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Is all that jazzy modern dance Jewish?
With a Jewish population of more than a quarter million and a rich dance culture that boasts five internationally known professional companies in as many ethnicities and dance genres, Philadelphia is a likely stage for a Jewish dance company. Jewish dancers, choreographers, presenters, entrepreneurs, critics, and even arts editors of prominent publications have largely shaped the city’s cultural dancescape over the past century. But, in fact, the first truly Jewish dance company, Koresh Dance Company, (KDC) was founded by Israeli Yemenite choreographer Ronen (Roni) Koresh in 1991. On its own, the company most represents Jewish dance in Philadelphia and nationally....
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Taking A.I.M
As the sun set on a humid Central Park the first evening of August, Kyle Abraham, the artistic director of A.I.M (a modern, genre-bending dance company formerly known as Abraham.In.Motion), spoke with Gibney’s new curatorial director Eva Yaa Asantewaa. In the few hours before A.I.M’s performance at the Summer Stage, they talked about Abraham’s performance style and influences, his advice to those who started dancing late in life, and his apprehension surrounding a piece he is currently choreographing for New York City Ballet.
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No Pain
Somewhere in the last few bars of the Bluebird coda from "The Sleeping Beauty," I felt my foot give way. I can’t remember exactly what step it was, but I knew instantly something was wrong. I almost managed to get to the end of the rehearsal, but the foot had completely locked up. Overwhelmed by a mixture of shock, pain and embarrassment, I needed to be out of view. As I limped to the seclusion of the corridor outside the busy rehearsal studio, all I could hear was white noise. Our company ballet master and my dance partner joined me...
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Just Breathe
Just over a year ago, I made an early decision to retire from my career as a professional dancer. Leaving behind the glory of the stage, the grind of endless hours in the studio . . . the past 16 years of my life dedicated to performing art. I know for certain that not one day has gone by that I haven’t considered my decision, contemplated my timing . . . wondered what ballet I might be rehearsing or injury I might be nursing if I was still “in the game.” I go to the theater frequently to get my...
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Dancers in Dialogue
“Will you hold this, please?” I look up from my notebook to see a young woman pressing a length of string into my hands. A beat later she slinks away, leaving me to fumble with the thread as its other end is pulled taut by a man swaying across the room.
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The Talk
“We invite you to stay for a post-performance conversation”—these are dividing words. After a recent performance, all but one of my seatmates—several friends and acquaintances—decided against staying. I wavered for a minute as I considered keeping my friend company and the possibility of hearing the choreographers and performers discuss their processes, inspirations, and attachments—all interiors that I love. But in the end I joined the exodus, citing my own rule not to attend post-performance talks for shows I am reviewing, in service of my oxymoronic goals of maintaining objectivity and developing a singular, personal response to the work.
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The Cult of Fragility
One of the greatest challenges—and for me, joys—of being a dance critic is navigating the not infrequent clash between contemporary values and those embraced in classical ballet, a centuries-old institution that venerates ‘tradition’ in all its old-world, patriarchal glory. How should a world increasingly concerned with racial diversity respond to an establishment that in 2015 remains overwhelmingly white? How can an art form that worships prescriptive gender roles address the growing call for LGBT inclusivity? What messages of value can women divine from stories that glorify female fragility and are primarily written and directed by men?
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Between the Dancer and the Dance
I want to find dance’s “fundamental feature” [note]Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (abbreviated CL). Translated from the French by Richard Howard. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010 paperback edition), 9[/note] as Roland Barthes, in his 1980 Camera Lucida, did for photography. [note]Please see essay #1 of “Between the Dancer and the Dance” for what the French critic Roland Barthes has to do with anything. [/note] I’ll begin, like him, with the peculiar mechanism by which the idiom (photography for him, dance for me) transmutes its raw material into art. The machinery, if not the alchemy, of sign-making, as the...
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Between the Dancer and the Dance
Six years ago, when I began teaching at the Fashion Institute of Technology for applied and not-so-applied arts, the professors hiring me asked if I might like to try my hand at a course that prepared graphic design students for the workplace—or at least got them in the door.
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A Month in the Country
In the following essay, Stephanie Jordan elucidates the method and meaning of the music selected for Frederick Ashton's “A Month in the Country” It comes from Following Sir Fred's Steps - Ashton's Legacy, the published proceedings of the conference on the choreographer and his work, held at Roehampton University in 1994, and edited by Stephanie Jordan and Andrée Grau. This essay is expanded upon in Stephanie Jordan's 2000 publication, Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet (London: Dance Books), pages 245-64.
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Teenage Angst and Institutions
Watching Matthew Bourne's reworked version of the “star-cross'd lovers,” I was briefly reminded of Veronica, played by Winona Ryder, in the dark 1988 comedy by Daniel Waters and Michael Lehmann, Heathers, and her line, “my teen angst bullshit has a body count.” Yes, this is the darker side of Bourne's repertoire,...
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The Me of Today
The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.
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Beneath blue California skies, manicured trees, and the occasional hum of an overhead airplane, Tamara Rojo took the Frost Amphitheater stage at Stanford University to introduce herself as the new artistic director of San Francisco Ballet.
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America, F**K Yeah
After a week of the well-balanced meal that is “Jewels”—the nutritive, potentially tedious, leafy greens of “Emeralds,” the gamy, carnivorous “Rubies,” and the decadent, shiny white mountains of meringue in “Diamonds”—the New York City Ballet continued its 75th Anniversary All-Balanchine Fall Season with rather more dyspeptic fare.
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Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup
An “Ajiaco” is a type of soup common to Colombia, Cuba, and Peru that combines a variety of different vegetables, spices, and meats.
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