Charly Wenzel: Seeding a career in American dance

Germany-born dance artist Carly Wenzel 

(photo above by Humberto Carreno;

below: a Wenzel selfie)

Guest contributor Charly Wenzel tells the story of her journey from Munich to her new home--New York City--and from classical ballet to the intimacy and power of immersive theater.

Seeds

by Charly Wenzel

I clearly remember a moment, when I was 11 or 12. I sat in my high school class in Munich, Germany and somehow came across a picture of New York City. Looking at the picture, I was struck by a feeling of homesickness. I distinctly remember that it wasn’t a feeling of curiosity or the hope of  traveling there someday, but I was feeling HOMEsick. How could I be homesick for a place I had never visited? A seed had been planted that would bring me here where I am today.

At age 6, I started taking ballet classes--another, more important, seed. I begged my parents to put me in ballet class for one reason only--all my friends were already enrolled. Experiencing my first years of ballet--and especially performing onstage in our yearly productions--ignited a fire in me that, to this day, still burns strongly. The diary I kept at the time consisted of loose pieces of paper that I didn’t even keep in a particular place, but they all pretty much said, “I can’t wait for my next ballet class!!!”

Right around the same time that I saw that picture of my future home, I transferred to a much more serious and rigorous “ballet school.” The school consisted of a trailer made into a ballet studio, where my dad’s high school teacher colleague--Miss Wood, from England--was allowed to offer ballet classes. There weren’t many students; my class eventually consisted of only myself and one other student. There was no place to hide, and Miss Wood was no joke. Licensed through the Royal Academy of Dance, she prepared us for our RAD exams. Miss Wood taught us hard work and discipline, and there were definitely times when I wanted to give up. Thank God I never did!

Meanwhile my high school put on yearly talent shows where I showed my first choreographies--either solos or duets that I made my poor friend, who had no dance experience or interest, perform with me. I was also enrolled in our theater program, and the rare time my teachers ever heard me speak was when I performed in some of the leading roles of Shakespeare, Ionesco and others. I was extremely shy and introverted, but I became alive onstage, finding freedom in playing a character as well as in expressing myself through movement.

Miss Wood never gave me the impression that I could dance professionally some day, and I knew I wasn’t going to be a ballerina. I didn’t know that there were other forms of dance until I was about 15 years old. I started taking jazz and modern dance at the Iwanson School in my hometown Munich. They offered a three-year professional dance program. So I told my parents that I would become a dancer. A lot of people looked at me like I was crazy but, as far as I was concerned, it was not up for discussion.

While most of my peers enrolled in college programs for jobs in demand at the time, I started my full-time training at the private Iwanson School. Unlike universities in the US, most German universities don’t have dance programs. Getting a college degree in contemporary dance in Germany is pretty much impossible. This made my decision even more incomprehensible to a lot of people. However, dancing every day all day for three years, I was completely in my element. I performed in a duet that I choreographed with a classmate and was awarded a scholarship for a summer at Ballet Academy Stockholm. My teachers wondered why I never performed like that in class. Again, it's the stage where I come alive.

Carly Wenzel
(photo: J. Ryan Roberts)

After finishing the program, one of my classmates and I applied to the Alvin Ailey school to improve our technique. To my surprise, we got accepted; the whirlwind began! The plan was to stay in New York for a year and then return to Germany. Fifteen years later, we’re both still here.

After graduating from Ailey, I worked as a dancer in any imaginable capacity--dancing for a range of contemporary companies; being a show girl in a Russian dinner club; traveling all over the country and abroad as a backup dancer for a Japanese Pop singer; dancing in music videos and dance films; dancing with big puppets in a children’s show, and so forth. Meanwhile, I always worked on my own choreographies and presented my work all over New York City.

I was inspired to make my first dance film when my singer/composer friend Kristin Hoffmann gave me a piece of music. The story I heard and was inspired to tell required a different medium, especially because of the images that came to mind. I made my first film Global Tides, which won several awards and was accepted by many film festivals. Excited about the endless possibilities for film to bring a vision to life, I later made Licht and most recently Schein.

Schein speaks about how gender-role expectations confront women, how they are supposed to present themselves. Women are much more harshly scrutinized for their appearance than men are. We are expected to underline our so-called femininity. However, the resulting objectification of women makes us vulnerable to discrimination and aggression in male-dominated society.

