Fame or Famine

One of the things that does bother me about this concert: only one man performing. Especially in the last piece, Aya, I wish there were men included in the celebration of dance. Chris Walker, the choreographer, just came into the sound booth and verified it. “I love working with guys!” he said. “There’s just no guys in the program right now with the technical skills. In my traditional pieces, I have all kinds of men…”
On the whole, though, I’m feeling incredibly lucky to be part of this concert. We just finished the last run of Tania Isaac’s “Standpipe”, and I …read more

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One of the more interesting pieces in today’s concert is Valerie Green’s "Naked Heart." It utilizes a different kind of movement vocabulary and accompaniment than most of the other pieces in the concert. Valerie, who graduated from the program just before I joined it, has a "choreographic work and teaching style influenced by her apprenticeship with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company"
I read this after we teched her solo, and I can definitely see it. I think I pleased her when I mentioned that her word seemed more based on "feeling" than beats and measures, and there are moments when she’s …read more

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Quick notes from the light booth:
Just finished teching Meghan McCoy’s piece "Without", a pensive trio. It says in her bio she was a founding member of Collective Dance NY "which was created as an opportunity to present work without guidelines, time limits, and space restraints." Only had enough time to google the site, but if anyone knows about it or has questions for Meghan, now’s the time to let me know…

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"I think my generation lacks the quiet imperative. I think we absolutely thrive on melodrama." — Tania Isaac, Stuporwoman

"I love this piece," said the light board op. "It’s one that I really want to see again and again."
"Really?" came the voice of one of the stage hands. "See, I like it because it’s a piece I’d love to dance in."
Both of them are undergrads at the University of Wisconsin here in Madison, and they’re part of my crew as I stage manage the 80th Anniversary Gala. The gem of the concert is Tania Isaac, whom I’ve raved about here before, …read more

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Reading about this, part of me screams that there are so many better uses of resources, both in terms of effect on the environment and in terms of money that could go to theatre groups and supporting artists. I mean, really, the idea of a one-off piece of this magnitude is, well, staggering in its hubris.

Lepka’s group, Lawine Torren, performed Hannibal on top of the Rettenbach glacier in the Austrian Alps earlier this month. With massive, snow-covered mountains and elaborate snow architecture as a backdrop, roughly 300 performers and 43 machines dramatized the story of Hannibal and his men against …read more

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Much to my pleasant surprise, one of my crew for Saturday night’s concert is my old friend Seana Dishun. I used to perform in a music trio with Seana, as well as accompanying her on dumbek while she would perform traditional Middle Eastern dance.
Turns out she’s now running her own troupe, with a debut show this saturday at midnight at the Mad Cabaret at the King Club in Madison, WI. She promises more pictures, as well as video (which I’m hoping I can forward to Shanmonster). It’s an added bonus when your friends make it good!

A dancer from the young …read more

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I posted a while back about how I wished I could see RHPS the Musical when it played in Toronto (as if I could actually just jet off to Toronto, ha ha). Shanmonster went to see it though (btw, her blog is a GREAT source of dance video of all types, not to mention funky fun links. She comments on one strange aspect of RHPS going "mainstream":

"The audience was a strange one, though. I think well over half of the audience was over retirement age, which was a new experience for me. To get people into the spirit of things, …read more

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I wrote about her before, and now the time has come: I’m stage managing for Tania’s solo and the repertory piece she set on UW-Madison dance students. There’s a special kind of pleasure in seeing the people you went to school with behaving and excelling professionally, as well as the "old" moments when she says things like "teenagers!" under her breath at the antics of some of the dancers.
In this particular piece, Standpipe, there is one moment when the ensemble is down stage left, in dim turquoise light, and they are all moving gently, undulating with their arms outstretched as …read more

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starting rehearsals for UW’s 80th anniversary gala (as stage mgr) . I’ll be setting up flickr tonight so that we can fotoblog it with my treo. Should be funj

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I’m a little late to the party, as many people have commented on this particular social experiment. A prodigious violinist playing incredibly difficult music with a Stradivarius was playing on the street, for a crowd of a total of 1, 070 passersby…and hardly anyone listened.
“…he seems so apart from his audience — unseen, unheard, otherworldly — that you find yourself thinking that he’s not really there. A ghost.
Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.”
The other interesting phenomenon is that children, apparently, did take notice:
“…the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely …read more

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