Fabian Barnes, 56

Fabian Barnes, founder/director of Dance Institute of Washington, dies at 56
by Sarah L. Kaufman, The Washington Post, April 12, 2016

A happy 40th anniversary to Maida Withers and company!

Maida Withers (above)
and
Maida Withers Dance Construction Company
(photos: Shaun Schroth; virtual art: Tania Fraga)

 

For its celebratory 40th anniversary season, Maida Withers Dance Construction Company premieres MindFluctuations, an interactive spectacle of dance, 3D projected virtual artworks, Emotiv neuro headsets, and live electronic music. The piece represents Withers's third collaboration with renowned Brazilian 3D computer artist/architect Tania Fraga, and continues the troupe's investigation of how the human body and mind can connect with innovative technology.

Read more here about this creative intersection of movement, technology and neuroscience, and see the work on Thursday, March 19, 8pm, at DC's George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium.

Lisner Auditorium
730 21st Street NW, Washington, DC (Metro GW Foggy Bottom)
(map/directions)

Directors protest WJCC firing of Ari Roth

Directors’ Letter Protests Firing of Theater J’s Artistic Director
by Michael Paulson, The New York Times, December 22, 2014

Minds wide shut: WJCC fires theater director Ari Roth [UPDATE]

Ari Roth, Director of Jewish Theater, Is Fired
by Michael Paulson, The New York Times, December 19, 2014

Click for update

For Carmen de Lavallade, the dance goes on

Carmen de Lavallade Still Captivates Onstage at 83
by Danielle C. Belton, The Root, October 30, 2014

"Straight to the heart of weirdness..." with Degas in DC

Review: Degas' Little Dancer at National Gallery
by Philip Kennicott, The Washington Post, October 16, 2014

Dance/USA: Fall 2014 paid internships, fellowships

Dance/USA, the voice for the professional field of dance, offers internships to aspiring arts administrators based at the national office, located in Washington, DC.

Dance/USA Internships are available in the following departments for the Fall 2014 Term:

·         Communications
·         Development
·         Government Affairs

Fellowships are available in the following departments:

·         Research

To apply, interested candidates must email their resume and a cover letter outlining internship interests, career goals, and availability to Melissa Lineburg, executive administrator.

Dance/USA’s Fall 2014 Internship Application Deadline is Friday, August 1, 2014, and the Fall Term runs September 3, 2014-December 5, 2014.

Recent college graduates, current college juniors/seniors, and graduate students are eligible to apply! Those accepted will receive professional, on-the-job experience that is needed in today’s job market by working with and assisting our national office staff.

Part-time and full-time internships are available. Stipends or university credit are also available.

With questions, email Melissa or call the Dance/USA national office at 202.833.1717.

Melissa L. Lineburg
Executive Administrator
Dance/USA
1111 16th Street, NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036
202.833.1717 ext. 100
mlineburg@danceusa.org

The end of Washington's Corcoran?

"One now-retired museum director once told me that one of the hardest parts of his job was teaching new trustees from Wall Street that a museum is not a business in the sense that they understand the term." -- Eric Gibson

Clueless at the Corcoran

by Eric Gibson, The Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2014

Washington's Corcoran Gallery to Be Taken Over

by Jennifer Maloney, The Wall Street Journal, February 19. 2014

Joan Mondale, 83

Joan Mondale Dies at 83; Was Wife of Vice President
by Anita Gates, The New York Times, February 3, 2014

American dance history in photos: Smithsonian's "Dancing the Dream"

Dancing the Dream

open now through July 13, 2014

Dancing the Dream tells the stories of performers, choreographers, and impresarios who harnessed America’s diversity and dynamism into dance styles that defined the national experience: dance was American culture in motion. From the era of live performance to today’s media age, dance’s “singular sensations” have riveted our attention—iconic figures with signature styles that leap into the starscape and strike us with wonder.

Admission: Free

Learn more here.

Visitors info here.

Women photographers in the news

Photographer Carrie Mae Weems wins a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship:

Syracuse photographer receives prestigious MacArthur Fellowship

by Ken Sturtz, Syracuse.com, September 25, 2013

*****

© Beverly Joubert: National Geographic exhibit “Women of Vision”
“In a hunting game with her mother, a young leopard leaps through tall grass” 

National Geographic

presents

Women of Vision: National Geographic Photographers on Assignment

October 10, 2013–March 9, 2014 

Open daily 10am-6pm

An exhibition of work by eleven award-winning women photojournalists, curated by National Geographic Senior Photo Editor Elizabeth Krist.

“Women of Vision” features nearly 100 photographs, including moving depictions of far–flung cultures, compelling illustrations of conceptual topics such as memory and teenage brain chemistry, and arresting images of social issues like child marriage and 21st–century slavery. In addition to the photographs, visitors will have an opportunity to learn how National Geographic magazine (NGM) picture editors work closely with the photographers to select images and tell a story. Video vignettes will present first–person accounts that reveal the photographers’ individual styles, passions and approaches to their craft.

