Category: dance

The choreographer originally created Available Light, now seen as a Minimalist milestone in both dance and music, as a site-specific piece for Gehry’s Temporary Contemporary at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. This past spring at MASS MoCA, she and Gehry revised Available Light for a proscenium stage; the work was just presented in Berlin and (finally!) makes its East Coast premiere this week at the Philly Fringe Festival.

“The woman, called Dai Dali, first learned to pole dance at a gym four years ago and is now able to pull of moves that most people half her age couldn’t accomplish.”

“Festival founder and director Pedro Pablo Peña emphasizes the daunting nature of his enterprise. ‘Fulfilling my dream of bringing ballet from all over the world to Miami has been a task worthy of Don Quixote,’ he says in Spanish. ‘It’s taken quite a bit of inspired madness.'”

“Working for the ballet had been a good career move for Picasso, augmenting his income and introducing him to an audience of rich, cultured patrons. It had also pleased Olga who, while retiring from the stage, remained deeply attached to her old profession.”

“While I may be impressed by the calibre of these performances, being ‘impressed’ has little to do with what I expect or want from dance. Imagine if critical engagement with literature centred on its ability to impress, rather than its ability to provoke thought and feeling, to trouble and inspire, to mitigate the disjuncture between our conscious and unconscious minds. The demotion in richness, in complexity of experience, would be self-evident.”

“From the early days of the Great White Way to the greatest hits of the past ten years, here are 12 legendary choreographers who have (literally) given shape to Broadway as we know it.”

The Kaufman school, which started classes this week, is unusual in embedding a conservatory-style bachelor of fine arts program within a private research university of some academic rigor. It’s also distinctive in curricular focus; its motto — “the New Movement” — connotes revolution, and Jody Gates speaks of “reimagining dance education for the 21st century.”

“I trusted my instincts. It is a very short career [and] I didn’t have time to cope with the management of the company.”

“But today the ones in this room are tired. This is no surprise as last week was a hard one finishing the entire show, which is nearly 90 minutes of dancing. I always push the first week of a rehearsal period so that we can all see what we actually have.”