A couple of years ago, as I reflected on my performance career, knowing that I was far from done, I browsed through audition notices by mostly brand-new companies whose directors were at least ten years younger than me and who couldn’t offer any compensation. I knew If I was going to perform for someone else again, it would have to be someone with more experience than me. It would have to involve a process I could learn from, one that would help me continue to grow as a performer. Thinking back to my acting days, I craved more character- and story-based work. I auditioned for Third Rail Project’s Then She Fell, honestly not knowing what I was auditioning for. A fellow dancer, who was in the TSF cast, had posted “you want this job” on Facebook. I guess I just believed her.

I was asked to read lines in the audition, which came as a complete--but very pleasant--surprise!

I think the universe was looking out for me yet again. I was hired, and the show turned out to be everything that I was looking for and more. I was still in the rehearsal process when I got to see the show for the first time, and I was a sobbing mess at the end.

The show, based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, takes place in a mental ward. An audience (fifteen people, maximum) is split into separate groups and led through different rooms in the building. Along the way, they encounter various characters and have many one-on-one interactions with them. It’s a magical, surreal environment in which the audience becomes a part of the story.

To be a part of something so truly special is nothing less than a blessing, and I couldn’t be happier or more thankful. In the last two years with the company, I have been performing six shows a week with a total of around 450 shows. While it is hard work, and I’m definitely feeling my 36-year-old body, it has been an extremely rewarding experience. Seeing the audience transformed and genuinely touched by their experience makes you feel like you are a part of something bigger.

We live in a time when most people spend the majority of their day in front of a computer or smartphone screen and most of our interactions are through social media and e-mail. I truly feel that, as performers, we can provide healing for people through much needed human interactions and an escape from daily worries. Immersive theater allows people to reconnect with their imagination, to fully be in the moment and to have all their senses activated instead of just passively consuming information and entertainment.

I somehow knew this even before my first visit, but New York has become my home and has felt like home from the moment I arrived. And even though I miss my family and friends in Germany, the dance community here has become my family. The support from fellow artists--as well as their enthusiasm to create and collaborate--constantly inspires me.

(photo: Yi-Chun Wu)

Charly Wenzel is an award winning choreographer whose work has been presented in her native Germany, as well as at Dixon Place, Judson Church, the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, The Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater, Steps on Broadway, The Secret Theater, Connecticut College and many other venues in and around New York. She worked as the choreographer for several recording artists for their live performances and music videos and she choreographed for a number of dance films.

Charly won several awards for her dance films Global Tides, Licht and Schein, which have been shown at film festivals around the world.

Charly danced at the Bavarian State Opera in Germany and performed with Naganuma Dance, Keila Cordova Dances, Regina Nejman & Company, Earl Mosley/Diversity of Dance, Erick Montes, Bodystories: Teresa Fellion Dance, LolaLola Dance Theater, Eddie Stockton, Morningside Opera, DexDance, Hydroflo Movement Company, Soul Movement and other companies and independent choreographers in and around New York City. She is currently a company member of Third Rail Projects, performing in their Bessie award winning production Then She Fell.

Charly was the Rehearsal Director and Associate Artistic Director of Naganuma Dance and she worked as the Rehearsal Director for Shadow Box Theater.

She is currently the Rehearsal Director of Bodystories: Teresa Fellion Dance.

www.charly-wenzel.com

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Kurt Moll, 78

Kurt Moll, German Basso Profundo, Dies at 78
by Michael Cooper, The New York Times, March 9, 2017

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"a fragile son": Matthew Rogers solos at JACK

Dance artist Matthew Rogers
Below: performing a fragile son
(photos: Nika Brunova)

Startlingly clear images from a fragile son--a solo performed by dancer-choreographer Matthew Rogers at JACK--have lasting power. I can attest. I woke up in the middle of the night, and they were right there, in my mind, complete and fresh.

There's something nondescript about Rogers himself. Take the fair, wispy, wayward tresses that, at times, blur his delicate, Southern white guy features. But, lit by Tuce Yasek, he can bring things into focus and bury them deep in the mind even as they retain their enigmatic nature.

He opens by first trotting up to a riser opposite the audience and telling us a few things about his family--related to Thomas Jefferson on his granddad's side; the men marked by a rare genetic disorder that thickens their palms and limits their fingers' flexibility. That "son" is part of the title implies we'll likely be dealing with father-son stuff, and "fragile" points to some sort of fault line.

