Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange
While looking at a previous newsletter of the Howard Hughes Medical Center, we came across an article on Liz Lerman's dance, Ferocious Beauty: Genome. Still being performed today and having its Canadian debut, we went to Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, only to find that much of her company's choreography centers on contemporary issues.
Ferocious Beauty: Genome - Genetic research raises prospects that previous generations may
scarcely have imagined: of prolonging life and maintaining youth
indefinitely, of replicating an individual, of choosing the bodies and
brains of our children, and of creating new species to feed and serve
us. How we heal, age, procreate, and eat may all be altered in the next
years by scientific research happening right now.
Funny Uncles - While the number of blended families, adoption, single parents by
choice and gay parenting are all on the rise, the image of family
remains as a traditional, nuclear unit. Funny Uncles, conceived and directed by Producing Artistic Director Peter DiMuro, explores the reality of contemporary families through movement, theatre, video and spoken word.
The Mining Project - Under the artistic direction of choreographer Martha Wittman Imprints on a Landscape: The Mining Project uses a combination of movement, video, spoken word, audio of interviews and traditional and original music to explore the connections between life, labor and landscape in coal mining communities.
"Imprints on a Landscape travels a double path,” explains Wittman, "exploring both the labor of mining and the labor of art. Each transforms something ordinary into something new. Mining turns rock into energy, and dance allows motion to become a story.”
Vignettes focus on the union movement, memories of working deep in the mines, family celebrations, and the banshee, a spirit whose presence evokes the reality of living with the constant, unquestioned threat of tragedy and death.
A Dancer's Journal
Click on the handle of Jordy Kandinsky's locker and you're at the entry of A Dancer's Journal; Learning to Perform the Dances of Martha Graham.
Jordy's assignment when she joined the company was to learn three ballets and understudy four roles in a period of six weeks: the woman in Lamentation, Ariadne in Errand Into the Maze, one of the followers in Appalachian Spring and the girl in yellow in Diversion of Angels.
There are a number of quite marvelous audio and video clips for viewing. One of the clips shows Ms. Graham performing Lamentation herself.
The artistic director prepares a check list to help Jordy learn the dances (as well as watching films of performances). Here are some of the points covered:
- Read what Graham and others have written about the dance
- Talk to those who have performed the role
- Find pictures, poems or other items that help you 'become' this character
- Fill the physical moves with meaning (give them character
- Learn to manipulate the props, sets, and costumes
- Learn how to wear your hair and apply the makeup for your character
- Rehearse to put everything together; hone your personal interpretation
British Dance Edition
On with the dance, let joy be unconfined;
No sleep to morn when Youth and Pleasure Meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet
— Lord Byron
The British Dance Edition is a biannual event held this past February in Leeds and organized by the
Association of National
Dance Agencies (ANDA) project "which enables dance companies to
showcase their latest work and allows promoters to see this work
compacted into a few days all in one city."
Some of the performances created by their choreographers were:
"Park is a place of refuge. Floating like an island in the urban ocean, Park is the backyard for worn out beliefs and redundant ideologies. In this playground,
Jasmin Vardimon and her eight dancers create a new hybrid of metaphors and tales, a collage made from these remnants. Park becomes the place where the individual escapes the everyday in order to play."
Muttnik was choreographed by by Niki McCretton:
Muttnik is a stray dog (patterned after Laika, the dog sent into space aboard the Russian Sputnik 2 rocket in 1957). "She lives on the streets of Moscow, cold and hungry until one day she is captured. To her surprise she finds herself in a new home with food, water and adventures better than dreams. She is living at the Russian Space Centre and is to become the first dog in space! She learns to fly a rocket, to dance in zero gravity and to go ‘where no dog has gone before. Will she skate on the rings of Saturn, what will be her first message home and what will it be like to dig holes on the moon?"
The Angika Dance Company is a "leading British Indian dance company and their work is committed to
regenerating the rich vocabulary of classical Bharata Natyam dance with a contemporary approach."
Bhakti (the work performed at the Dance Edition) means devotion and this new work is powered by the concentrated vitality and sculptural geometry of Angika's dance.
And, of course, there is that piece Chase the Glowing Hours with Flying Feet by Choreographer Helene Blackburn for Diversions, the Dance Company of Wales. Here's how they describe it:
"A witty and dynamic work accompanied by an evocative soundscape with
Bach piano music. The dancers explore communication through sharp,
ensemble movement and intimate dialogue, addressing their personal
motivation to dance.:
Dance, People, Dance
An Australian site, DancePeopleDance, among other explorations, traces the history of early touring Australian dance companies.
