Gerodias for their brotherly rivalry in a long, sinuous duet.

Although Juba is the term for a slave dance, Battle’s folk-derived, yet nearly mechanized, steps, Mia McSwain’s blue tunic costumes, and John Mackey’s original, highly varied electronic score suggested a Balkanized world, divided, unified, repartitioned and then optimistically reunified in a triumphant crescendo. Juba, Battle’s first work for the company, offered a wide geographical reach. As if the shape of the world depended on this dance, former Philadanco dancer Hope Boykin, Philadelphia native Abdur-Rahim Jackson, Samuel Deshauteurs and Rushing stretched it to global proportions.

The seamless fluxion in Elisa Monte’s 1979 Treading gave it the feeling of an amniotic float that was also erotic and athletic. Fisher-Harrell’s and Clifton Brown’s virtuosic interpretation of Monte’s dance displayed a slow contrapuntal control against Steve Reich’s pulsing Eighteen Musicians. Like two mighty rivers flowing purposefully to meet at their delta, the dancers ended this masterpiece with Brown carrying Fisher-Harrell aloft, her arms flowing behind her deeply arched back. Sadly, the lighting technician spoiled this gorgeous image by closing the spot too abruptly.

The now permanently endowed 1960 Revelations by the great Ailey closed the program and still revealed its timelessness, spirituality and jubilation. Gerodias’ solo to the hymn “I Wanna Be Ready” fully expressed the human need to reach one’s potential, which is what these dancers do.

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Dance Exploding

Author: admin

Nov 11

DanceBoom!’s “African Threads” weaves a stunning tapestry of movement.

By Merilyn Jackson
For The Inquirer
Posted Feb. 2, 2009

 

 
If Africa is the origin of human life, it is also the origin of language, art, music and dance. As Philadelphia’s most renowned modern and Africanist dance writer and scholar, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, writes in her elegant DanceBoom! catalog essay, “African culture [and its] seeds pervade our daily lives from basketball to ballet and beyond Broadway.

“Africanisms are not a choice,” she writes, “but an imperative that comes to us the way electricity comes through wires.”

With a dozen dance groups, this year’s DanceBoom!, called “African Threads,” at the Wilma Theater offers a stunning array of Africanist-based dance works. There can be no stereotyping of Africanist dance. It is everything from traditional rite-of-passage dances to the celebration of hip-hop, Caribbean, jazz-inflected ballet, and cool tap.

“We looked at all the compass points of where our diaspora resides,” DanceBoom! curator Nick Stuccio said. “Koresh Dance Company is very interesting to us as they are rooted in jazz, but also [choreographer George] Balanchine was such a fan of African dance and first shocked ballet audiences when he introduced bent wrists and thrown-out pelvises like you’ll see in Agon.”

The key word to learn at this festival is polyrhythmic, a term that ties this festival together. The dancers and choreographers throw the word around as easily as they swish their hips while bobbing their shoulders to contrapuntal rhythms. (“The polyrhythmic dancing body may carry one rhythm in the feet plus one or more additional accent patterns in other body parts,” Gottschild writes.)

Audiences can sample from the festival’s following five groupings spread over different nights through Feb. 6.
Rennie Harris Puremovement

Rennie Harris Puremovement will start the festival off on its hip-hop head, hands and feet with a pastiche from the repertoire and add a premiere that Harris says “expresses the souls of inner-city African American and Latino communities.”

Lisanga Ya Bana Kin Philadanco or Odunde Kulu Mele African American Dance Ensemble Joan Myers Brown, America’s most formidable heroine of African American dance, will have her 35-year-old Philadelphia Dance Company (called Philadanco) perform the riveting trio from Alonzo King’s Steal Away, in which a woman dissolves into despair under the weight of slavery while her two male partners fail to save her.

Philadanco will perform only on Sunday and Tuesday, with Philadelphia’s Odunde appearing on Feb. 4 and 5 to teach audiences social dances of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.

Kulu Mele’s steely artistic director, Dorothy Wilkie, is North Philly-born and -reared, and melts into sweet smiles when the dance takes over her body. Her company will present three dances, including a solo called Amazon War Dance by guest artist Djian Tie from the Ivory Coast.

