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A wave of productions will show why Philadelphia’s dance scene is among the best.

Author: admin

Sep 22

Posted on Sun, Sep. 11, 2011
By Merilyn Jackson

Julie Diana in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue

‘I love dance as an art form,” says current Chicago mayor, former White House chief of staff, and onetime dance student Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago native who wants his city to be known for its moves. Like Philadelphia, it is a first-rate dance town, and, with Philadelphia, it is recognized by national dance media as one of the top five in the country. But it doesn’t eclipse Philadelphia.

Four well-established, critically acclaimed resident companies – the Pennsylvania Ballet, Philadanco, BalletX, and Koresh Dance Company – bring choreographic cachet to the Avenue of the Arts. This fall we’ll see another world-class season by Dance Celebration at Annenberg. And dozens of other small but robust companies will be presenting as part of a newly funded venue-rental program.

Our dance makers are artists, athletes, activists, healers, and teachers who may actually serve your diner breakfast the morning after you’ve seen them leap from the flies. With plucky start-ups bubbling like so many water-main breaks, you just can’t stem the tide of dancers here. Our own mayor would do well to tap them as role models for Philadelphia’s youth.

– Merilyn Jackson reviews dance for The Inquirer

Carbon Dance Theatre Carbon ironically calls its season-opening concert “Swan Songs.” World premieres by Kate Watson-Wallace, Matthew Neenan, and Carbon artistic director and retired Pennsylvania Ballet soloist Meredith Rainey are set to a range of final songs, from Schubert’s Schwanengesang to those of contemporary (if late) popular artists Amy Winehouse, Nick Drake, and Tupac Shakur. Oct. 28-30 at the Performance Garage (www.carbondancetheatre.com or www.ruddydance.org/garage/performances.).

Group Motion/Masaki Iwana As part of a long-established Japanese-American dance exchange, Group Motion presents a one-night-only chance to see Japan’s Butoh master, Iwana, in a solo dance, as well as the dance-theater artist Moeno Wakamatsu in Naked Water. Sept. 23 at the Community Education Center, 3500 Lancaster Ave. (215-387-19110

Subcircle Seed was conceived in New Zealand early this year and fleshed out in the Czech Republic over the summer as a duet for Niki Cousineau and Gin MacCallum, with choreographer Carol Brown directing and performance design by Jorge Cousineau. The multi-award-winning Cousineaus are founders of Subcircle, one of the city’s leading dance-theater companies. Nov. 2-5 at Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N. American St. (215-829-1449, [email protected]).

Philadanco It’s more than 40 years old, yet as young at heart as its founder, Joan Myers Brown. The company dances the Philadelphia premiere of Watching Go By, the Day by one of its former stars, Hope Boykin, on a bill with Gene Hill Sagan’s glamorous full ballet La Valse, Christopher Huggins’ all-male Blue, and Suite Otis by George Faison. Nov. 3-6 at the Perelman Theater (215-893-1999, www.kimmelcenter.org).

Headlong Dance Theater Desire, an original, full-length dance-theater piece directed by Swarthmore College’s K. Elizabeth Stevens, stars Headlong’s codirector/founders Amy Smith, David Brick, and Andrew Simonet. You’ve been waiting for this loopy trio to repossess your sensibilities with onions, hippos, and watermelons, haven’t you? Nov. 11-13 at Bookspace, 1113 Frankford Ave. (215-545-9195, www.headlong.org).

Lionel Popkin Here’s a not-to-be-missed chance to see former Philadelphian and Trisha Brown alum Popkin dancing in his quartet There is an Elephant in This Dance, joined by Carolyn Hall, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and a mystery guest, in the Philadelphia Dance Projects Presents 2011-2012 series, “Dance Up Close.” Gabrielle Revlock’s Share is also on the program. Nov. 18-19 at the Performance Garage (215-546-2552 or www.philadanceprojects.org.)

BalletX The often-puckish choreographer Matthew Neenan collaborates with composer Robert Maggio on a piece for the company’s dancers, with music scored for and performed live by Pennsylvania Ballet Orchestra cellists Jennie Lorenzo and Mark Ward. San Francisco-based choreographer Alex Ketley’s 2009 Silt repeats. Nov. 16-20 at the Wilma Theater (215-546-7824, www.wilmatheater.org).