Before the piece began, Rogers personally handed each of his watchers a copy of a missive that begins "Hlelo Dad," nearly every word containing misplaced letters. It's written to a long-absent father, ultimately an act of taking account of, and responsibility for, his own life and happiness.

Some of the indelible imagery involves a thick rope drawn out straight across a diagonal, a rope like an orderly measurement of time, the unfolding of a path. Then rippled, wriggled, lashed, its oscillations invoke a rodeo act, expert and--since we are so close to the performer in this intimate space--a little unsettling at times. Whistling through the air, the rope also calls up images from slavery.

There are also cords, the red of blood and undeniable bloodlines, sometimes stretched between Rogers and an audience member willing to hold an end. Sometimes Rogers wraps himself in the grip of a cord then unwraps his body. It is a slight, wiry body with sufficient knowledge of itself to be deliberate and surprisingly graceful; to tumble hard and flail loosely; to bound up steps as nimbly as "Bojangles" Robinson; to offer itself up as a blank sheet for audience members to mark; to be naked and fragile.

In the genesis of a fragile son, there might have been some work around a literal father, or a lineage of fathers of fathers. But the piece moves in less than literal space and, if you will, can take in the whole idea of place and home, the whole idea of heritage, the whole idea of white patriarchy and masculinity, and what it means to be a body, a mind and a spirit moving in and out of orbit of those ideas.

A few years ago, Rogers uprooted himself from his familial roots in Virginia and his more recent dance roots in New York--dancing in the work of major artists such as Tere O'Connor, Ivy Baldwin and Pavel Zuštiak--and relocated to Slovakia and Germany. Traces of that relocation and possible struggles around it move through a fragile son.

Curated by Stacy Grossfield for her Images//Landscapes series, a fragile son continues through February 12 with performances tonight and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm. For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Alan to the Max at The Met Museum

Alan Cumming in Max and Alan
at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
(photo: Stephanie Berger)

A tycoon, a trapeze artist, a nightclub owner, a sailor. German Expressionist Max Beckmann saw himself as an actor on the stage of life and often painted himself in disguise. Tony Award-winning Alan Cumming has created this personal musical work drawing on his own experience as an émigré to New York, channeling an artist who fled his native land after he was famously denounced as a "degenerate" by the Nazis. Beckmann died just sixteen months after arriving in New York, suffering a fatal heart attack while on his way to The Met. This MetLiveArts commission is inspired by the artist's all-too-brief time in New York. -- from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Cumming with Beckmann's Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket (1950)
(photo: Stephanie Berger)

I have never had the good fortune to see actor Alan Cumming perform in a cabaret--or in Cabaret, sadly. So, I can't say for sure, but if he lets loose in more intimate spaces the way he let loose in Max and Alan, his one-night-only performance at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, he should be declared a vital national energy resource. We need him now--and not only because, politically-speaking, Cumming always fights the good fight.

Responding to the Met's wonderful Max Beckmann in New York show (on view through February 20), Cumming brought a startling portfolio of songs performed with the vibrant, versatile trio of Lance Horne (piano), Eleanor Norton (cello) and Alon Ilsar (percussion). His selections evoked a life lived head-on despite risk, conflict or doubt. The Scottish émigré clearly, often amusingly, identifies with Beckmann: "We quite like degenerate things in Scotland," he quipped.

In his statement for the show, Cumming wrote:

And of course we are bound by our connection and connected by our bond, to the era of the Weimar Republic, that supernova moment when art and sex and satire and politics all sidled up alongside each other and sparked so impossibly brightly for a few electric years. He was there. He was in it. I am merely a disciple, a conduit by proxy.

Kurt Weill, expected guest at Cumming's party, kept company with Miley Cyrus ("Wrecking Ball") and Kate Bush ("This Woman's Work"). Friedrich Hollaender's wistful "Falling in Love Again," approached with a rare delicate touch, was there along with Jerry Herman's button-bursting gay anthem, "I Am What I Am," from La Cage aux Folles. Between songs, Cumming offered insights into Beckmann's paintings, his loves, his world.

A song of love is a sad song, hi-lili, hi-lili, hi-lo. A song of love is a song of woe, don't ask me how I know.

