Malcolm Young, 64

Malcolm Young, Whose Guitar Riffs Helped Propel AC/DC to Fame, Dies at 64
by Christina Caron, The New York Times, November 18, 2017

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Dr. G. Yunupingu, 46

Dr. G. Yunupingu, Australian Aboriginal Singer, Dies at 46
by Russell Goldman, The New York Times, July 26, 2017

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Inspiring Ellen: Still making dance at age 100

Meet 100-Year-Old Dancer Eileen Kramer, One Of The Oldest Choreographers In The World
by Priscilla Frank, The Huffington Post, March 5, 2015

Carole Johnson: Journeys in dance and culture

Carole Johnson: Dance: A Legend's Journey

Published on Dec 22, 2014 by Dr. Tracie O'Keefe, DCH

Carole Johnson is a legend in the Australian Contemporary Dance history. The African-American Juilliard graduate is the founding director of the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Council (NAISDA) Dance College and founder of the world-famous Bangarra Dance Theatre.

In this interview with Dr Tracie O’Keefe DCH, Carole Johnson, choreographer, dancer and dance administrator takes us on a journey from her beginnings in the 1950s where black dancers were not allowed to attend white ballet schools, through to her groundbreaking work in black dance history.

Carole was inducted into the Australian Dance Awards Hall of Fame in 1999 and in 2003 was awarded the Australian Government Centenary medal in recognition of the contribution she has made to the Australian Indigenous community.

Women Make Movies hosts NYC premiere of "I AM A GIRL"

  

Exclusive NYC Premiere of I AM A GIRL

Women Make Movies, Girl Be Heard, Gathr Films, and Duggal Visual Solutions invite you to the exclusive screening of the Women Make Movies award-winning documentary, I AM A GIRL

Thursday, February 5

Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas

260 West 23rd Street, Manhattan

(map/directions)

6pm Cocktail Reception

6:45pm Film Premiere

8pm Girl Be Heard Performance

8:15pm Talkback

Buy Tickets!

Filmmaker Rebecca Berry will be in attendance for Q&A! Rapper and I AM A GIRL film subject Breani Michele will perform her original and empowering raps after the screening.

All proceeds will go to support Girl Be Heard's social justice theatre company that puts global issues affecting girls center stage by empowering young women to tell their stories.  The film will have a huge impact across the nation through cutting-edge education curriculum created by Girl Be Heard, which allows teachers to engage students on critical human rights issues raised in the film. To watch the trailer click here, and to buy a DVD please visit the Women Make Movies website. For all other inquiries, please send us an email at orders@wmm.com.

About the Film:

A compelling, insightful, and inspiring exploration of what it means to grow up as a young woman in the 21st century, I AM A GIRL follows the first-person stories of six young women in Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, Cameroon, Afghanistan, the USA, and Australia. The documentary, which was nominated for several Australian Academy Awards, explores obstacles that so many young women face around the world such as poverty, teen pregnancy, mental illness, sex trafficking, and access to education.

About Women Make Movies:

For over 40 years, WMM has transformed the landscape of filmmaking for women directors and producers, bringing the issues facing women around the world to screens everywhere. Now, with more than 550 films in our catalog, including Academy®, Emmy®, Peabody and Sundance nominees and award winners, WMM is the largest distributor of films by and about women in the world. Women Make Movies. By Women. About Women. For Everyone. Please visit the WMM website for more information.

Colleen McCullough, 77

Colleen McCullough, Author of ‘The Thorn Birds,’ Dies at 77
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, January 29, 2015

Rod Taylor, 84

Rod Taylor, star of "The Time Machine," dies at 84
by CBS News, January 8, 2014

Indigenous dance and music of Black Cockatoo at Asia Society

Dancer Albert David of Black Cockatoo Dance Company

Australia's indigenous peoples are a culture so old that it takes us through history but is also current.
These artists are about the present and the future...about what it means to be human and what it means to be on the Earth.

-- Rachel Cooper, Director of Global Performing Arts and Cultural Initiatives, Asia Society

Black Cockatoo Dance Company: Indigenous Australian Song and Dance, presented on Friday night by Asia Society in partnership with Australia's Consulate General, was one of the finest concerts I've seen this season. But that's not all. The personable members of Black Cockatoo also gave us one of the best post-show Q&A sessions of all time--informative and charming in equal measure.

Company founder Sean Choolburra and colleagues Albert David, Smilar Sinak and Vivian Anderson first cleansed the theater's energy with percussive didgeridoo music and chant. They followed this opener with a brisk-paced sample of ceremonial dances and songs from mainland aborigines and people of the Torres Strait islands (which lie between Queensland, Australia and Papua New Guinea). The earliest of the cultures represented here stretches back more than 50,000 years. Indigenous Australians are elders to the world; their artists preserve foundational stories necessary for the cohesion, survival and well-being of their communities. What's thrilling is the blend of seriousness and lightheartedness with which Choolburra and his compatriots carry these stories and discharge their responsibilities to their people and to our shared planet and its precarious future.