Dance Celebration at Annenberg This stellar presenter has snared two of the world’s most brilliantly unorthodox choreographers in one season – Australia’s Gideon Obarzanek, founder of Chunky Move, and Montreal’s Marie Chouinard in her Compagnie Marie Chouinard.

Those who loved Obarzanek’s Mortal Engine at the Live Arts Festival two years ago – in which light displaces music as a driving force – will no doubt flock to see his new work with kinetic sculptor Reuben Margolin. In Connected (Nov. 17-19), the dancers construct Margolin’s sculpture in real time.

I cut my professional reviewing teeth on Marie Chouinard’s Rite of Spring shortly after it premiered in 1993. I’ve since seen at least seven other Rites by renowned choreographers, but none surpasses Chouinard’s for steamy atmosphere of a savage life cycle annually rising from the slime. No less turbulent will be her 24 Preludes by Chopin, also in its Philadelphia premiere. Dec. 8-10 at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts (215-898-3900, www.annenbergcenter.org).

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Read more: http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20110911_A_wave_of_productions_will_show_why_Philadelphia_s_dance_scene_is_among_the_best_.html#ixzz1YifmbbiN
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Review: More Mouvements fur Lachenmann

Author: admin

Sep 17

Saturday, September 17, 2011

By Merilyn Jackson

Aw, come on. Fess up. You know you’ve done it when nobody’s looking — stood in front of a mirror and conducted your favorite Mahler or, at least, played air guitar.

In 2007, Xavier Le Roy turned his “conducting” of a recording of Le Sacre du Printemps into a marvelous dance performance. He’s taken this concept to another level with More Mouvements, not so much choreographing on the musicians in the piece, but allowing the music (or the score) to impel the movement, which looks more like pantomime than dance, especially when the instruments have gone missing and/or are hidden with musical doubles playing them behind screens.

Local new music group Bowerbird has pulled off the coup of bringing this piece to the Live Arts Festival this year, performed by eight musicians who include members of the Klangforum Wien. Helmut Lachenmann’s musique concrète pulls sound from each instrument’s entire body; conversely, the musicians’ movements are mostly upper body.

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Monday, September 12, 2011 Review: Shantala Shivalingappa’s ‘Namasya’

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Sep 12

“Merilyn Jackson says Shantala Shivalingappa brings spare elegance and beauty to the four solos she performs in tribute to her teachers and mentors, particularly Pina Bausch.”

Posted: September 12, 2011

By Merilyn Jackson

For the Inquirer

The moment Shantala Shivalingappa appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s in Tanztheater Wuppertal’s Bamboo Blues in 2008, the audience inhaled collectively as if a floral scent had suddenly wafted onto the stage. It had.

It wasn’t the first time Shivalingappa danced with Pina Bausch’s company, but it was the first whiff of her we had in the States. She appeared shorter, more adorably childlike than the older, wiser, perhaps jaded, Wupertallers.

At the Arts Bank Sunday night she danced four solos in a brief evening she devised, looking anything but childlike. She called the evening Namasya, an homage to her teachers and mentors, not the least of whom was the late and still-mourned Bausch.

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The 2011 Rocky Awards

Author: admin

Sep 6

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

By Merilyn Jackson

This year’s Rocky Awards, presented Monday night by the previous year’s winners to other dancers of their choice, moved at such a clip they lasted a mere hour and a quarter.

The host, as in recent years, was the inimitable Jaamil Kosoko, in spanking white attire (well, it was Labor Day), blonde wig, and gorgeous feather ruff. The formal look belied his laconic demeanor as he moved the show along with the assistance of Melanie Stewart, in a slinky blue sheath.  The first of the 2011 awards (wooden shoe molds) was given to Leah Stein by Gabrielle Revlock.

In amongst subsequent presentations, several entertainments had been devised for our amusement. Few other cities can boast the range of talented people it takes to pull these little bagatelles together, but between our dance and theater folk, we’re never in want.