It all culminated in an encore, the ominous "Mad World" (Tears for Fears), with the singer taking Horne's place at the piano. That was to be expected. In early November, Cumming had written a brooding piece in his blog on the prospect of our election ending disastrously.  Now, like all of us, he had much on his mind.

As a singer, Cumming is ever the masterful actor, using face and body as channels for a prodigious force called from I know not where, simultaneously blazing bright and blazing dark. Even the suddenly flashed, dimpled grins possess the gathered tension you see in his arms and hands as he plunges his whole being into lyrics and, for godsake, delivers them. The voice just whips out and lashes. You reel back, expecting to go away exhausted by his entire effort. Instead, you end up curiously exhilarated.

Or, at least I did. After the show, I subway-ed downtown to my Santacon-invaded East Village, feeling mentally sharp and strengthened for battle.

Thank you, Alan, so very much.

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Ursula Mamlok, 93

Ursula Mamlok, Avant-Garde Composer, Dies at 93
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, May 6, 2016

Edgar Froese, 70

Edgar Froese, Leader of Tangerine Dream, Dies at 70
by Ben Ratliff, The New York Times, January 26, 2015

Siegfried Lenz, 88

Siegfried Lenz, Novelist of Germany’s Past, Dies at 88
by William Yardley, The New York Times, October 10, 2014

Nature Theater of Oklahoma crosses the line

Once again, French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) tempts us to cross boundaries of geography, genre and imagination with its eighth edition of Crossing the Line festival (now through October 20). I will share my thoughts on a few CTL events in coming weeks.

Last night, I attended FIAF's New York premiere of The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma is Calling You!, a documentary by Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, founders and co-directors of the OBIE Award-winning Nature Theater of Oklahoma. (The name, if you're wondering, derives from Kafka; this New York-based performance troupe is about as Oklahoman as I am.) The reaction I posted on Facebook, earlier today, says it all: "Endearing and alarming: THEATER!"

Running at 127 minutes, the diary-like film traces events before and during a 2013 residency in Berlin, a demanding time for the anxious Copper and for Liska, a charismatic Slovak complete with bald head and natty handlebar mustache. Liska wrestles with urges to be creatively out of control and in charge at all times. The couple's personal relationship and their confidence as artists are taxed by the considerable stress of overwork, tension and insecurity wrought by their project's complexity.

We witness the heady playfulness and the nearly impossible intricacy of NTO's group process, so much hard, ceaseless labor for productions that seem so slippery of form, swimming between the familiar and the unknown, buoyed by droll humor. A visual knockout with unrestrained, cheerful light and color, the film can also plunge its unsuspecting viewers through emotionally cloudy and dark places.

Oddly enough, The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma is Calling You! made me think back to a Hollywood film I'd just caught up with--George Clooney's World War II drama, The Monuments Men, a diverting, if slapdash, throwback. That film stepped all over its opportunity to make, for our blasé nation, a solid and still necessary case that art is worth sacrificing and maybe even dying for. But I thought of that argument as I watched the NTO collaborators labor and Liska struggle to the point of near breakdown. Maybe not so much why this particular strain of hipster art might matter to society at large but why it matters, greatly, to the artist's soul.

For information on Crossing the Line 2014 programs and venues, click here.

Otto Piene, 85

Otto Piene, German Artist of New Modes, Dies at 85
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, July 18, 2014

Courage of his convictions: Jean Guéhenno in Nazi-occupied Paris

Shedding Light on Nazi-Occupied Paris
David Ball’s Translation of ‘Diary of the Dark Years’
by Alice Kaplan, The New York Times, June 25, 2014

Esther Bejarano: Her voice rings clear, still

Amid the Rap Music, Echoes of an Orchestra Playing in a Dark Past
Survivor of Auschwitz Ensemble Teams Up With German Hip-Hop Duo
by Sally McGrane, The New York Times, June 27, 2014

William Forsythe to step down from artistic director post, names successor

William Forsythe to No Longer Run Forsythe Dance Company
by Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, May 23, 2014

Legends, then and now: Graham and Bausch

What becomes a legend most...when she's gone?

