Dance 3, Presence 10

She’s not all that technically brilliant, according to my Middle Eastern Dance Research Team (yes, I have one, doesn’t everyone?). But what she has is presence – she’s obviously having a great time as she dances and entertains, and it’s contagious.

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It’s only a preview, but it’s a breath of great things to come: the review of the premiere of “Another Evening: Serenade/The Proposition,” by Bill T. Jones seems to hint at a magnificent work to come. Commissioned to create a work celebrating the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, it’s a pretty tall order for anyone but Mr. Jones.

He assembled, along with his usual fantastically talented company, an amazing creative team: Janet Wong on video, singer Lisa Komara, score by Jerome Begin and Christopher Antonio William Lancaster, Liz Prince’s amazing costume design and a set consisting of moveable columns by Bjorn G. Amelan.

The review describes some tricks not working so well – video flames on the columns, for example – but on the whole it sounds like Jones once again is exploring a subject that seems so incredibly overdone in new and amazing ways. It’s a disjointed but serious look at war, racism, and other themes of the day, and his choreography, always pushing the limits of the human form, addresses it like a hologram – in pieces, but each piece containing suggestions of the whole.

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Apparently researchers in Australia’s University of New England are exploring whether tango can “boost people’s emotions.”

“While you’re doing tango you can only be in the present — you really have to focus, concentrate, and it doesn’t allow your thoughts to drive into your mind,” says Rosa Pinniger, who is heading up the research. “If people can have a break from their negative thoughts for three minutes, which is the time of the tango, they can realize that… this is what it is, nothing else. So all their problems and their thoughts, they cannot be, they are not invited in the tango.”

Sounds a lot like zen, and she admits that it is a lot like meditation. Also, it may not be for everyone, since it is a social endeavour and depressed people are not known for going out and socializing. Still, if you’ve ever been to a milonga, it does not matter what you look like – everyone moves, everyone dances with everyone else. It’s a group meditation, I guess.

So the question is: would watching a tango on So You Think You Can Dance or Dancing with the Stars be about as effective as watching someone meditate? See for yourself (and let me know if you feel better after). Alex da Silva choreographs for Mark & Chelsie:

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I feel that – it warms my heart, actually. At age 18 I started on what I thought was going to be a career in musical theatre, but got a bit sidetracked, and didn’t end up getting my degree in dance until the venerable age of 29. Ten years later, I have taught ballet to three year olds and the rumba to 70 year olds, worked with world-class dancers like Heidi Latsky, presented before World Dance Symposiums, and danced on stage to “Let’s Get Physical” with Foxy Veronica’s Peach Pies at a goth club.

Because in the end it’s not about the movements or the technique, Milia. It’s about your movement, your technique, and your body moving. You want to dance? Dance, then. If you make the movement authentic, it will be good.

Pina Bausch and Tanztheatre Wuppertal

I’m having trouble finding the documented evidence, so this is anecdotal, but when I was at one point doubting my ability to dance when compared with the 18 and 19 year olds I was training with, my mentor Douglas Rosenberg told me about Pina Bausch. Aside from being a fantastic dancer and choreographer herself, he told me that at certain points in her career she’d refused to have any dancers younger than…oh, 35 or 40, I don’t remember which…in her company. They hadn’t lived enough life to put the meaning that she wanted into the movements.

Now, this may be an unfair comparison – many young dancers are exquisitely expressive, and age is no virtue – but it has served as inspiration to me as my movements change with age. The legs do not lift me as high, but the intention behind the leap has more depth now than it did before. And in the end, there is always a new Spring in my step.

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Making the Dream Real

Much to my joy, I find that Jeanne is making the dream real, putting Stardance into movie form. The complications of choreography in zero gee are immense, and not the least of it is the problem of, well, getting into zero gee in the first place. However, she and her main choreographer, Kathleen McDonagh, managed to get up in one of the zero gee planes and…well, they did it. They danced. They began a zero-gee movement vocabulary. And I can’t tell you how amazing I find that. It’s the most inspirational thing I’ve seen…well, ever.

Thank you, Jeanne, for making me believe in dreams yet again.

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Now, I’ll admit that I found this by googling “Mountain Standard Time Arts”, but a causal browse on
their website revels a lot beneath the generic title. The first festival was in 1971 in Calgary, AB Canada. Since then, the festival has specialized in combining traditional art forms like film and dance with more modern ones like video and multimedia, as well as covering everything else under the “performance art”
umbrella. I know that this will be of particular interest to my friend Gray, who has a lot of experience with combining video with dance to create new and interesting performance pieces.