In the 1920s the legendary dancer Anna Pavlova took Australia by storm; she was one of the first international stars to include Australia on her extensive touring circuit. Following in the footsteps of Pavlova, and building upon her successes, the Ballets Russes (Russian Ballet) companies of Colonel Wassily de Basil made three tours to Australia between 1936 and 1940.
The section titled Search for Identity examines the problem of Australians trying to balance "
a European cultural heritage with a geographical
location in the Southern Hemisphere":
Many influential figures in the world of Australian dance, including Robert Helpmann, Gertrud Bodenwieser and Edouard Borovansky, found different solutions to this dilemma of balancing location and heritage.
The Australian Vision segment explores the Aboriginal aspect of dance:
Until recently Aboriginal people were, almost without exception, the only audiences for Aboriginal dance. That situation has been transformed. Traditional dances are now being toured and choreographers of Aboriginal descent are making theatrical works based on their Indigenous heritage for showing in Australia and overseas.
Multicultural and social dance forms have always been popular participatory, and sometimes competitive, forms of dance in Australia and continue to be so into the twenty first century. Indigenous dance has also become one the diverse strands of popular Australian culture.
The costumes of Vanessa Leyonhjelm (and other designers) are worth noting here: "By using industrial materials— air conditioning insulation mesh, vacuum-formed synthetic material, nylon, raffia — in her costumes for Stanton Welch’s Divergence, Melbourne-based designer Vanessa Leyonhjelm moves classical dance costumes and accessories in a new direction."
Photographs, audio input and additional resources, make this a marvelous site from the National Library of Australia.
Another Century Anniversary
Frederick Ashton, like George Balanchine, was born in 1904. This date represents yet another century birthday fest for a great in the field of ballet choreography. Not as well known as Ballanchine but considered one of the greats of the 20th century, if not England's greatest.
The story of Ashton's
version of
La Fille Mal Gardee uses the plot device of the heroine, Lise, whose mother disapproves of her boyfriend and wants her to marry a rich man.
The celebrated Margot Fonteyn performed in Ashton's version of Horoscope, predicated on a story line surrounding the influence of the signs of the zodiac on two young lovers. Fonteyn also appeared in Ashton's Sleeping Beauty.
Some of the ballets that Ashton danced in, as well as doing the choreography for, were Façade, Firebird, as
the evil Kostchei,
and in Cinderella as one of the ugly sisters. Among other ballets he designed, Ashton's choreography is on display in Gertrude Stein's opera, Four Saints in Three Acts.
Tutu Review carries a comprehensive article on Ashton by Clive Barnes that quotes Ashton as saying:
"Choreography is my whole being,
my whole life, my reason for living.
I pour into it all my love,
my frustrations.
To me, in many ways,
it has more reality
than the life which I live."
To celebrate Ashton's birth, Manhattan's Lincoln Center is presenting films for which Ashton choreographed dance sequences,
The Tales of Hoffmann and The Tales of Beatrix Potter.
PBS' Dance in America series has a site dedicated to
The Dream which premiered in 1964. Score by Felix Mendelssohn with choreography by Ashton, The Dream interprets Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. An essay on the site by Laura Jacobs further explores Ashton's background and talent. Jacobs comments:
Ashton, the son of a moody English businessman living in Lima, Peru, grew up in a city that tangoed. Ballet wasn't a reality but a tremulous vision, an epiphany in the form of Anna Pavlova, who toured through Lima when Ashton was 13. "She injected me with her poison and from the end of that evening I wanted to dance."
A screen saver from The Dream is a bonus to the site as is the excerpt from the pas de deux, accessible through a RealPlayer program.
100th
Birthday
From the Bolshoi
in Moscow to Beijing
to Bellingham
WA, the world is making note of George Balanchine's 100th birthday
celebration. An article from the Australian
Ballet's site, quotes Balanchine:
"A choreographer
cannot invent rhythms, he can only reflect them in movement ...
the organising of rhythm on a large scale is a sustained process,
the function of a musical mind."
The five programmes that
he Australian ballet is presenting this season explores the relationship
between composer and choreographer. In this case, the site continues
in its introduction to Stravinsky's Agon ballet, first performed
in Los Angeles in 1957:
" Blanchine mirrored
the twelve sections of the score in his use of twelve dancers, whose
precision he likened to a "machine that thinks".
As to what that machine may have been thinking about, Lincoln Kirstein,
who commissioned Agon for the New York City Ballet, thought
that the ballet's 'naked strength, bare authority and self-discipline'
was a metaphor for the tension and anxiety of the era. If that is
the case, one wonders what a collaboration between Stravinsky and
Balanchine on the theme of contest would yield today."
The Balanchine
Foundation highlights the beginning events in the centennial
year. PBS is reprising the two-part American
Masters program on Balanchine, Originally filmed in 1984, shortly
after his death, Balanchine documents his career and celebrates
the themes of his ballets.
