Category: dance

“With a dozen high-def cameras and a couple of camcorders, plus pens, notebooks, sketch pads and laptops, more than 40 people spent three recent weeks in a black-box theater on the campus of UC San Diego documenting what was occurring there. The object of their study was notoriously elusive: dance and the process of choreographic creation.”

The Cameroon-born choreographer Merlin Nyakam and his Compagnie La Calebasse, which “does more than just meld African dance vocabulary with European-style scenic clarity and phrasing,” is making its U.S. debut this weekend. The Seattle Times‘s critic says that “Seattle audiences have a rare chance to gaze into a crystal ball this weekend and glimpse a future world choreographic master.”

“The Brooklyn Academy of Music is bracing for protests of the Batsheva Dance Company, an Israeli troupe, this week. In recent weeks during a North American tour, Batsheva, which was to begin a run of performances on Wednesday night, has been dogged by small demonstrations and calls for a boycott over Israel’s actions in Gaza.”

“Since its first tour of the United States in 1970, Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company has won over American crowds and critics alike with its energetic approach to dance. At the time, it was, perhaps, a novelty: an Israeli group performing primarily American repertory with unbridled verve and vigor. But in the past 18 years, the company has become a phenomenon of a different sort.”

“Last week, at the Roundhouse, choreographer Hofesh Shechter pulled off a coup. For years, pop stars have been turning their gigs into dance spectaculars. What he now did, in large part at least, was to transform a contemporary dance show into a rock gig… [T]he standing area was packed with teenagers snapping the stage with their phones.”

Alastair Macaulay attends this winter’s season and suspects it is…

“Twenty years after his passing, the spark of Ailey’s vision, famously encapsulated in his belief that “dance came from the people and should be delivered back to the people,” continues to guide his company, which has performed in 71 countries on every continent except Antarctica, and brought the work of more than 70 choreographers – including 79 works by Ailey himself – to an estimated 21 million people.”

“After the seven-week hiatus of Ballet B.C.’s shutdown due to financial crisis, these performers have been thrown into the fire. And yet you get the distinct feeling they’re rising from the ashes.” Said fire is this weekend’s world premiere of James Kudelka’s The Goldberg Variations – Side  2: Adam & Eve & Steve.

“Modern dance returns to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center this summer as the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Paul Taylor Dance Company, guided by two of dance’s greatest choreographers, make their first-ever appearances on the SPAC main stage.”

Alastair Macaulay: “But what is funny and refreshing about the Cie2k_far – its full name, by the way, is Cie2k_far Contemporary Dance Company and Creation of All Kinds – is that it cheerfully and immediately contradicts any such notion” that it must necessarily base its work in traditional dance.