Category: dance

sjDANCEco is a new Bay Area modern dance company featuring work by area choreographers. The company – whose focus incorporates other kinds of dance besides modern – was formed in 2002 to organize San Jose’s Dancin’ Downtown festival, which in May showcased dozens of South Bay companies on an outdoor stage. The group has been evolving ever since and now is preparing applications for non-profit status.”

“Burkina Faso – or “Land of Men of Dignity”, surely the most beautifully named country in the world – is the home of Africa’s most important film festival, held twice a year in the capital, Ouagadougou. The city also has a thriving music scene. Against all the odds, Burkinas had found ways in which they were not poor”… But “it is still a surprise to find that Burkina Faso is home to one of the most innovative contemporary dance companies on the European circuit.”

Interest has been intense on Merce Cunningham’s dance company celebration of 50 years, writes Tobi Tobias. “For the opening night gala, attended by a packed house of the rich, the famous, and the curious, augmented by squads of rock music fans and their Cunningham-reverent equivalent, as well as an extra component of security folks, the dice rolling was done onstage, in the presence of the musicians who would later be hidden in the pit and a few dancers picturesquely warming up. It featured New York’s Mayor Bloomberg at his most aggressively exuberant (to compensate for Cunningham’s decades of under appreciation?), with the rolling done by celebs like former Cunningham collaborators Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cunningham ur-dancer Carolyn Brown. Eventually, after all the brouhaha, here it was, another Merce Cunningham dance, and this time, as chance would have it, not a particularly distinguished one.”

“It is not an exaggeration to say that the Ballet Nacional de Cuba is among the best in the world. That alone makes watching its dancers take flight on stage a thrill for any lover of the arts. But for us, Cuban exiles from Miami of different generations in emigration and age, this evening was more than a performance. It was an act of rebellion against a 44-year-standoff, my entire lifetime, and of faith that not all is lost.”

“The nitty-gritty details of a contract for a ballet ensemble directed by William Forsythe and funded by the cities of Frankfurt and Dresden and their respective state governments had all been worked out months ago. But when representatives of the contractual parties met in Dresden on Tuesday to sign the deal, two chairs remained empty. On the same day, Frankfurt’s city council passed a decision that Frankfurt would pull out of the cooperation, to which it would have contributed EUR200,000 ($232,600) per year.”

China’s Great Hall of the People, home to its government, was converted to a giant theatre to host the dance sensation Riverdance. “The vast stage, which is better known as the platform for speeches by Communist party leaders, has been filled with about 100 dancers, musicians and production staff tapping, drumming and fiddling out jigs and ballads from the other side of the planet. In the audience, a full house of almost 7,000 people sit at the desks usually reserved for legislators.”

Montreal’s annual Festival International de Nouvelle Danse is a massive showcase for dance. “Just consider the numbers: 22 companies, 25 choreographers and 250 dance artists, not to mention 200 Canadian and foreign critics, journalists and producers eavesdropping on the more than 60 shows in 17 different locations throughout the city.” And what stood out? William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt, which just points out the absurdity of this company’s imminent demise.

Merce Cunningham is celebrating 50 years of his company with a collaboration with two rock bands. Radiohead and its Icelandic cousin, Sigur Ros are performing with Cunningham’s dancers at the Brooklyn Academy, and, as usual Cunningham has engineered the programs for maximum unpredictability…

Merce Cunningham on his Radiohead collaboration: “Well, I don’t know that much about rock bands, but it was a new kind of sound. I thought, ‘Well, that’s interesting.’ As music is greatly concerned with sound and, as John Cage would say, silence, I thought, Well, we’d never done anything like this before, so why not try it?’ But what started out as a relatively simple idea – find an open-minded, nonconforming composer with whom to collaborate on a new piece – quickly became a more complicated venture than Cunningham had ever encountered.”

Choreographer Jonathan Burrows is a big hit in Europe. So whay not at home in Britain? “Why Burrows is so little seen in Britain – only glimpsed in London or Nottingham’s adventurous NottDance festival – baffles and troubles me. He has been based in Belgium for three years, which he believes gives him a better view of the waves of innovation that constantly break in European dance and art. London, with its ‘island mentality’, is ‘resolutely isolated’. Britain, he says forcefully, is addicted to hype, which is intensely discouraging to choreographers not keen to replay old familiarities.”