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/phillystage/The-2011-Rocky-Awards.html?c=0.10653950914630506&posted=y&viewAll=y#comments

And the winners were:

2011 Rocky Award winners: Germaine Ingram, John Luna, Kelly Turner, Michele Tantoco, Tommie-Waheed Evans-, Brenda Dixon Gottschild and Leah Stein

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Brian Sanders’ graveyard pavanne brings Merilyn Jackson to the edge of tears.

Author: admin

Sep 4

Saturday, September 3, 2011

By Merilyn Jackson

 After 18 years on the boards, Brian Sanders, artistic director of JUNK, showed thematic maturity with last year’s Live Arts smash, Sanctuary. This year, Sanders hews to a morbid theme in this self-produced Fringe work, a ghoulishly touching show prompted by recent deaths of people close to him. If part of grief is healing and part of healing is laughter, then Sanders puts the nail in grief’s coffin.

Part of Sanders’ genius lies in finding the right venue. For Dancing Dead, he’s in an old factory sub-basement rigged with roping and large squares of real turf, dimly lit by Terry Smith. Sanders, a crotchety old cemetery caretaker, does his rounds on skates or a rickety bike, pulling Connor Senning from a mound of dirt where he’d been lying long before the large audience entered.

Read more: http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/phillystage/Review-Dancing-Dead.html#ixzz1X1fONrPg

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Zon-Mai. It means home in French slang – maison backwards

Author: admin

Sep 4

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Review: Zon-Mai

By Merilyn Jackson

Zon-Mai. It means home in French slang – maison backwards, but (appropriately) it also sounds like my zone in reverse. Everything about this film installation is turned inside out and upended with 21 dancers from 10 countries allowing us a peek at their intimate domains.

Each is an emigrant from somewhere else, and choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui set dances on them in their current places, to perform in their bedrooms and bathrooms, under their tables, on their windowsills. Larbi and cameraman Gilles Delmas try to discover what home means when you have to set up far away from the home you knew.

The installation is shaped like a house made of screens, and the projections on it are like windows through which we can spy.

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/phillystage/Review-Zon-Mai.html#ixzz1WyIJGvwm

 

 

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‘Sam-Gam BAM!’, triple-power dance at Drexel

Author: admin

Jul 22

Posted on Thu, Jun. 23, 2011

By Merilyn Jackson

For The Inquirer

BILL HEBERT

Performing “Chinnamasta: The Parts and the Whole” are (from left) Lesya Popil, Hedy Wyland, and Marie Brown.

Philadelphia’s dancers have built a community that’s the envy of other cities around the country. A Washington City Paper article last month cited Headlong Dance Theater as a ringleader, quoting one of its founders, David Brick, as saying, “You have to figure out how to do things on your own.” Sometimes that requires contorting into unlikely partnerships such as the one between Headlong, another long-established dance group, Group Motion, and Viji Rao’s newer Three Aksha. Their show, called “Sam-Gam BAM!”, opened at Drexel’s Mandell Theater last weekend and continues Thursday through Saturday.

Headlong is the postmodern, hipster/brainy dance company that relocated in Philadelphia from Wesleyan University in the early 1990s; German expressionist Group Motion had arrived from Berlin back in 1968. Traditional Indian dance company Three Aksha’s been around for the better part of the last decade.

“Sam-gam” – Sanskrit for “flow together” – is the title and overarching theme of the new works presented by the three companies, whose flowing together was pure serendipity.

“Group Motion had reserved the Mandell for two weekends,” said company director Manfred Fischbeck, “and since Headlong and Three Aksha inquired about the Mandell for the same dates, it made sense to join forces with the support of the Dance UP rental subsidy program.”

Headlong’s world premiere, I cannot tell you how to watch this, is actually an amusing primer on how to watch it, featuring Lorin Lyle as a referee and several dancers who form Headlong’s new ensemble springing off and melting into one another, contact-improv style. Headlong’s Amy Smith soloed in a classical Bharatanatyam dance taught to her by Rao, to jazz and country music. It was wonderfully quirky at first, though the quirk didn’t outlast the conceit, especially as a solo on a large proscenium stage.

Rao led her group of seven women in Uurja, expressing Bharatanatyam’s nine emotions with live music and vocals. They later danced a more contemporary theatrical work, Faces Behind the Mask, in which four masked couples represent ordinary life situations.

