by
Madeline Connors
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Oct 11, 2024 10:17 am
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SINISTERSUNDAYS Jumbo’s Clown Room Los Angeles Oct. 6, 2024
If you ask any fun-loving person in Los Angeles who the best Jumbo’s Clown Room dancer is, they’ll be able to come up with an answer. On Sunday night, I find myself partial to Topaz, who, while speaking to me, gives me the nostalgic sensation of eavesdropping on my cooler older sister’s sleepovers as a child. She learned to dance on the job, she tells me while fiddling with a jukebox. My friend jokes that she belongs in a Tarantino movie, but instead, she is here, materialized in front of me in a glittering white jacket and red lipstick. She is funny, charming, and beautiful. She is also a writer. She asks if I would come to her play reading. Yes, of course. At that moment, I would do anything she asked of me. I briefly wonder if this is how men feel all the time. An hour later, I overhear a man mutter: “I no longer believe in God. God is dead. I believe in Topaz.”
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Alicia Chesser
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Sep 20, 2024 11:16 am
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tulsa ballet photo
Jun Masuda in Alice Topp's "Square Pegs"
Tulsa Ballet: Creations In Studio K Tulsa Ballet Sept. 14, 2024
Blink and you’ll miss it: the moment when, at the end of one of the most irresistible duets I’ve ever seen on a Tulsa Ballet stage, a woman crawls up from underneath a baggy sweater her man is wearing, belly to belly with him until her face pokes out of the neck hole, facing his. In a perfect magic-trick switcheroo, she ends up wearing it herself, standing alone, as he ducks down out of it and walks away.
Royal Ballet (Indoor) Ted Shawn Theatre 358 George Carter Rd. Becket, Mass. July 3 – 7
Manon (Mayara Magri) saunters over to her lover (Matthew Ball) with the confidence of someone who has been in a relationship for a long time. She grabs the feathered quill out of his hand and tosses it, but it doesn’t get very far and falls right at their feet. No matter. They don’t need a good excuse to make love. The duet, typically a portrayal of new love and demure first confessions, takes on a different tone with the actual-couple-in-real-life playing them.
This is The Royal Ballet’s first visit to Jacob’s Pillow, America’s hub for dance and home to the longest running international dance festival. The mixed repertory program pays homage both to the historic space and to the new connections their engagement has formed. It has had a five-night run at the Ted Shawn Theatre Main Stage.
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Robin Lapid
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Jun 28, 2024 1:50 pm
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Robin Lapid Photos
Fallen Heroes, Rising Stars: A Juneteenth Celebration Through Dance 494 9th St., Oakland June 22, 2024
On a closed-off block of 9th Street in Old Oakland, even the sun seemed to dance on our shoulders. Just around the corner from Broadway, there were a hundred or so of us gathered outside, sitting on chairs and picnic blankets, soaking up the warmth in the audience and onstage, taking in the “Juneteenth Celebration Through Dance,” sponsored by the Grown Women Dance Collective.
As I watched an impressive lineup of dancers from Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, Dance Theater of Harlem, Broadway dancers, and other dance companies, I didn’t expect to be moved to tears at how the human body can express history, pain, joy, and hope through movement. But on this afternoon in June, three days after the holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States, that’s exactly what happened.
Fallen Heroes, Rising Stars: A Juneteenth Celebration Through Dance
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Breezy Bratton
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May 3, 2024 9:30 am
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Via templehillevents.com
The Temple on the hill: Disney or Jesus?
Tapestry: Weaving the Community of Dance Oakland Temple Hill 4780 Lincoln Ave. Oakland April 27, 2024
I had seen the place a hundred times from other parts of the city, an Asian architecture-inspired white and well-lit angular structure with five golden spires protruding towards the heavens. The Oakland Temple, for this sunny early evening in the hills, was home to “Tapestry: Weaving the Community of Dance”. Happy for an excuse to explore the grounds during Bay Area Dance Week, I wandered around and took in the blossoming fragrant flowers blooming along the water features.
In the lobby, a pair of dancers from the Ballet Folklorico Mexicano de Carlos Moreno posed in their starched white garb for pictures, and families of dancers from over ten professional dance companies, studios, and youth dance groups gathered towards the front of the huge hall to see their loved ones prance and bound.
I had been to OMCA’s Friday night events a handful of times in past years (all pre-pandemic). While it had always felt worth the pop-by. I had never found myself drawn to really, really take in the scene. Luckily, the mix of dance, music and food at the outdoor gathering this balmy and still very sunny Friday evening was an excellent reentry into the possibilities for both me and the community, as the weekly event just restarted for the season this month.
The museum’s terraced sculpture garden has never, in my experience, looked better, than when olden hour rained down on a lawn of families picnicking and dancing, a small stage of activity, and beds and beds of lush plant life. Across the street on one side the lake sparkled. To another side, on the shadowed courthouse steps skaters took up nightly residency, shredding away the day’s public duties. (BBQing too, this night. Right on.)
by
Alice Kaderlan
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Mar 18, 2024 4:53 pm
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Amanda Tipton Photos
From front to back, dancers Emma Michaux, Morgan Rust and Kelly DornanImage perform in the Boulder Ballet's performance of Mindfield.