For Janet Eilber, artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, what becomes her legendary mentor now is a mix of classic repertory works and new commissions designed to take a fresh approach to Graham themes. In seasons past, these themes have explored "Political Dance" and psychological "Inner Landscapes." For its 2013 program at The Joyce Theater (February 20-March 3), the company will offer "Myth & Transformation." This collection will include Phaedra--unseen for a decade--and other Graham works inspired by Greek myths and legends plus the New York premiere of Doug Varone's Lamentation Variation and a restaging of Richard Move's The Show (Achilles Heels), originally created for Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project. In addition, along with a new piece by Nacho Duato, the troupe will bring Graham's Rite of Spring to Carolina Performing Arts (Chapel Hill, NC) as part of a year-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of the premiere of the Stravinsky piece.

From the original cast of The Show (Achilles Heels). Rasta Thomas (l) and Miguel Anaya (r)
photo by ©JulietaCervante

Yesterday afternoon, the troupe previewed samples from "Myth & Transformation" in its new home--the former, and legendary, Merce Cunningham studio at Westbeth. Varone's quartet for men--part of the company's commission of interpretations of Graham's iconic solo, Lamentation--evokes a sense of the early HIV/AIDS crisis, of dynamic interconnections, interdependence, loss, readjustment and healing within a community at a time when change is the only constant. The Show (Achilles Heels), with its snappy, game-show setting and androgynously-sexy protagonist (played now by Lloyd Mayor, a breakout talent hailing from the Isle of Man), will give freer play to its young dancers' expressive capabilities and seems pitched to draw younger audiences.

[And look what I found! Here's Lloyd Mayor in a video interview, a year or so ago, talking about life at the Rambert School and mentioning his dream of getting into the Graham company.]

BAM drew a decidedly mature, largely upscale crowd of fans of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch for last night's sold-out US premiere of Bausch's final work of surrealist absurdity and romance. "...como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si..." unfolds across a stage floor glowing with cool, white light like a  lightbox or a polar ice sheet, which makes its imagery (and designer Marion Cito's elegant, sensuous gowns) absolutely pop.

With one intermission, the evening runs a giddy 2 hours and 40 minutes--a pretty steep commitment--but the Bausch ensemble rewards attention with alternately gorgeous, tender, clever and amusing scenarios and performances. The begowned women--and Bausch's movement for them as individuals--have always impressed me more than the guys darting around them in their serviceable black shirts and slacks; the luminous female standouts here in "...como el musguito" include Morena Nascimento and Ditta Miranda Jasjfi. But Fernando Suels Mendoza has a wonderful bit as a flirtatious fellow effusively greeting the ladies as they approach and pass. Once you watch him perform this segment, you continue to follow and welcome everything he does.

Mind the cracks, though--those "Antarctic ice" cracks opening up in that glowing white floor. Beneath all of that color and movement and beauty and fun and abandon lie completely ignored hints of disaster in the making.

The company premiered this work just a few weeks before Bausch's cancer diagnosis and shocking, sudden death. With 20/20 hindsight, it appears prescient, a farewell and a gift of mad, extravagant love to her dancers and her audience.

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch continues at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House tonight and October 20, 23, 24, 26, 27 at 7:30pm and October 21 at 3pm. Tickets are sold out but, for information, click here.

Wim Wenders discusses "Pina"

Wim Wenders on ‘Pina,’ His Film on Pina Bausch’s Dances
by Julie Bloom, The New York Times, December 9, 2011

Pina Bausch in 3-D

Wim Wenders reinvents 3-D in epic dance film
by Greg Quill, thestar.com, September 9, 2011

Yatkin's "Wallstories": dancing to freedom

There's a moment, late in the hour, when Wallstories--a Fringe Festival multimedia work presented by Nejla Y. Yatkin's NY2Dance--takes flight. Prior to this point, the production seems an earnest, generically energetic ensemble based in thoughts about the Berlin Wall and the eventual passing of the Cold War era.

Opening with a blaring voice-over and a very narrow horizontal strip of film imagery of workers laying bricks, the dance employs a multicultural cadre of performers in short, rumpled raincoats who repeatedly bunch together and collapse one moment and, at another, make big, jazzy gestures like a Broadway chorus line of mimes. Their dancing, set to music by Bach and Pink Floyd, runs from lunges, stretches, dashes and collisions that give an impression of restlessness and inevitable release to sharply-rendered solos that convey the essence of an individual's recollections and emotions. Occasionally--as in the sixth section, "Dorothea's ?uestions," set to Pink Floyd's "Blue Sky"--the movement achieves a rapturous flow.