After reprising a luminous 2003 work by Japanese choreographer Kenshi Nohmi, Group Motion provided the strongest work on the program. With an electronic score by Andrea Clearfield and live music performed by Tim Motzer, Thomas Wave and Fischbeck, the world premiere called Chinnamasta – The Parts and the Whole drew on the legend of the Hindu goddess who is self-decapitated. Text by poet and dancer/choreographer Jaamil Kosoko provided chilling monologues about greed, compassion, and sex.

With a video installation by John Luna projected onto billowy rectangles of plastic dropped from the fly, and a full complement of Group Motion dancers and guests, the piece had the sense of spectacle the concept called for. Bathed in golden light by lighting designer Matt Sharp, the group writhed behind the semi-opaque sheeting in an erotic and mystical tangle.

Read more: http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20110623__Sam-Gam_BAM____triple-power_dance_at_Drexel.html?ref=more-like-this#ixzz1SrPJpmnb

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Two Ochoa world premieres highlight BalletX program

Author: admin

Jul 22

Posted on Fri, Jul. 22, 2011

By Merilyn Jackson

For The Inquirer

                                                                                                                              ALEXANDER IZILIAEV

Barry Kerollis and Chloe Horne dancing in BalettX’s performance of Amy Seiwert’s “It’s Not a Cry.”

Two impressive world premieres by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa set BalletX’s summer season ablaze at the Wilma Theater on Wednesday evening.

Ochoa has choreographed for the company before, and Laura Feig and Adam Hundt danced her Bare with charming tenderness. In ordinary underwear, they languidly spill over each other, entwining and uncoupling as if drowsy with morning love.

Duets perpetually serve as studies of coupledom, and Amy Seiwert’s It’s Not a Cry explores the couple over the long haul. To Jeff Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s hallowed anthem to love gone bitter, “Hallelujah,” Chloe Horne and Barry Kerollis appear in separate spotlights. If Kerollis pulls Horne along in a slide, she convulses in mid-glide and twists off in the other direction. It seems they’ll never make it work. Yet by the final iteration of “Hallelujah,” the two are coiled together, bathed in a single pool of light.

A Soliloquy Among Many, by Roger C. Jeffrey, opened the evening with costumes by Loris Doran that evoked a medieval theme – monk-brown skirts, flat suede boots. The group sections looked crowded at times, but Horne, as the lead, drew me in with her lissome solo.

En Dedans, a short film by Gabrielle Lamb, served as an entr’acte. Voice-overs reveal the individual thoughts of the company’s dancers in rehearsal, making apparent the hardships, pain, and doubt artists endure to bring us the pleasure of their company.

But it was Ochoa’s morbidly sad, yet freakishly beautiful Castrati that ended the program with an unexpected concept – a study of the “last seven castrati” who endured being maimed for life in order to acquire voices that could range over three octaves.

Along with Colby Damon, Jesse Sani, and Hundt, Ochoa smartly used four female dancers whose long, smooth limbs resemble those developed by boys after prepubescent castration.

Avid Arik Herman’s golden masks and marquisette and faux brocade costumes recalled the foppery and excess of the era. Music by Friedrich Handel and David van Bouwel wrapped this gorgeous lot in the high-pitched voice that sounds as dismembered as the body. Various tics and exaggeratedly grotesque gestures expressed how damaged these performers were. Damon’s overly courteous bows drew laughter. Hundt, extracting his voice from his yawning mouth as if it were a long silken scarf, drew pity. Tara Keating, lying leopard-like off to the side, surveyed the audience as if all this were our fault.

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Thunderous reception for 4 dance works

Author: admin

May 10

Posted on Tue, May. 10, 2011
By Merilyn Jackson
For the Inquirer
The Earth goddess of Philadelphia dance, Joan Myers Brown, hurled a thunderbolt of a program at the near-capacity audience in the Kimmel’s Perelman Theater Friday evening – but instead of running for cover, the crowd erupted in cheers as each of the four works ended.