Straying away from Balanchine
a bit, we pursued the first chapter of No
Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century by Nancy Reynolds
and Malcolm McCormick, who stated that:
"Though Isadora
Duncan is usually given progenitorial precedence in inspiring the
breakthrough to the modern era, Loie Fuller's fame preceded hers
by a decade, and Fuller's niche beside Duncan is secure. Loie was
not even a dancer by training (she had taken some six lessons in
her life). Rather, she was an actress who specialized in male roles;
nevertheless, she is considered the earliest major precursor of
modern dance. Loie appeared onstage with bare feet; sometimes she
wore draperies and sometimes flowing dresses, and she always went
uncorseted."...
"With time her effects
became more and more elaborate: the "fiery lighting" of her 1895
Salome was adapted to turn sea into blood for another rendition
of Salome in 1907; in the Fire Dance (1895), which she performed
on a glass plate lit from below (her own invention), "shaking and
twisting in a torrent of incandescent lava, her long dress spouting
flame and rolling around in burning spirals, ... she stood in blazing
embers, and did not burn." To heighten her effects, Loie used no
scenery, and she draped the stage, including the floor, in black
velvet, so that the theater was in total darkness before her dances
began. The complete absence of light was one of her earliest and
most dramatic inventions."
Highlighted
Sightings
The
art of baroque music and dance: Bimbetta, Il Teatro Amoroso,
early music in America, the vielle, the rebec and Bones 'n Drones.
The dance world was not
very well represented on the Internet at first. Perhaps this is
because, with the exception of the very large companies, most dance
groups are underfunded. The fans of dance, though, are legion and
a number of them have dedicated sites to their favorite form of
artistic expression. We meant this sighting to cover many forms
of dance and, instead, it became one only directed to the baroque.
A Toronto
Opera site gives an overview of baroque dancing. While you may
be aware of that form by name, you've probably heard of the minuet
or the quadrille, perhaps seeing them performed
in movies. There's a girl baroque band called Bimbetta,
who has presented programs based on the "popular dances and
repeating bass lines that swept Italy and Spain in the first years
of the seventeenth century."
The group, composed of
a cellist, harpsichordist and three sopranos, performs the music
on composers composers
Luigi Rossi, Claudio
Monteverdi, Giovanni
Felice Sances, and Juan
Hidalgo wrote vocal and instrumental music on the chacona, passacaglia,
folia, romanesca, and jacara, the most exciting and provocative
of these exuberant dances.
The Kennedy Center has
hosted workshops over the years on the minuet danced by The
New York Baroque Dance Company. The company specializes in historical
dance from the time of Handel, Haydn, Gluck, Monteverdi, and others.
The company is led by Catherine Turocy and Oberlin
College describes the dance in these terms:
Delicate, graceful,
controlled yet deeply emotional, at once mannered and sensual,
baroque dance is characterized by ornamental hand gestures, a
relaxed foot, a 90-degree turnout of the legs, vertical carriage
of the body, close interplay between music and movement, and the
choreographic employment of symmetrical, complex floor patterns.
In New Bern, NC, the
Baroque Dance Arts
Project organized by Paige Whitley-Bauguess, specializes in
this art. Whitley-Bauguess also is the leader of the Craven
Historical Dancers and leads a dance workshop at Rutgers
U in July. And on the other side of the globe, the Swiss company,
Il Teatro
Amoroso, combines the elements of dance and music with a basic
formation of five singers, instrumentalists and dancers.
One site that lists festivals
and workshops on 'early music' (and yes, baroque falls into that
category) is ..... duh, the Early
Music website.
If you're interested
in a treatise on dance, consult the ever-wonderful Library
of Congress. For historic dance instruction manuals, the Library
again is your source. And, if you want to stump your friends with
a new word, try Orchesography:
"or, the art of
dancing by characters and demonstrative figures. Wherein the whole
art is explain'd; with compleat tables of all steps us'd in dancing,
and rules for the motions of the arms &c. Whereby any person (who
understands dancing) may of himself learn all manner of dances."
The Early Music Guild
of Seattle hosts a group using little-recognized stringed instruments
of the Middle Ages: the vielle
and the rebec.
Apparently, as Les
Pages de la danse Baroque de Mercure Galante reveals, a 'schism'
has developed between French and English styles of the dance:
Although modern baroque
dance masters and scholars have the original contemporary notations
to work from, a schism of interpretation has developed between the
"French" and "English" styles. The French style interprets the steps
as having a light, balletic flow, whereas the English style is very
grounded and statuesque. French and English styles also differ about
placement of the arms, for which there is scant notation to fall
back on.
|