With “Just Dance,” I am elevating my heart rate, but I am also sidestepping the self. Depending on the song and background images, I am a partying hipster in a floor-length fur (Macklemore, “Can’t Hold Us”), or a futuristic funk dancer (Nicki Minaj, “Pound the Alarm”), or a girl with swinging blond hair at a club. Critics complain that the offerings on “Just Dance” skew painfully toward bubble-gum pop, but it also means that on “Just Dance,” I am forever young.
Category: dance
Lightning Strikes Ballet Company’s Headquarters
“Lightning and strong winds struck the Board of Trade building in downtown Duluth early Thursday, knocking the chimney through part of the roof – and leaving many of the Minnesota Ballet’s costumes under a thick pile of rubble. … The rest of the ballet’s rooms were unharmed, except for a few branches that came through the dance floor studio windows.”
Is It Time To Establish Quotas For Female Choreographers?
A debate and forum in London earlier this month came to close to recommending just that: one of the action points was “Implement strategic equality quotas with Boards, funders, Associate Artists and artistic programmes.” The conclusion was that “‘strategic quotas’ could be beneficial if, and only if, they created a trickledown effect. But how effective can quotas be?” And would it help or hurt if government funders required them?
Raising The Standard Of Choreography In Pop Music
Singer-songwriter Sia and choreographer Ryan Heffington “believe that dance is underused in pop music – more that it is abused much of the time by adhering to an easy formula. ‘We established the artist and backup dancers, I believe, in the early ’80s,’ he said. ‘There has to be evolution, and there is. We’re doing it.'”
Alvin Ailey Dancers – On Their Own Time – Create A Protest Dance Video To Beyoncé’s ‘Freedom’
Company member Sean Aaron Carmon, who conceived and choreographed the brief piece as a response to the recent shootings by and of police, talks about where his material came from and whether “Freedom” could become part of a larger project.
Why Collective Movement (Dancing?) Brings Us Together
Evidence suggests that synchronising movement with others leads to feelings of togetherness or ‘oneness’ – perhaps because the intentional act of coordinating with another person necessitates sharing mental states. To row a boat down the river, the individual ‘I’ must become the collective ‘we’.
Snapping Hip Syndrome: An Explainer For Dancers
“Does this statement sound familiar to you? ‘My hip snaps or pops when I do grand battement or developpé devant or à la seconde. The snap sometimes presents with pain but sometimes not, and happens either on the up phase or down phase of the movement.’ Dancers might also notice decreased range of motion through the sagittal or frontal planes.”
David Parsons Is Choreographing For Drones
“‘The drones also become personalities,’ he explained. ‘They become alive. They make decisions in front of your eyes, and so do the [human] performers onstage. So you get the feeling that they have artificial intelligence, that they are thinking. It’s spooky.'”
Benjamin Millepied Is Now A Free Man (A Q&A)
“In a recent Skype call from London on a day off, Mr. Millepied looked happy and relaxed, quick to laugh. Words tumbled out of his mouth in sometimes hard-to-follow torrents. He spoke about his constantly expanding plans, his state of mind post-Paris and his love for Los Angeles. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.”
Keeping Choreography Alive After The Choreographer Goes Away
At the Trisha Brown Dance Company, keeping her work going will “require well-versed experts to convey Ms. Brown’s precision physicality and use of gravity to enhance basic movements, such as bending, stretching and rotating. Nothing about it is simple, say her supporters, and it needs careful preservation to survive.”