It started with a vigorous sun shower, a reprise of Milton Myers’ Violin Concerto to the Philip Glass work of that name. Myers has been resident choreographer for Philadanco since 1986; this is one of my favorite pieces by him. Clad in variations of purple, 10 dancers race in diagonals across the stage to Glass’ pulse and, in a second section, stop the action with bodybuilding poses. It all ends with the lead female dancer held aloft in a fish dive by four men.

Also reprised was Cottonwool, by frequent contributor and former company member Christopher Huggins with music by the UK electronic music duo Lamb. It increased the volume and intensity of the evening to a downpour of movement. Tommie Waheed-Evans, Jeroboam Bozeman, and LaMar Baylor take turns teetering in spotlights as if to fall, while around them Chloé O. Davis, Roxanne Lyst and Rosita Davis and the other dancers skitter and speedball at high risk with never a misstep.

A Philadelphia premiere by Ray Mercer, a dancer of Lion King fame, was called Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It had its world premiere in New York in March and has nothing to do with the movie but with a huge table that provided a feast for the eyes. I’ll never know how Philadanco kept pouring it on after the first two high-velocity pieces, but this technically tricky (if sometimes shticky), virtuosic table dance all but brought the house down. Davis, Lyst, and Lindsey Holmes take solo turns on a four-foot-high square table that acts as a platform to leap onto, dive under, or spring from, which they did with wild abandonment. Good thing Michael Jackson Jr. or Baylor or Evans was always there to catch them as the women flipped onto them backward, swan-diving with their noses to the floor and toes meeting between the men’s shoulder blades!

Finally, Rennie Harris’ often unexpectedly poignant hip-hop hit, Philadelphia Experiment, was danced with precision. Davis and Heather Benson got down but stayed elegant. How these dancers kept cool while doing squats, leg sweeps, and pumping or locking body parts at the end of such a demanding program is a mystery.

Diaghilev may have demanded “Étonne-moi!” but it only takes Joan Myers Brown’s steely gaze from the wings to make these artists astonish us.

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Choreography aims for gut, not head

Author: admin

May 9

Posted on Sat, May. 7, 2011

By Merilyn Jackson

For The Inquirer

Artistic director/choreographer Roni Koresh sometimes cherry-picks the best-received sections from his earlier dances, gathers them into a sequence, then gives the whole a title and a vague raison d’etre, as he has with his new Through the Skin.”Don’t intellectualize this dance, feel it viscerally,” he said before Thursday’s performance at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, which launched Koresh Dance Company’s 20th year.

Like Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin (with whom he worked last year), Koresh in recent seasons has found this formula – linking choreographic nuggets that otherwise wouldn’t make a golden coronet on their own – to be a good way to showcase minor work among the company’s showpieces.

His Sense of Human and Somewhere in Between, both from 2010, had 14 sections each, and he said Through the Skin grew out of his plundering of those two works. Showman though he is, however, he might have found a better way of setting it.

Why not program the full-company, two-part chair dance “Alarm” and “Ease” sections from Somewhere in Between as an excerpt in the first half of the show? The company of 10 dances the first section with stunning precision to Hugues Le Bars’ pulsing music, then repeats similar choreography at a slower pace to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 4. It’s long enough and strong enough to be a stand-alone piece. But as one of the 16 sections of Through the Skin it broke the momentum Koresh had going with much of the newer work.

Nonetheless, there were moments aplenty to savor, and the best of it was the overall change from Koresh’s signature quicksilver tempo to one slow enough to see his movement phrases more clearly. The whole was loosely laced together by Karl Mullen’s hypnotically voiced-over poem that states “We let the world in, through the skin.”

Koresh now has four virile men in the company, but some of the women’s sections stood out. In “Clash of the Humdrum,” Shannon Bramham, Jessica Daley, and the company’s sole remaining original member, Melissa Rector, all but spike the stage with triangled bends. In “Bang, Bang and Banging,” Leo Abraham’s music has Alexis Viator and Asya Zlatina aggressively jumping, skipping, and hopping around each other as if they were in a boxing ring.

Rector’s brief solo with Micah Geyer had the push- and-pull that something titled “Sin and Forgive Me” should. And when Joe Cotler shoved Fang-Ju Chou Gant’s leg down from arabesque like a lever, it soon flew up into one of those 6 o’clock extensions for which Koresh women are justly famous.

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