Congolese choreographer Mufulu Kingambo Gilonda, who has been living and working in Philadelphia for 15 years, will perform with his company, Lisanga Ya Bana Kin. They will perform Gizembe, about two regions in the Congo that “have to learn to get along.”
Koresh Dance Company Pennsylvania Ballet Merian Soto

Roni Koresh describes his Negative Spaces as a cabaret.

“It’s all urban jazz-influenced, almost done like a minstrel show, but all the dancers are in white face,” he said. “Once you put on a mask you can do whatever you want.”

George Balanchine made his 1957 masterpiece Agon with an awareness of the era’s racial tensions. He set a major male role on Arthur Mitchell, at the time the New York City Ballet’s only black dancer. Now Meredith Rainey, one of several black dancers in the Pennsylvania Ballet, profoundly inhabits the role he dances with principal ballerina Arantxa Ochoa.
Merian Soto changed her The Art of Improvisation program at the last minute, recycling a title from a show last year, What’s Heart Got to Do With It, a structured improvisation duet for dancer and musician.
Tania Isaac Paule Turner / court Charles Anderson / dance theatre x A phenomenal dancer from St. Lucia, Tania Isaac explores the “cultural schizophrenia” of living in a strange land.

“We jump-cut our lives every day,” Isaac said. “You become adept at shifting from one personality to the other, depending on who you interact with, and that is implicit in my work.”

For DanceBoom! she has streamlined an earlier work, home is where I am… .

In the belief that shock is the best route to awareness, Paule Turner presents the fourth and final section of Touched, the 25-minute “Hitting Bottom,” with his company of six dancing in the nude. Turner has been working with dramaturge and author Don Belton on this explosive multimedia show for more than a year. With the Ku Klux Klan and a beheading in the piece, Turner hopes to show that the world can survive such atrocities.

Charles Anderson is black and gay, and known for big works with magnificent male dancers. Here, however, the cast of Parables of Mutants and Madmen consists of 18 women, with live music.

“Being a member of a historically marginalized group, I’ve always identified with superheroes and their dual identities,” Anderson said.
Germaine Ingram Kariamu & Company Eleone Dance Theatre

DanceBoom! will often move you to tears, but nothing else can make you weep like Nina Simone’s songs. Germaine Ingram, Philly’s top tapper, has refitted three of them for her new show, Nina’s Laments. A jazz quartet interacts with the three women dancers, and Ingram shows segments of her ground-breaking video, Plenty Good Women Dancers: African American Hoofers From Philadelphia.

Kariamu Welsh’s company of seven astonishingly gifted dancers will perform the Jamaican-influenced Sankofa-Ja! and The Museum Piece, a work that harks back to when Sarah Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, was displayed throughout Europe, and arcs through the American objectification of black peoples.

Eleone is a title made up from its founder’s name, the late E. Leon Evans. Its 13 finely tuned dancers will perform a lyrical work by codirector Shawn-Lamere Williams to Bobby McFerrin’s “Sweet as the Morning’s Flow,” innovative choreographer Christopher L. Huggins’ Highway, and The Movement by Wayne St. David.

“African Threads” includes a talk on “The Rise of the Tango” by Robert Farris Thompson, art historian and Yale professor, on Feb. 5 at 10:30 a.m. Odunde, a Philadelphia organization that promotes African culture, will give dancing lessons on Feb. 4 and 5. And a dance photography exhibit called “Roots and Threads” will run from Feb. 3 through April 17 at the Open Lens Gallery at the Gershman Y.

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A festival of ‘Universal African’ dance

Author: admin

Nov 11

Daily Magazine

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Universal African Dance

By Merilyn Jackson
For The Inquirer

Posted Jan. 14, 2005

Sochenda means “the traveler” in Dagomba, a language of northern Ghana, and is the title of the featured dance in the 2005 Dance of Our Ancestors Festival presented by Swarthmore College and Temple University.

Choreographer F. Nii Yartey, creator of Sochenda (so-CHEN-da), arrived from Ghana at Philadelphia International Airport last week toting enough titles to wear down any baggage handler. He is artistic director and choreographer of the Ghana Dance Ensemble, a senior research fellow at the University of Ghana, project director of Noyam Contemporary African Dance Research Project, and president of the National Committee of the International Dance Council of UNESCO.

