Why it’s called American Street Dancer
Books are banned, DEI scuttled, and Africanist studies scaled back. Yet, the irrepressible spirit of African American artists is not extinguished.
Continue ReadingWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
“The Bowie Project,” the brainchild of Austin-based choreographer Andrea Ariel, whose other credits include the choreography for the film Waiting for Guffman and a three-part dance-theatre series on the floating garbage patch in the North Pacific Gyre, was an exercise in personae, layering, fragmenting, and improvisation. The performance, which incorporated three dancers, the David Bowie tribute band Super Creeps, and three members of New York’s Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble, utilized Soundpainting, a “composing sign language” invented by musician Walter Thompson. Working with Thompson, Ariel adapted and expanded the vocabulary of music-focused conducting gestures—they look a bit like the gestures one makes during a game of charades—for dance and performance. Through Soundpainting with a bank of Bowie songs, text from his interviews, and movement sequences within a predetermined arc, the show facilitated an engagingly disorienting dive into the most outwardly colorful period of Bowie’s life and work: the 1970s.
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Books are banned, DEI scuttled, and Africanist studies scaled back. Yet, the irrepressible spirit of African American artists is not extinguished.
Continue Reading“Lists of Promise,” a new work currently in a two-week run from March 13- 30 at the East Village cultural landmark, Theater for the New City, promised more than it delivered, at least for now.
Continue Reading“State of Heads” opens with a blaze of white light and loud clanking onto a white-suited Levi Gonzalez, part Elvis, part televangelist addressing his congregation. A pair of women sidle in—Rebecca Cyr and Donna Uchizono—dressed in ankle-length white dresses and cowered posture.
Continue ReadingThe late John Ashford, a pioneer in programming emerging contemporary choreographers across Europe, once told me that he could tell what sort of choreographer a young artist would turn into when watching their first creations.
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