A Leap Beyond

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May 1

By Merilyn Jackson

For The Inquirer

Those of us who critique the arts go wild with delight when an artist we’ve been watching for many years creates a work that transcends all he has done before. Thursday night Koresh Dance Company opened its spring season at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre with artistic director Ronen (Roni) Koresh’s Sense of Human, an evening-length piece that I would call his masterwork to date.

The program opened with choreography by Melissa Rector, Koresh’s spitfire star dancer since the beginning, 19 years ago. Rector set her Flight on the Koresh Youth Ensemble, and its 11 young women soared. There were Africanist stompings, grotesque gyrations, and the kind of angsty angularities that contribute to the Koresh “look.”

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Compagnie Jant-Bi

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Apr 29

Sun Dance

West African dancers in Compagnie Jant-Bi (the sun) bring the power of Senegal to Gammage

By Merilyn Jackson Thursday, Apr 5 2001

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.

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The Pound of Music

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Apr 29

The Pound of Music

STOMP motion comes to the Orpheum

By Merilyn Jackson Thursday, Jun 14 2001

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.

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Work or W(h)ine?

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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?

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Filed under: Current Events, Dance, Food, Inquirer Articles

Dance Critics Association Annual Conference

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Apr 27

Dance Critics Association

Making your plans for this year’s DCA conference? We hope so. And in a slight change from previous years, the Friday of the conference – July 16 – will feature a full day of workshops.

Don’t wait until the last minute to make your hotel reservations for this year’s DCA conference. Remember, the DCA conference is being held in conjunction with the World Dance Alliance conference. The conference hotel is the Doubletree Hotel Chelsea, 128 W. 29th St. Call (212) 564-0994 and ask for the DCA/WDA conference rate.

http://www.dancecritics.org/

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GERMAINE ACOGNY

Posted by admin

Apr 21

Posted on Thu, Feb. 11, 2010

Exploring African roots and branches

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.

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Philadelphia Dance Projects

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Apr 21

JACQUES-JEAN TIZIOU / www.jjtiziou.net
Artists in the Local Dance History Project: (top row, from left) Jano Cohen, William Robinson, Gregory Holt, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Terry Fox; (bottom, from left) Heather Murphy, John Luna, Alie Vidich, Dan Martin, and Michael Biello. Reconstructed works are being performed by today’s dancers in the project’s two weekend programs.
Posted on Tue, Mar. 2, 2010

The old, the new, moving together

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.

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International Association of Blacks in Dance

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Apr 21

Everybody dance!

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.

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Philadelphia Dance Projects Presents

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Apr 21

Posted on Mon, Mar. 8, 2010

Dances from the past and the present

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

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Well again, a dancer embraced life and art

Posted by admin

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.

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