Moreover, when asked what his name means, he said Nii was actually a royal title. “Something like ‘Your Highness,’ ” he admitted with a slight giggle. “I come from a royal family, the Ashantes. Yartey is really my given name.”

This first celebration of African-based dance begins Sunday with a public reception for Yartey. The festival culminates in performances at Temple and Swarthmore, which are cohosting the weeklong sessions of panels, workshops and lectures, all open to the public, on Swarthmore’s campus.

Philadelphia offers a surprising amount of African and Caribbean-based dance. As if to illustrate this, the DanceBoom! festival at Wilma Theater later this month features dance with African flavor by local companies such as headliner Rennie Harris Puremovement.
Yartey is setting his piece on the Temple University-based dance troupe Kariamu & Company: Traditions, under the artistic direction of Temple professor Kariamu Welsh.

She and professor Sharon Friedler, director of dance at Swarthmore College, conceived of the festival. New Yorker Welsh had traveled to Ghana numerous times, starting in 1977. While she was living in Zimbab-we in the early ’80s, Prime Minister Robert Mugabe asked her to work with the National Dance Company of Zimbabwe; she later became the company’s artistic director. “The dancers were all paid by the government,” she said. “Rehearsal space was extremely humble and the performances were often outside.”

Welsh arrived in Philadelphia in 1985 to teach African American studies at Temple, and soon set about to translate African dances to the concert stage without compromising their integrity. She taught the first classes on African dance at Swarthmore in 1988: “My first degree is in literature, but all things African came to me after I was entrenched in dance.”

In 1995, Swarthmore invited professor J.H. Kwabena Nketia to fill an endowed professorship. “Dr. Nketia is considered the foremost ethnomusicologist in Africa,” said Friedler, who has studied African dance since the ’70s, “and he played a very strong role in forming the African wing of our [Swarthmore’s] World Dance Cultures program, inviting me to spend my sabbatical in Ghana in 1997.”

“The people Kariamu and I had contact with in Ghana overlapped,” said Friedler, “and eventually we both met Nii and began to plan these annual festivals. Next year we will have Sir Rex Nettleford, head of the National Dance Theatre of Jamaica.”

Yartey said his soul-searching piece was “inspired by the problems that all of us have as humans. Life is a journey of pain, but there are moments of happiness.”
Ghana Dance Ensemble member Joshua Trebi is guest artist. He will perform a solo in next week’s Friday and Saturday programs at Temple and Swarthmore, which will also include three of Welsh’s own works. During rehearsals, the dancers imitated Trebi’s crouching, hunterlike, “traveling” movements.

When asked if the Americans were meshing African movement with their own previously learned techniques, Yartey said they were doing this very well: “I am measuring them not by the standard that would be used in my village or on my company, but rather I see each body as a sponge that is dipped in a liquid and that liquid is squeezed out by each in his own way.

“My perception of dance is not limited to where I come from,” he continued. “I am a universal African. Any cultural values that are compatible with my own I can use it.”

The performances will be dedicated to the tsunami victims, Yartey said, “because their journey is now in the spiritual world.”

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At Come Together Festival, Koresh Dance brothers now share stage

Author: admin

Oct 19

By Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer

Posted: July 22, 2014

 

(CLEM MURRAY / Staff Photographer)

The Koresh brothers – (from left) Nir, Roni, Alon – with their troupe rehearsing for the Come Together Festival.

With the Come Together Festival presenting five nights of dance and the city celebrating the annual Philadelphia Dance Day with free workshops, performances, and a massive dance party on Saturday, you won’t be able to miss dance in Philadelphia this week.

You can either sit through it or get up and do it, but why not do both?

For the festival, Koresh Dance Company is sharing one of its weeks at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre with an ingathering of regional companies, both well-established and upstarts. Choreographer Ronen (Roni) Koresh launched the festival last year with support from PNC Arts Alive.

Koresh emigrated from Israel in 1983, followed by his brothers Alon in 1989, and Nir in 1994. All three had served in the Israeli military, so you’d think anything they did after that would be a cakewalk. But starting Koresh Dance Company and School of Dance in Philadelphia in the early 1990s proved challenging.

The company opened on a Friday the 13th in 1991, and presented its next show a year later at the Warwick Hotel. “I built a stage in the ballroom. We had a cocktail hour hosted by WXPN’s David Dye and Channel 3’s Evening Magazine host Ray Murray, a show at 9 and a dance party till 2 a.m.,” Roni said while sipping wine at a sidewalk table at Twenty Manning recently.

