Cuba's DanzAbierta presents "Showroom" at The Joyce

Review: Cuba’s DanzAbierta debuts at The Joyce Theater
by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, ZEALnyc, May 15, 2016

Augie Rodriguez, 86

Augie Rodriguez, 86, Half of a Mambo Team, Dies
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, July 26, 2014

Fired up with Robert Farris Thompson

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

presents

ON FIRE WITH AFRICAN DANCE

Staccato Incandescence: The Story of Mambo

with Robert Farris Thompson

Thursday, March 14, 6pm

Robert Farris Thompson, Master T, the Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, will focus his lecture on mambo, which fuses a variety of dance styles, from Lindy to ballet to bomba to Afro-Cuban dance.

Robert Farris Thompson is America's most prominent scholar of African Art, and has presided over exhibitions of African art at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. He lived in the Yoruba region of southwest Nigeria for many years while he conducted his research of Yoruba art history, and is affiliated with the University of Ibadan and Yoruba village communities. Thompson has studied the African arts of the diaspora in the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and several Caribbean islands. Robert Farris Thompson is also an authority in hip hop. Cornel West, who teaches African American studies at Princeton, calls this white man from Texas "my dear brother" and "one of the greatest pioneers in the study of Afro-American culture and African culture."

The ON FIRE WITH AFRICAN DANCE series is presented by The Committee for the Jerome Robbins Dance Division and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and is produced by The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Free admission

Click here for more information.

For information on other upcoming programs, including On Fire with African Dance presentations by Ronald K. Brown of Ronald K. Brown/Evidence (April 6) and Djoniba Mouflet (April 11), click here.

FLASH MOB ALERT: For Sandy relief -- Today 12:12pm at Washington Square Park Arch

BALLROOM BASIX HOSTS RHUMBA FOR ROCKAWAY RELIEF

FLASH MOB

Tony Dovolani of Dancing With The Stars, Iveta Lukosiute, the 2009 World 10 Dance Champion, Radio City Rockettes and Flash Mob America Join Ballroom Basix to Raise Funds for Rockaway

TODAY, Wednesday, December 12, 2012 at 12:12 p.m.

Washington Square Park Arch, Manhattan
(map/directions)

More than 100 Ballroom and Latin dancers with Harlem schoolchildren from M.S. 45, 57 and 76 come together to raise thousands for Sancy victims.

Ballroom Basix, a not-for-profit, arts-in-education initiative that brings the etiquette and education of partner dancing to deter bullying and enhance peer relationships among schoolchildren, was serving over 120 students in PS 114 in the Rockaways before Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on the area. PS 114 was one of the most severly affected schools ­ so sever that all the children were relocated.

The flash mob will be danced to an original composition, a contemporary English/Spanish version of America, The Beautiful (featuring Grammy-nominated powerhouse Karina Pasian). The song is available on iTunes for $1 ­ all dowload proceeds will go towards helping the students of PS 114. A video of today¹s flash mob will post later today in hopes of viral recognition/downloads/fundraising.

This road is officially opened: Paseo

This road is officially opened...

There is no road to nowhere, only to what is still here. 

-- La Bruja

Bobby Sanabria

"As this has never been done before, we have no idea what we're doing today," Joanna Haigood half-joked at the launch of Paseo, less a walking tour than a movable, danceable feast, a peripatetic block party that, for one delightful hour, would twist through the South Bronx neighborhoods of Hunts Point and Longwood. Haigood, a site-specific choreographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, had teamed up with musical director Bobby Sanabria (multiple Grammy winner) and Dancing in the Streets executive and artistic director Aviva Davidson to create this public celebration.

La Bruja (photo by Rosalia Rivera)

With hip hop poet La Bruja's blessings, the procession stepped off from Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education on Simpson Street. Threatening clouds hung low, but spirits flew as we followed the lead of the ebullient Sanabria and his musicians, passing dancers on fire escapes and brownstone stoops. Cries of "Que vivo, Puerto Rico" went up as we passed balconies flying the island's flag.

Haigood had warned of the temptation to stop along the way: "Paseo is best enjoyed as a stroll, a promenade," she said. Indeed, it was hard not to linger with the guitarists and dancing couple in front of Nico Laundromat, or the curbside conga players, or the four doo wop singers, or the chorus in their smart white suits and skirts or even to stop to comfort a couple of unnerved cats who scampered away from our surging procession.

