Brooklyn Ballet founder and artistic director Lynn Parkerson doesn’t believe in keeping ballet hidden away in the rarefied air of the thea-tah. Rather, her philosophy is all about integration – whether mixing classical ballet with hip hop or taking it to the streets, literally, with a series of free performances in public spaces. So it makes perfect sense that Brooklyn Ballet’s new headquarters is in Schermerhorn House, a mixed-used building that offers supportive housing to low-income artists and the formerly homeless. The company’s new home is the result of a collaboration with Common Ground, a nonprofit organization that has created similar offerings in converted Times Square hotels. Read More »
The wait to get into a restroom is often fraught with anticipation, and I was definitely feeling it as I lingered outside the Gershwin Hotel’s lobby bathroom last Saturday night — but not for the usual reasons. Just what I would find inside remained unclear; the entrance was blocked by a velvet rope, beyond which lay the setting of Yanira Castro’s latest dance installation, Dark Horse/Black Forest. Read More »
When a group of women dressed in white began dancing in the Whitehall Ferry Terminal last Wednesday afternoon, the crowd initially didn’t know what to make of it. They looked on in bewilderment as the dancers split into three groups and performed with gusto to a brassy score that blared from speakers overhead. Eventually, people began pulling out their camera phones — a twenty-something guy in a baseball cap laughed as he filmed the action, and a construction worker tapped his boot and smiled. By the end of the 22-minute performance, the dancers were surrounded by a tightly packed crowd jostling for a better view.
And that was just the dress rehearsal. Read More »
Retiring from the stage can be a tough transition for a dancer, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for Damian Woetzel. The former New York City Ballet principal is taking a kid-in-a-candy-store approach to his post-performance life, sampling a variety of projects and relishing the possibilities of his career’s second act. Even before leaving NYCB last June, Woetzel earned a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and founded the Vail International Dance Festival in Colorado. Now, in addition to producing dance and music events around the world, he’s exploring the arts’ potential to impact realms beyond the concert hall, trying his hand at everything from cultural diplomacy to education. Read More »
Having your own dance company is great – except when it comes to all the stuff that has nothing to do with dancing. There are performance spaces to rent and publicity to drum up, not to mention the pesky business of raising money. But five clever graduates of the Mills College dance program found a way to avoid drowning in the non-dance details. Four years ago they formed Propel-her Dance Collective, an organization that allows them to share resources, ideas, contacts, fundraising efforts and administrative duties. Having all those extra hands – and feet – around frees up each member to spend more time focusing on the business of creating. Read More »
If you ask Julie Ludwick how she made the transition from earthbound modern dancer to gravity-defying aerialist, she’ll tell you that it’s partly because she grew up in Alaska. “As a friend of mine said, Alaska is the only state where women carry their own luggage,” explains Ludwick, artistic director of Fly-by-Night Dance Theater and founder of the NYC Aerial Dance Festival. “And so carrying your own weight into the air is kind of a no-brainer for me.” Read More »
If you watched Fame as a kid and dreamed of dancing your heart out in the streets of New York City, then your moment has arrived. The third annual Dance Parade, which is set for May 16, will feature six thousand dancers boogieing, pirouetting and shimmying their way down Broadway, and spectators are invited to join in. The event was founded three years ago as a way to celebrate the diversity of dance, as well as to call attention to New York City’s archaic cabaret law, which prohibits dancing in nightclubs and bars without a license and which has remained largely unchanged since its enactment in 1926. But the founders emphasize that their organization is not politically motivated, and that the parade is not a protest but rather a celebration of the joy of movement.
The parade kicks off at 1 p.m. near 28th and Broadway and winds up at Tompkins Square Park with free performances, lessons and a dance party until 7 p.m. After the jump, we catch up with co-executive director Yana Landowne to get the scoop on this year’s event. Read More »
Move over, Michelle Obama: Judith Jamison, artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, joins the First Lady as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2009. [via Time Magazine] Read More »
Luca Veggetti is not a brand-name choreographer in the United States, though he’s been creating works for European and Russian companies for nearly two decades. He had a stateside coming out of sorts in 2007, when three of his dances were showcased as part of the Works & Process series at the Guggenheim, and last year he directed and choreographed a multimedia performance of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis’ opera, Oresteia, at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre. Read More »
Back in November, we were jeté-ing for joy overAmerican Ballet Theatre’s Voices and Visions: The ABT/Altria Women’s Choreography Project. The launch of the program amounted to one big leap for womankind in classical ballet, a discipline in which those who wear tutus rarely make it to the top. Through the initiative, ABT annually commissions an emerging female choreographer to create a new work for its training company, ABT II, in addition to offering a series of choreographic workshops to female members of both companies. Read More »