“When I came onto the scene, I had to rely on audiences, not funding. It was flashy. It had to be – we had to satisfy the audiences. We were young and so were they.”

A year after that, their first show at the Mandell Theater had a packed audience and won a standing ovation. “But Nancy Goldner” – then The Inquirer’s dance critic – “tore us to shreds. That was the first shock,” he said. “I didn’t leave my apartment for three days, I was so embarrassed.”

Roni is Koresh’s artistic director, Alon serves as executive director, and Nir directs the Koresh School of Dance. Recently, they signed a deed to a beautiful building at 2002 Rittenhouse St. – a building with a dance history. Laura Keeler, late wife of director of Dance Celebration Randy Swartz, once owned it, and Roni got his start there in the ’80s jazz dance company Waves.

Today, Koresh Dance Company fills a respected niche in contemporary dance – sometimes with a jazzy edge, often with ethnic characteristics, and always hot and hip. As dance company in residence at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, it joins BalletX, Philadanco, and Pennsylvania Ballet on Broad Street, making Philadelphia the only U.S. city with four major companies dancing within a block of each other.

Koresh begins a 26-city tour in October that runs through next May and includes a festival in Belarus. “I like going on the road because I feel rewarded,” says Roni. “We’re lionized wherever we go, especially Melissa Rector, who’s danced with me since Day 1.”

The Come Together Festival includes mixed programs from Wednesday through Sunday, with Nora Gibson’s geometric ballet, Rennie Harris Puremovement hip-hop, and Brian Sanders’ Junk’s physical theater – among a total of 26 companies – sharing the stage. Sanders “creaks” around in Dancing Dead, which he remounted in suite form with support from the Swarthmore Project this summer. Koresh performs each night with excerpts from its spring premiere of Promises I Never Meant to Keep, Bolero, and excerpts of other works.

More highlights:

 Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers performs Be/Longing 2 on opening night. It created a chiaroscuro of light and dark, movement and stillness in spring when he premiered this work, which has been whittled down to a more concise form for the festival.

Raphael Xavier – hip-hop artist, photographer, filmmaker – returns this year to perform Still. “It’s a four-man piece about maturing as a dancer,” he says. At 43, he’s no aging b-boy, though. “I may not be able to do some of the things I could do when I was younger, so this is a kind of transitional exploration. The 23-year-olds I’m working with know how to move, but I slow down and ask them to just react to me.”

Alchemy Dance Company has been performing in small venues around town and shows Beggars and Choosers, “an explosive excerpt of 2013’s Follies,” to music by composer Jonathan Bowles.

Melissa Chisena of Chisena Danza solos in Breathe with percussionist Jonathan Cannon. “Breathing is a universal experience,” she says. “This dance is an exploration of breath.”

DanceSpora was formed in 2008 by Pennsylvania Ballet alum Heidi Cruz-Austin and David Austin, an accomplished house dancer who performed with Renee Harris Puremovement. Cruz-Austin wanted her Trenton-based company to look like contemporary ballet with house and jazz influences.

Danse4Nia Repertory Ensemble performs an excerpt from Falsely Accused to music by James Blake and choreographed by Itola Byrd. It’s a tribute to women unfairly or unjustly accused of crimes they did not commit.

Ballet Fleming presents an excerpt of a staple of its repertory, a lovely, lyrical work to American composer Paul Schoenfield’s Cafe Music.

DANCE

Come Together Dance Festival Wednesday through Sunday at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 S. Broad St.

Full schedule and ticket information at koreshdance.org.

Philadelphia Dance Day

A schedule of events is at philadelphiadanceday.com.

 

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Review: ‘Soul Project’ leaps from Fringe to Swarthmore

Author: admin

Oct 14

David Zambrano of "Soul Project." (Photo: Anja Hitzenberger)

David Zambrano is the creator, choreographer, and ringmaster of “Soul Project,” which returns to Swarthmore College from the Fringe Festival. (Photo: Anja Hitzenberger)

Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer

Posted: Thursday, September 24, 2015, 3:01 AM

Soul Project, a European hit since 2006, tours extensively, performing for intimate crowds that mill around its international crew of dancers as they solo to American soul and R&B songs. Swarthmore College helped bring it here as one of Fringe Festival’s final shows, where the two-night run sold out at Christ Church last weekend. It reprises on Swarthmore’s Lang stage Friday and Saturday.