These mainland and islander cultures were severely impacted by European encroachment and violence. Choolburra's troupe dedicates itself to seeding the future through their many educational programs and upholding the value of kinship. It's there in every turn of phrase the artists used in the lengthy Q&A. Everyone is brother, auntie; everyone interconnected with land, sea and the abundance of animal life. Infused with this respect and love, many of the ceremonial dances portray animal totems of key importance to clans and individuals--the emu, the kitehawks and sea eagles, each fondly mimicked through characteristic details like the kangaroo's flipping ears and short front legs held close to the breast. Black Cockatoo derives its name from the fabulous totem of Choolburra's clan.

Black Cockatoo pair
(photo by Snowmanradio)

In the sunny mainland dances, the performers strike the floor with lively, articulated feet, almost pawing it, and easily skim about. By contrast, some island dances seem stern and minimalist, but there's subtle, eerie poetry in the Welub Batayrik feather dance and crackling electricity in David's performance of a warrior's bow-and-arrow dance. Hey, bro! Watch where you point that arrow!

New York City got only one night to witness these dedicated artists. I hope Asia Society is already working on ways to bring them back.

For more information about Asia Society's arts programs, click here.

Doris Pilkington Garimara, 76

Doris Pilkington Garimara, Aboriginal Novelist, Dies at 76
by Douglas Martin, The New York Times, April 20, 2014

Mandawuy Yunupingu, 56

Mandawuy Yunupingu, Australian Musician and Educator, Dies at 56
The Associated Press, June 4, 2013

Colgate University will return Aboriginal art to Australia

Aboriginal Artworks to Return to Australia
by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, May 7, 2013

The Black Arm Band: music of Australia's indigenous experience

"dirtsong" from The Black Arm Band on Vimeo.

NYU Skirball Center presents the U.S. premiere of dirtsong--traditional music and new songs from Australia's Black Arm Band.

Friday, February 22, 8pm 

The Black Arm Band brings together many of Australia’s premiere Aboriginal musicians. They hail from across the country and represent diverse musical, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Performed predominantly in Aboriginal languages, against a backdrop of evocative film imagery, the U.S. premiere of dirtsong comprises a series of musical “conversations” in which the artists reflect on their country. The result is a deeply moving show that conjures not only a sense of geographical place, but encounters, memories, obligations, community and nature. Combining traditional music and newly commissioned songs inspired by the beloved indigenous author Alexis Wright (Carpentaria), dirtsong offers a conceptual and emotional map of Australia's heartland.

For ticket information, click here or call 212-352-3101

NYU Skirball Center
566 LaGuardia Place (at Washington Square South), Manhattan
(map/directions)

These four guys: Lucy Guerin Inc at BAM Fisher

Here's the link to my DanceMagazine.com review of Lucy Guerin Inc in Guerin's Untrained--running now at BAM Fisher.

Robert Hughes, 74

Robert Hughes, Art Critic Whose Writing Was Elegant and Contentious, Dies at 74
by Randy Kennedy, The New York Times, August 6, 2012

Anouk van Dijk prepares for Melbourne post

Director makes her first move
by Philippa Hawker, theage.com.au, February 3, 2012

Circus in extremis

Circa--featuring acrobatic dancers based in Brisbane, Australia--presents hyper-edgy New Circus stripped to abstraction. Forget fanciful story lines. Forget expensive, dazzling sets and shimmering costumes. Lighting effects aggressively sculpt the stage; harsh, blaring music comes on like a tsunami. But other than that, Circa is all about gravity and quirky movement--catnip for pure dance-lovers, genuinely mind-blowing. Why, it looks ten times as dangerous as Spider-Man at a fraction of the cost!

Artistic director Yaron Lifschitz's 80-minute production, now having its US premiere at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, twists and splays and pulls and pushes and propels the bodies of seven outlandishly skillful men and women to punishing extremes. It often makes them look desperately manic and self-destructive or at least absurd. Anything to force our hearts into our mouths. And the strategy works: Skirball's audience gasped and shrieked and chuckled and rose in ovation.

I felt somewhat more ambivalent. On the one hand, Circa's overall weirdness, the tension they create, their hip hop attitude and their frequent elements of surprise can't be topped. Circus really is kind of strange, and these performers absolutely rule by being as strange--and as strained--as they want to be.

