Fame or Famine

It may finally happen. I may be able to go and see a performance of a dance piece I’m writing about. Best of all, it features my homeboy, Ethan Steifel, who started his stellar career right down the road from me at the Monona Academy of Dance.
Twyla’s Interpretation of Heaven & Hell
Ethan works with Herman Cornejo and other dancers from American Ballet Theater at Lincoln Center’s Opera House to convey a balletic journey through a “post-modern idea of the world.” Bloomberg News called the latter part of the ballet “too long and too diffuse” and concluded there was “nothing new.” …read more

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A couple of fascinating literary works have come out – one journalistic, one autobiographical – that serve to really highlight how much the world has moved on from the days of Rudolph Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov leaping over airport turnstiles to defect to the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Alexei Ratmansky
In the New York Times Chip Brown has written a piece about the very young artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, Alexei Ratmansky. At 39 he has become “one of the most sought after choreographers in the world.” Instead of plotting his escape from totalitarianism, the …read more

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This blog is a bit of a balancing act. I try to cover general performing arts, and that’s a wide spectrum; so you end up with one day me talking about plays in London, another day about popular culture like Dancing with the Stars, and another day about the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre celebrating its 50th anniversary.
And then you have days like today, when I can talk about how the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre performed part of its signature ballet Revelations on Dancing with the Stars. I have to say, this is one of the best …read more

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I’ve written before about how the real training for an action star should be in dance. The new Batman? Christian Bale, a trained dancer. Jackie Chan? Dancer in the Chinese Opera. And if, like me, you were in love with Joss Whedon’s Firefly, you thrilled to see Serenity, where Summer Glau gave more than a glimpse of the virtuosic control she has of her body.
But all of these examples are not really examples of dancing for the camera; they’re examples of people who have used their dance training to augment the fight choreography of their scenes in movies. Of course, …read more

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Doug Fox writes about a new event (and wonders “…how come nobody else has done this before?) where the Cedar Lake Ballet invited several dance bloggers to munch on wine and cheese and see a dress rehearsal along with a post-performance talk. He notes that this is a big departure from the traditional methods of dance publicity, namely getting big name reviewers to say nice things in big papers and then put the quotes on the event posters.
I’m not surprised that the power of the blogosphere is spreading, though. I think that the tech world figured it out first, as …read more

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The general consensus seems to be that DanceWar is a bust. Swan Lake Samba Girl put it this way
“…I’ve never in my life seen more people with less dance training seeking to become “stars.” They sang their hearts out and wiggled their butts and seemed in all honesty to have no clue that ass wiggling did not constitute dance…and so looked like monkeys.”
I don’t know that I’d go that far – again, this is a show not about dancers but about what kind of team Bruno and Carrie can craft. But I actually came to the review via Natalia of …read more

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NOTE:  the following blog entry is a review of the stage show “Fashionistas” which is based on the adult film of the same name. While not explicit, it deals with adult themes of sexuality and alternative lifestyles. If this offends you, please skip this blog entry.
Fact is, it was a ballet.
Really. Complete with the libretto being projected pre-show, describing the time-honored tale of the mousy young fashion designer who falls for the gorgeous male fashion mogul that her boss, Cruella de Lapdance, has her eye on, and how she snares him with the oldest trick in the book – that …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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While getting coffee at Escape Coffee House, there was a young woman in line in front of me who looked vaguely familiar. When you’ve lived in a town as small as Madison for as long as I have, that’s an easy thing to have happen, but I couldn’t place her, until she recognized me and reminded me of her name, Colleen Coy, and that she’d been a part of Li Chiao-Ping Dance company during several of their concerts I tech-directed.
She told me she’s now dancing with the Madison Opera, and will be performing with them this Friday as they present:

The …read more

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