Its creator, teacher, and choreographer, David Zambrano, is a Venezuelan who divides his time between Amsterdam and Brussels. He is something of a magical-realist Pied Piper – or a ringmaster.

A topknot sits where the ringmaster’s top hat would be, if designer Mat Voorter had provided one – and the barefoot Zambrano is dressed only in wide red-and-white striped tails. And though he had no whip in hand, the audience meekly obeyed his invitation to enter from the cobblestone street outside. Lace-gloved Edivaldo Ernesto shouted, “Be careful!” and danced as we proceeded to the now-seatless fourth-floor space.

Each dancer found a spotlight, getting cues from an iPod Shuffle. That inflected a nice touch of chance for audience and performers, uncertainty causing everyone to shuffle around before finding where to be or look.

Slovak Peter Jasko, in sequined eyelids and Elvis jumpsuit, often danced low velocity, almost in place. In polka dots and hula skirt, the only woman, Slovenian Nina Fajdiga, blunted her most violent movements with catlike disdain. For us?

With a half-shaved head, South Korean Young Cool Park offered the most original, overtly political move of the night, goose-stepping out of his spot. Zambrano began with an energetic Pogo-dance in what I hope was a waggish wink at overwrought Jennifer Holliday singing, “And I Am Telling You, I’m Not Going.”

Curiously, he chose mostly American soul songs of the ’60s and ’70s, concert recordings – to Philly ears, tired-sounding – rather than their dancier versions. Philly invented many social dances in that era – the Mashed Potato, Watusi, and, of course, the Twist, all of which morphed with dances from other cities into funkier club and house styles by the ’80s. Gloria Gaynor’s 1978 anthem, “I Will Survive,” had an urgent rhythm we all danced to; here, the more saccharine 1982 version by Gladys Knight didn’t get our dance cells grooving.

Instead, this cast of seven found Euro-grooves, isolating body parts in wildly opposing directions, flexing whatever they could simultaneously, hands almost flung off the wrists like the opera gloves in a burlesque show. These moves were like choreographic selfies – contact-improv for the soloist.

DANCE REVIEW

Soul Project

8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Lang Performing Arts Center at Swarthmore College.

Admission: Free.

Information: 610-328-8200 or www.swarthmore.edu

Merilyn Jackson For The Inquirer

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/arts/20150924_Review___Soul_Project__leaps_from_Fringe_to_Swarthmore.html#U4Mj737WPEjVK0W7.99

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Dance doers and thinkers caucus at Slought

Author: admin

Feb 19

By Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer

Posted: January 30, 2015

20150129_inq_dm1chore029-c

You probably know what continental drift is – but what’s Choreo_Drift?

Simply put, it’s the movement of choreographic ideas that relate to one another, to art and politics, and to society and communities across the continents. It’s the brainchild of Italian-born, Sweden-based choreographer and theorist Cristina Caprioli, and the collaborator/dancers in her company, ccap.

The project, which takes many shapes, has this week drifted down from the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1, in Queens, N.Y., to Philadelphia. Aaron Levy, a founding director of Slought, the gallery, lecture, and performance space on the University of Pennsylvania campus, is hosting its local premiere, “Choreo_Drift: Choreography and Disenchantment” – three days of multimedia, interdisciplinary performances, films, and conversations exploring choreography, embodiment, and power that’s open and free to the public.

Caprioli and Tulane University’s Felicia McCarren, author of French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop, opened the series Wednesday with talks and audience conversations, plus choreographic input of Caprioli’s dance “att att.”

Thursday features conversations with Temple University’s Mark Franko, Egyptian choreographer/dance activist and archivist Adham Hafez, and Mattias Gardell, Swedish author of Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism. Again, there will be dance interludes throughout the gallery.

Choreo_Drift culminates with a collective talk followed by a full performance of Caprioli’s Omkretz (Circumference) at the Annenberg Center on Friday.

Caprioli first came to Philadelphia last year to explore possible venues for Choreo_Drift, and, after meeting Levy, she decided Slought was the logical place to moor. She already knew Franko, who directs Temple’s graduate studies program in dance, from his own choreography and his many books on dance, and it wasn’t long before the three concluded his work and Slought’s programming would mesh.