Mindfield Boulder Ballet Boulder, Colorado March 8 – 10, 2024
Boulder Ballet’s latest production, “Mindfield,” is ambitious to say the least and a departure from the company’s usual productions, which tend to be mixed-bill programs with works by some of today’s best known choreographers or favorite story ballets like “The Nutcracker” and the upcoming “Les Sylphides” (in May 2024).
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Jacqi Jones
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Feb 23, 2024 9:47 am
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Jacqi Jones Photos
"Red Hot" theme social at Matanuska Brewing Company/
Alaska Salsa Festival Anchorage, Alaska Feb. 9 – 11, 2024
The presence of a Latin dance festival in Anchorage, Alaska, might come as a surprise to many, but this year’s edition marked over a decade of Alaska Dance Promotions hosting the event in their south side studio. Festival organizer and studio owner Michelle Holland is synonymous with salsa in Alaska: She has built a name for her studio and traveled with her performance teams over the last 16 years.
Although Holland says the festival is still recovering from the blow dealt by Covid to the social dance scene, this year’s congress boasted a fair number of students in attendance for three days and nights of classes, performances, and themed dance parties led by a mix of favorite local instructors and out-of-state guest talent.
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Alicia Chesser
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Feb 22, 2024 4:39 pm
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NIR ARIELI PHOTO
Ailey II in Alvin Ailey's Revelations
Ailey II Tulsa Performing Arts Center Feb. 13, 2024
“I go every December in New York; I’ve probably seen Revelations 25 times,” said the woman behind me in the Tulsa PAC restroom line.“ Since probably not many Tulsans are able to put Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s City Center show on their annual calendar, the chance to catch that masterwork (the company’s signature piece, set to African American spirituals and seen globally more than any other piece of modern dance) here at home was, if you will, a revelation.
That’s not the beginning of a joke. It’s what happened at a soul night in downtown Oakland.
The night maybe didn’t start well for anyone caught outside when it started raining cats and dogs, which was … me. But I ducked into Zanzi just in time to dry off.
In the upstairs area of the bar, the rain didn’t seem to help the vibes. It was pretty empty, understandably. It was earlier in the night, a rainy Sunday after Valentine’s Day. Maybe people were dealing with a love hangover, or maybe it was the rain. There were no sports to get excited about that weekend, even in this sports-loving town: The Niners just lost the Super Bowl, and the NBA was on its all-star break. (“The all-star game is meaningless,” I overheard someone outside say.)
So I didn’t hold the turnout against anyone. The gods were not in anyone’s favor this weekend. But after a hella long day, I was more than happy to chill for a while.
Music wasn’t playing, but people were moving up onstage. It was a bit odd. Even odder was dancer Sam Shepard (not to be confused with the playwright) doing his best impression of Charlie Brown’s teacher.
“Wah-wah, wah wah…”
And the dancers were moving along to the beat he set. I’ve never seen something like that.
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Alicia Chesser
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Oct 2, 2023 10:15 am
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Kate Luber/ Tulsa Ballet Photos
"The Sun Sleeps," performed by Tulsa Ballet.
Creations in Studio K Tulsa Ballet Studio K Sept. 24, 2023
Like a great run for a goal in a soccer game or an unbelievable series of bars from a rapper, moments sometimes unfold in a dance performance that make my heart race and (maybe this is just me?) the words “let’s f — ing gooooo” silently exit my mouth.
If it’s been a while since you had an experience like that with dance, get yourself to wherever Tulsa Ballet’s second company is performing next. And go easy on the caffeine before you go: Trust me, you won’t need it.
by
K Hank Jost
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Sep 24, 2023 12:34 pm
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K Hank Jost Photo
Members of the Dynamite Experience performing In Lieu of the Option …
In Lieu of the Option … The Dynamite Experience JACK Theatre Brooklyn, N.Y. Sept. 21, 2023 Closede
The group holds a lone member above the ground by her fingertips. A trio becomes furniture for itself, restful positions on the floor serving to provide support for someone else. Foreheads pressed together, two couples spin counter to each other, threatening to upset their opposite’s balance. Tender moments of the entire cast wrap up together before breaking back into a sea of difference. The interactions between the dancers run the gamut of human intimacies and conflicts — no solos, the smallest arrangement being a single number done as a pair; and even here, another performer clamored in the periphery, on the ground, reaching up and begging to join.
In In Lieu of the Option…, choreographed by Winston Dynamite Brown and Latra A. Wilson, every landed jump, tumble, or sprint across the stage resounding in the black box of JACK Theatre, the soft, measured breathing of the ensemble in the quiet between selections, and the heat of life thickening the air reminded me that dance is no formal exercise of theoretical bodies-in-spaces, but a display of conscious movement.
Anyone who has taken a dance class knows that dancing on carpet is miserable. Sure, a dense shag can cushion your fall, but it’s definitely not worth the friction; a mere pirouette will wreak havoc on the balls of your feet. For this reason, I was surprised when I was greeted by wall-to-wall red carpeting upon entering the LA Dance Project.