Yatkin's fifth section--superfluously titled "The Government, Mother Russia, my Mother, your Mother"--feels like the first clear evidence that Wallstories aims to operate on a level of psychological and universal insight beyond its aesthetic and historical concerns. But it isn't until one of the final sections, when Yatkin suddenly rises from her front-row audience seat to move in sync with one of her dancers, that the work comes home. As a member of the audience, she stands on the cusp between us and the dancers, bridging temporal, physical, emotional and psychological divides. She visually identifies herself, finally, as the heart of this piece.

A Berlin native of Turkish-Egyptian descent, now living and working in the States, Yatkin is a tall, sinewy, strong-featured wonder, a gifted dancer's dancer whose every performance is living sculpture. Watching her move last evening offered the thrill and, simultaneously, the poignancy that Wallstories had previously withheld despite the admirable effort of its other hard-working performers. It located Wallstories squarely in Yatkin's body and in her experience as a descendant of immigrants, and that touched off connections to issues roiling Western Europe in the present day.

A joyous coda brings the evening to a close, but Yatkin's presence brought it to its height.

Performed by Ahmaud Culver, Shay Bates, Sevin Ceviker, Rachel Holmes, Fadi Khoury, Karina Lesko, Marissa Maislen, Derek Crescenti, Nejla Y. Yatkin and Ehizoje Azeke

Lighting: Caroyn Wong

Video Design: Michael K. Rogers and Nejla Y. Yatkin

Photography: Nejla Y. Yatkin

Text: Nejla Y. Yatkin, with original interviews with Germans from the East and West

Wallstories is a presentation of the New York International Fringe Festival and runs through Sunday, August 28 at Dixon Place. For specific schedule details and ticketing, click here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey), Manhattan
(directions)

Deborah Feller on German Expressionist graphics

Art Review: German Expressionist Graphics
Art For Our Time: German Expressionism at Galerie St. Etienne and MoMA
by Deborah Feller, News and Views, DeborahFeller.com, July 3, 2011a

Recommended: "Dancing Dreams"

Dancing Dreams (2009)

Documentary film by Anne Linsel (writing/direction) and Rainer Hoffman (director of photography)

89 min. German with English subtitles

(c)Ursula Kaufmann

I'm just catching up with Dancing Dreams--the most recent Anne Linsel film on choreographer Pina Bausch--which recently became available on DVD through First Run Features. In the wake of Bausch's sudden death in 2009, this film stands as a testament to her unique vision and an intriguing look at all that goes into making a Bausch piece work.

The documentary tracks the development of an unusual project that Bausch conceived in 2007. We watch the selection and training of forty Wuppertal teenagers with no previous training in dance to perform Bausch's 1978 work, Kontakthof (Contact Zone), a study of "tenderness and aggression" in human relations. Interestingly, something of the youngsters' natural adolescent awkwardness fits what's awkward (and also what's rambunctious) about Bausch's movement and scenarios, but that's not all to it. There's an incredible amount of work to be done--like trying to find within oneself and then convincingly release "a serious kind of laugh"--and you get a sense of how difficult it all is. Some of these youngsters agreed to join because they thought it might be a lark, a diversion to share with their mates. What they end up sharing is the challenge and opportunity of a lifetime.

To draw us closer, Linsel follows the struggles, hopes and determination of a few of the kids. We come to know a little about their lives and backgrounds and feel empathy. We hear, ultimately, that the project has boosted confidence and poise and improved school performance. Eventually, all grow into a "close community," as Bausch says, approving the exacting work of her two rehearsal directors--Tanztheater Wuppertal vets Jo-Ann Endicott and Bénédicte Billiet--who have brought these students so far in a relatively short time.

Dancing Dreams is an inspiring film for aspiring young dancers and, for all who will miss Bausch, a loving tribute.

Vollmond: only love can make it rain

Vollmond. Opulent. Audacious. Sure-footed. Funny. Poignant. Elegant. Dashing.
Generous. Unforgettable. Pina Bausch.

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch

US Premiere of 

Vollmond (Full Moon)

through October 9

2010 Next Wave Festival

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House

Peter Jay Sharp Building

30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn

information, schedule and ticketing
directions

Otto Dix: between two wars

Between Two Wars: The Masked Truths of Otto Dix

by Deborah Feller, DeborahFeller.com, June 20, 2010