They don’t have the current program for this year’s festival up yet, but going to the Program navigation
link on their website does bring up links to past artists that give a sample of what the festival has to
offer. The artists range from Camille Turner, who uses her performance as beauty queen Miss Canadiana as a way of mirroring the society around her; to the Nihilist Spasm Band, who specialize in creating their own unique sounds using a variety of low and high tech instruments and items not normally related to music; to Mono Logical, a monologist who incorporates video and audio clips into his monologues about urban space and global economics (among other things.) And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

If you’re interested in how performance arts are performed in different parts of the world, you could certainly do worse than checking out this site.

The Mountain Standard Time Performance Art Festival is being held October 3rd-17th, 2008 in Calgary, AB
(Alberta) Canada. http://www.mstfestival.org/index.html

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Adapt & Overcome

In spite of being bound to a wheelchair, Siua succeeded in his dream of creating a dance company. He drew from his University experience to apply the following precepts:

• appreciate art on its own merit
• study arts from a critical standpoint
• articulate arts in practical and theory
• separate emotion from the intellectual aspects of arts

Joined by his sister, middle eastern drummer Kuinivia McCloud, the company is profiled by the London Fale here.

This is not that company, but it’s a glimpse of the traditional Tongan dance.

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Who are you, and what have you done with Simon Cowell?

The easiest place to start is Britain’s Got Talent, the equivalent of American Idol. I even saw the biting and critical Simon Cowell there in the judges chair. But what’s this? Rather than looking disgusted, he looked engaged! Interested! He was actually the friendliest of all the judges for this first act! See if you can guess why:

And in the second one he is just one of many supportive judges, and it just almost seemed spooky to see him being so positive:

Apparently, the key to a nice Simon is to be an attractive, scantily clad British woman. Who knew?

A Civilized Culture

I do have to give kudos to the judges and the audience – I can’t see women who did this kind of act in the U.S. being treated with anywhere near as much respect and cheering. I have friends who are belly dancers, and the odds of a judge knowing that there’s a difference between belly dancing and exotic dancing, and that exotic and erotic dancing is, in fact, still dancing – well, in this country, those odds are long, indeed.

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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.” Worse, the score is by Danny Elfman, who is really not my favorite.

But who cares? Even the same old Twyla Tharp is still Twyla Tharp, and even an Ethan “no longer Mr. Perfect” is still Ethan frikkin’ Steifel. As I’m going to be in the NYC area over the July 4th weekend, I plan on going – so stay tuned for my own review!

image courtesy of Newscom

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Haylie Duff, Not Hilary Duff

Yes, that’s right. Legally Blonde: The Search for Elle is not hosted by Hilary Duff, as I wrote, but by Haylie Duff, her sister and co-star for the movie Material Girls. Haylie has also appeared on Broadway in Hairspray, but her longest and most recognized role was on the long-running TV series 7th Heaven.

For Search she is more than just the front of the show; she also serves as executive producer. Her attitude about the show seems very straightforward: “I don’t do any of the eliminating or judging. I’m always auditioning for things so I see them as my peers. They’re wonderful, talented girls and they’re already professionals.”

“…one of the most realistic reality shows…”

Says Cari Kroop, of CommonSenseMedia.org, mentions that the show is better than most reality-based theatre shows because it “doesn’t waste any time airing footage of the untalented hopefuls who didn’t make the cut during open auditions…it’s a process that’s as ruthless and unemotional as a real-life Broadway casting…” And watching people’s hopes and dreams get crushed on the air is what reality TV is all about, right?

Longtime-absent and perennial-favorite TV blogger Beckylooo also commented on this particular phenomenon of the shows, but with the opposite point of view. “There’s an argument to be made,” she writes, “that offering a cross section of the folks who showed up is in fact more real that pretending the sh***y dancers never existed.”

While I would agree that showing the whole spectrum of hopeful dancers is perhaps realistic, that only really applies if they show them in the first round of auditions. My problem is with the policy of allowing the really awful people to get through the first round – something that is not realistic – and then parading them in front of the home viewers accompanied by the outrage of the judges who complain of wasted time when they invited the dancers back in the first place.

Then again, that’s holding the reality shows to a standard of reality that is…unrealistic. So I just sigh and say that’s entertainment, I guess.

Warning: Here Be Monsters

Under the category of “some things are just better off not existing,” apparently Warner Brother’s theme parks are coming up with their own answer to Disney’s long string of successful musicals with Creature from the Black Lagoon – the Musical! No, I’m not making this up, and neither is the L.A. Times

Why should we be scared? Well, the opening in 2009 promises, among other things, that audiences will be ““enveloped by the exotic sounds and scents of the jungle.”  (emphasis added).

Smell-o-vision comes back to the floorboards…

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