Temple’s monthly dance colloquium is “the only program like it in the region,” Franko says, “and the fact that we live-stream the colloquia, which is free to the public, makes it absolutely unique on the East Coast.” He says people too often see dance only as play, or feel it can’t be thoughtful or engage with ideas and politics, as do other art forms.

His 2005 book, Excursion for Miracles, dealt with his time in New York in the ’60s with Paul Sanasardo and Donya Feuer, cofounders of Studio for Dance. Feuer (1934-2011), was a native Philadelphian who eventually moved to Sweden and was a longtime collaborator with director Ingmar Bergman.

So when Franko came to Philadelphia two years ago from the University of California at Santa Cruz, there were connections linking him, Philadelphia, and Caprioli.

“Cristina had invited me to Stockholm several times,” he said. “I’m never quite sure what I’m supposed to do or if I’m doing enough, but she just likes to have certain people around to bounce off of.”

When she was organizing a conference in Stockholm in 2010, she invited him to help her program it.

“It was called Weaving Politics, and she’s been extraordinarily generous. She provided an apartment for me for a month,” Franko said. “She brings me so that I can just be there. And I work, I write, we talk, I interact with the company.” He helped conceptualize the conference, which brought together choreographer William Forsythe and Bulgarian French philosopher Julia Kristeva, who called dance “a nimble movement of incorporated thought.”

Afterward, he proposed publishing the paper that resulted, “but Cristina said, ‘No, it’s your paper, but you should keep developing it, let it drift.’ So she’s the one who made the connection for me with Slought.”

In a Skype interview from MoMA last week, Caprioli proved an animated 61-year-old who seemed much younger – dancers tend to age less dramatically than the rest of us.

“I am convinced that choreography is not only the best [art] form to buy a ticket for, it is also an orchestration of encounters, the setting up of encounters between different minds,” she said. “I hope we give audiences the possibility to enter the choreography themselves, but also to intellectually stimulate the publics we encounter, more than just satisfy them and try to do it very gently, not aggressively.”

“I really cherish this. It is a shame for dance and choreography to be still happening in conventional theater. It’s not really about just watching a piece, but to share the event of the piece. It’s so easy to get into this product thinking.”

Omkretz, which had its world premiere in October in Florence, Italy, “has two dancers and a musician on a saxophone. The live music gives it a strong atmosphere.

“The dancers and the music are dealing with the idea of throwing the bow and arrow – thrust, momentum, trajectory, and distance,” said Caprioli. “When they come to the edge, they have to turn and drift back.”

http://articles.philly.com/2015-01-30/news/58591641_1_dance-choreography-slought

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Three Polish dancers made their American debuts Friday evening at the modest Mascher Space

Author: admin

Jul 16

Izabela Chlewinska -Tralfamadoria- photo Katarzyna Madzia+éa0

Izabela Chlewińska in Tralfamadoria

By Merilyn Jackson

For the Inquirer

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Posted Sept. 16, 2012

Three Polish dancers made their American debuts Friday evening at the modest Mascher Space up on Cecil B. Moore Ave. Though their paths have crossed in Poland and two have worked with each other in the past, their movement esthetics diverge except for the fact that each uses sound/music very minimally, if at all. Izabela Chlewińska lives and works in Warsaw, but has also performed in Germany, Mexico and Japan. In a doll-like little white dress, she writes out the story of her concept on an easel filled with large sheets of paper. She takes us to the land of Tralfamadoria, a riff on Kurt Vonnegut’s work (which was very popular in Poland) in that her work is non-linear, episodic and elliptical. It’s when she strips to her body stocking that we see what an original mover, even a contortionist, she is. In the Zoo section, she takes to the floor in an exquisitely high back-bend, head facing us and scuttles crab-like from side to side. She strikes sharply angled poses, bent-elbowed arms splayed out along her body while her chest and torso rise pointing to the ceiling or lies on her side like an odalisque or such as you might see when a leopard is in repose. Finally, she dedicates the dance to her father. But why? Did he introduce her to Tralfamadoria? Is this a remnant of a childhood memory lived just before the bizarre life lived under Communism dissolved? Maybe nothing of the sort, but I love works that raise more questions than they can answer.