Yes, my lower back and feet talked to me long after I returned home, but still....

Rumbas in the park till past midnight in the canyons of da’ projects in the summer. 

Couldn’t sleep? Who cares, you didn’t want to.

--Bobby Sanabria

To read an excerpt from Bobby Sanabria's Nuyorican Memories, about his youth in the historic, still vibrant South Bronx, click here.

US conservatives object to cultural tourists dancing in Cuba

Licensing Rules Slow Tours to Cuba
by Damien Cave, The New York Times, September 11, 2012

Dancing "Ghetto Klown"

Because when people really move, and they’re really in themselves, it’s like shamanism, and they’re overtaken by something. I find that so beautiful and so raw. That really speaks to me.  -- John Leguizamo

John Leguizamo in ‘Ghetto Klown’ on Broadway
by Julie Bloom, The New York Times, April 8, 2011

New York loves Latin dance

A Latin Dance Scene Spreads Across New York

by Larry Rohter, The New York Times, July 22, 2010

Celebrating Cuban culture in New York

Areytos Performance Works presents

HERENCIA CUBANA: BEMBÉ, SALÓN Y CALLE, a dynamic evening of dance, live music and visual art featuring Afro-Cuban orishas, rumba, salsa, cha-cha-cha and contemporary dance theater.

Friday, March 19, 7:30pm

Hostos Center for the Arts and Culture

450 Grand Concourse (at 149th Street), The Bronx

Directions

Click here for tickets, or call the box office at 718.518.4455.

The joy of mambo!

One in 8 Million - New York Characters in Sound and Images - The New York Times

Great series overall, but don't miss the one about mambo dancer Candice Angelet--link here--interviewed by Catrin Einhorn!

Burn the beat around!

If, during Burn the Floor's first act, you keep wondering when the hell's this show gonna break for intermission, it's probably not because you're having a bad time. Most likely, it's because you're feeling an urgent need to get your blood pressure checked, your pacemaker readjusted or, at least, your sweaty brow mopped.

Australian director-choreographer Jason Gilkison has finally brought his decade-old success story--with its international cast of Latin and ballroom whiz kids--to Broadway's Longacre Theater. It belongs on Broadway. Though it will close on October 18, it should run here a much longer time.

Why? Well, simply because I could manually flip this show upside down like one of its fantastic dancers and turn it inside out and not find a single thing wrong with it. Staging, lighting, costuming, pacing, dancing, singing, and music playing--have I forgotten any other "ings"? Breathing? Being?--are all top notch. That's why.

I scoffed, at first, and avoided taking one of my serious concert dance friends or serious theater friends to see Burn the Floor, fearing their reaction to anything with the whiff of Dancing With the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance. (Indeed, most of Gilkison's champion performers--like charming Sasha Farber and sultry Peta Murgatroyd--have done time on those shows, and he was a SYTYCD guest choreographer.) So, I went alone. But I was wrong. If any of my friends could not enjoy themselves at Burn the Floor, I might have to rethink our friendship.

So, if you don't care for sexy and romantic dancing--or for Broadway musicals, for that matter--you might want to stay away. Or come with an open mind and give it a shot. If you do love ballroom and Latin, waste no time getting to the Longacre while there's still a floor left because, yes, they do burn it.

The title works because these dancers blaze. Curtain's up, they're ready to go and rarely ease off a driven pace. Samba, rumba, foxtrot, swing, tango, paso doble, even swoony Viennese Waltz get a fresh treatment and vigorous workout from imaginative Gilkison and his intrepid corps. Dance segments magically flow into one another and, in the absence of a narrative, the sweet-natured vocalizing of Ricky Rojas and hot-mama belting of Rebecca Tapia hold it all together.

And you're simply swept along without time to doubt or protest. At times, I definitely felt that I was dancing, too. When intermission arrived, a woman sitting behind me gasped, "I'm exhausted! I could collapse right now!" Kind of alarming, given the apparent average age of the audience!

Burn the Floor information
Tickets

Sizzlin'!

A must-see from 30 Seconds of Dance!

Salsa Dancers Cristian Crespo & Gaby, Part 1