The performers incorporates within their own behavior suggestions of what traditional circus usually offers--"animal acts," "clown acts," maybe even "freak side shows" distilled to their most abstract dynamics and rolled out in way that makes them effective both as circus and as dance. One diverting solo evolves from an audience-interactive finger-snap-along to a display of how to be funny with just your hands or your dangling feet. Pluck the gorgeously crafted and interpreted choreography from its context, and it could be a brilliant, award-worthy dance in and of itself. Similarly, aerial ribbon dance and terrestrial multiple hula hoop numbers strengthen the impression of these performers as supremely focused with a measure of grace to go along with their guts.

But I cared less for watching women frequently tossed and flung about like rag dolls or stuffed sacks. While the male performers--a couple of them quite buff--sometimes allow themselves to look ridiculous, the women take the brunt most of the time. A little more imagination--and respect--please. Okay, well, there is that one long segment in which a woman wearing glittering cherry-red stilletos--at last, a dazzling costume detail!--climbs all over one guy's bare skin. Sweet revenge, perhaps.

Last two performances: tonight at 8pm and tomorrow at 3pm. Information and tickets

Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 LaGuardia Place (at Washington Square South), Manhattan
(directions)

Sydney Opera House announces dance competition

"My Mutation" online dance competition

announced by Sydney Opera House

Open to dancers all over the globe of all ages and dance styles! The winner has the opportunity to dance at the Syndey Opera House in our Spring Dance Festival on September 26, 2010 (expenses paid trip of course!).

Find out more here.

UPDATE: CLOSING DATE extended to August 13

Chunky Move at BAM reviewed

My review of Chunky Move at BAM is available now on DanceMagazine.com.

Guerin instructs at BAC

OMG! These dancers are doing two shows per night of this…?!

In Corridor--a roughly hour-long piece from 2008, given its US premiere at Baryshnikov Art Center--Lucy Guerin asks a lot of her performers, members of the Melbourne-based Lucy Guerin Inc. All we, her audience, have to do is sit there in two single rows of chairs flanking the long sides of a runway and tuck away our feet and our belongings, since dancers can scarily lunge our way or hurtle by very close to our toes. We do have to shift our gaze back and forth, seeking the next outbreak of imagery--which can feel strained--but if ever there were a dance in non-traditional theater space that kept viewers in their place, this is it. We start off with a distinct THEM-and-US feeling.

Occasionally, some dancers roll a light panel behind our chairs from one end of the room to the other. It's kind of an MRI experience, at least, visually; it doesn't quite achieve a full-on claustrophobic feel, and I don't know if Guerin intended it to do so. But it does give you a sense of being hemmed in and controlled by alien machinery you don't really grok.

At the sneakily-timed onset of the piece, one and gradually all of the six dancers--secretly embedded within the audience--answer ringing cellphones, rise and aimlessly stroll the corridor while conversing with their callers. All looks reasonably normal until one fellow's facial expressions, movements and gestures take on an odd cast that gets odder still. The Ministry of Silly Walks lives!

If the dancers' shoulders were hangers, their bodies would be suits of clothes waggling and flapping in strong gusts of wind.

One guy picks up a cordless mic and offers capsule descriptions of some facet of each dancer's appearance and moves: "She's wearing a little bit of lipstick. She's giving a kick to the side. His shirt is very stripey." This segues into pairings of one dancer with a talker who calls out instructions like--my favorite--"Do snake. Do serpent. Do snake. Do serpent." Guerin then experiments with having the partners in each pair mirror each other's movements.

A stream of little things spliced together with precision and creepiness, Corridor is totally abstract yet resonant with powerful, cartoonish imagery--like slapstick without contact, like wild rebounds from invisible sites of impact. The dancers' superior agility of motion and mood, and their physical abandon and courage, particularly in a few outrageous solos, will exhilarate and terrify you. And you're so close, why, when bodies slam to the floor, you feel it in your own bones, but you have to just sit there and take it.

The final segment, it seems to me, zooms the dancers out of the realm of the personal. A distorted voice from on high now issues the instructions, and these call for global and cosmic missions more appropriate to angels or supermen than men. One by one, the dancers drop the shell-like robes they'd donned and quietly leave the space.

It seems like death. Or it could be a refusal to engage with the instructions. Or maybe it's both. The lights go off, and we're left with only the space's glaring-red EXIT signs to stare at. Brilliant. The final instruction.

Corridor continues its BAC run tonight at 6:30 and 8:30 and concludes with a 5pm performance tomorrow, Sunday. Space is very limited. Call 212-868-4444 or purchase tickets online here.

Lucy Guerin Inc. will present a 2006 work, Structure and Sadness, at Dance Theater Workshop, October 1-3 (7:30pm). For information and ticketing, click here.

Dreaming time

Highly recommended: Icons of the Desert, a great exhibit of Australian Aboriginal art at NYU Grey Gallery, now thru December 5