Marysia Stokłosa’s Vacuum didn’t spare us from questions either. Wielding a vintage Electrolux canister vac (I had a similar one for many years), she literally swept the entire large space with it, criss-crossing from right to left, even insinuating it under the feet of the people in the front row. She re-covered the entire space from front to back running in reverse, so I thought, probably incongruously, of a warp and weft imaginary weaving of the space into one large fabric for her to dance upon. Lest you think this sounds too serious, Stokłosa disappears into a side restroom and runs the shower returning to us in a bathing suit the same vintage as the vacuum cleaner, and sopping wet, belly flops on the floor, flinging and flopping like a fish out of water. To Chopin, she dries her hair with the vacuum. Hah! Is she saying it’s time for Poland to wash that fusty romantic self-image away? I hope so, but that’s just me.

Each dance seemed born of a big idea realized with an economy of movement and a great take-it-or-leave-it confidence including the final work, Le Pas Jacques. By Magda Jędra, who is co-founder of Good Girl Killer in Gdansk, she starts with both feet planted on the floor while she scoops and swoops the air with her arms. She pulls a Babci shawl from a nearby paper bag and ties her ankles together with it, her wrists with another piece of clothing and then bruisingly jumps around, falling often until she loosens her bonds. I had to leave for another show so I regrettably couldn’t stay to see the rest. But I ran into her at the supermarket today and she had cabbages in her cart for tonight’s show. So, Kapusta anyone?

$15 Mascher Space, 155 Cecil B. Moore Ave. tonight and Sunday night, 8 p.m.

 

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Slam dunks from Philadanco

Author: admin

Jul 10

Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer

Posted: Saturday, April 19, 2014, 1:08 AM

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20140419_inq_dm1danco19z-b-1

Adryan Moorefield and Janine Beckles of Philadanco.

The program included a mix of newer and older pieces.
To a packed house, Philadanco brought back Donald Byrd’s 1995 BAMM at its spring offering at the Kimmel’s Perelman Theater Thursday night. I first saw it in 2004 with the now-retired force of nature Odara Jabali-Nash as the center of its centrifugal force. This time, six dancers revolve around veteran company dancer Roxanne Lyst like numbers on a spinning clock.

The missing hands of this no-tick-tock clock are Mio Morales’ quick-pulsed percussive score, which ultimately hurls the dancers from the circle and into various patterns around the stage. The men walked off and on stage ramrod-stiff, almost militaristic. But the spitfire Lyst remains in control, leading the others through Africanized, hunched-over skipping. Their fists pumped to the floor, pushing their shoulders up in synchronized rhythms.

It was such a sweet surprise when many of the same dancers came out next in Gene Hill Sagan’s ballet Suite en Bleu, to the music of Handel and Bach, which, with its metronomic formalisms, mirrored Morales’ score. Lyst, Rosita Adamo, and Janine Beckles, in soft hyacinth-blue gowns and ballet slippers, flared out their skirts in their tours, Tommie-Waheed Evans, Dwayne Cook Jr., and even the towering Adryan Moorefield lifting them joyfully as if they were flowers.

The company premiere of Ulysses Dove’s 1984 Bad Blood, to Laurie Anderson’s “Gravity’s Angel” and “Walking and Falling” and Peter Gabriel’s “Excellent Birds,” seemed a little off-kilter on opening night. This normally sure-footed company did not yet have the piece in its belly, where they need it. It is a furiously brutal work about the search for connection through physical impact. I could see Beckles cross herself before running out from the wings to throw her spread-eagled legs around one of the men who had to take her impact without faltering. I have no doubt they will ultimately devour the piece with their typical fierceness.

That hunched-over Africanist skip returned in Rennie Harris’ 2007 Philadelphia Experiment, only this time as a ghost of itself, haunting us from the centuries of slavery where even the muscle memory diminishes. Evans ferociously spurred the full company through its paces past Philly’s darker moments – shown in a video collage by John Abner – to embrace the joy and fulfillment that hip-hop and dance bring to many of us in Harris’ paean to our city. With so many slam dunks throughout the show, I wanted to jump up and shout: BOOMSHAKALAKA!

 

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20140419_Review__Slam_dunks_from_Philadanco.html#Oiq2X5KEM4BcfTPQ.99

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