Portraits of a Lady
Martha Graham is the Georgia O’Keefe of dance. No matter what the source material, the primary subject of her works is womanhood.
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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. The much celebrated American choreographer, Lorenzo “Rennie” Harris, is known worldwide for his (2000) “Rome & Jewels” and his practice of bringing hip hop and street dance to the stage under his company name Rennie Harris PureMovement or RHPM. This month, as part of Harris’s three-year choreographic residency at the University of Pennsylvania’s 936 seat performance venue, Penn Live Arts, he premiered “American Street Dancer.” As a kind of lesson, this show expands on the multivalanced styles that largely derive from Africanist traditions to historically assimilated Black dance, revealing the cross pollination of white and Latino urban and regional styles with African American idioms. Note, Harris does not call his new show African American, but American street dance, which underscores the origins of the forms and a principled geopolitics.
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Martha Graham is the Georgia O’Keefe of dance. No matter what the source material, the primary subject of her works is womanhood.
Continue ReadingPetite in stature, with beautiful, delicate features, Scottish dance artist Suzi Cunningham is nonetheless a powerhouse performer: an endless shape shifter whose work ranges from eerie to strange, to poignant, or just absolutely hilarious.
Continue ReadingWith his peerless vocabulary of postmodern abstract moves—or, as he’s called it, “gumbo style,” which blends Black dance with classical ballet techniques—Kyle Abraham, a 2013 MacArthur Genius grant awardee, has been making thought-provoking works for decades.
Continue ReadingCan art save civilization? The question matters deeply to Brenda Way, who has dedicated her life to the arts in San Francisco.
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