All the photographers featured in the exhibition will be at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 10, joining journalist Ann Curry for a panel discussion on the power of photography and the many people and places represented in their assignment work. The event will be live–streamed on NationalGeographic.com. Curry also wrote the foreword to the exhibition’s companion book, “Women of Vision: National Geographic Photographers on Assignment,” along with National Geographic magazine Editor–in–Chief Chris Johns. The book will be available in the National Geographic Museum Store.

National Geographic Museum

1145 17th Street, NW (17th and M), Washington, DC

For more information on the exhibition, click here.

For visitor's information, click here.

Audition for DC-based Dakshina dance troupe

Washington, DC-based Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company seeks strong male and female dancers with a solid background in modern dance and/or ballet and release technique for its 2013-2014 season.

New York City audition: 

February 25 (Noon to 1:45pm)

Alvin Ailey Studios

Dakshina has a multi-year partnership with the Sokolow foundation in restaging Anna Sokolow’s iconic modern dance works, works with Bharata Natyam—a South Asian classical dance form, and synthesizes the two forms in a unique three-prong approach to dance.

We are looking for energetic, committed, professional, and positive dancers who love to engage and interact with each other.

To read more about the company, this unique opportunity and audition details, click here.

Undebatable: Arts fuel the economy

Arts Fuel the Economy
by Clyde Valentín and Kamilah Forbes, Room for Debate, The New York Times,  May 1, 2012

Dakshina and Sakshi at Ailey tonight

This weekend, Nandini Sikand (Sakshi Productions) and DC-based Daniel Phoenix Singh (Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company) gracefully interweave their companies, cultural traditions and modern visions in a shared program, Prana/Breath, that concludes tonight at the Ailey Citigroup Theater. Both troupes uphold the exacting discipline and charismatic dazzle of Indian dance traditions--Daksina's Bharata Natyam; Sakshi's Odissi--while venturing contemporary ideas of movement and narrative.

Both artistic paths--old and new--are on offer in a show including ten pieces and, with an intermission, running well past two hours. But it is in the latter area--the infusion of contemporary choreography--where Prana/Breath sometimes weakens, putting forth movement that swirls and expands, less like breath than like ink dripped into water, leaving no clear or lasting mark. Carrie Rohman's Beyond Muscle, Beyond Bone--a 2006 duet made in homage to the late choreographer Cheryl Wallace and danced by Rohman and Kristin Lyndal Garbarino of Sakshi--might have subtle, spiritual connections to the evening's already elusive theme of prana. (What form of dancing is not, in its very foundation, about breath?) However, without the program notes' reference to Wallace, Beyond Muscle, Beyond Bone's vague, pleasant airiness would ultimately speak of nothing but itself.

Singh's love duet Since You've Asked (2009), danced with Jamal Ari Black and set to music by Leonard Cohen and Jacques Brel, rests so much on the obvious physical similarity and unison of these two slender, lyrical guys that it does not afford the men the individuality and individual textures--sourced from within, not applied externally--that could make this piece resonate in our own human hearts. A few tender touches come a little late to have what was possibly the intended, empathic effect.

In that respect, the evening's crown belongs to Symbiosis--a palpably tender, occasionally playful duet in the sensuous Odissi tradition and shared by Sikand and Singh. This piece displays the union of opposites so often depicted in South Asian imagery as male and female deities in romantic or erotic coupling that can represent a host of potential blendings of being and energy, even within one person or thing. Om shanti, shanti, shanti. Symbiosis was made and is danced by two beautiful masters who, in their clearly loving attention to detail and nuance in movement, reward our witness.

Dakshina's Natalia Mesa Higuera was also fascinating as a clearly troubled figure, struggling and failing to hold herself together, in Darla Stanley's contemporary solo, In Sleep She Migrates Home (2012).

For information and tickets for tonight's 8pm performance, click here.

Ailey Citigroup Theater

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
The Joan Weill Center for Dance
405 West 55th Street (at 9th Avenue), Manhattan
directions/map

Is Sarah Kaufman ignoring DC's modern dance?

What should a dance critic talk about when she talks about dance?

by Amanda Abrams, From the Green Room/Dance USA, November 15, 2011

Dancers to commemorate 9/11

The Table of Silence Project
conceived by choreographer Jacqulyn Buglisi and Italian artist Rosella Vasta

The Table of Silence Project represents the common threads of humanity which unite all mankind into a single force with common goals and aspirations, regardless of race, culture or religion. Through this event we wish to achieve the dual purpose of celebrating and honoring peace through listening - a united moment of silence - a call for Peace in our world from NYC's community of artists. -- Jacqulyn Buglisi

Sunday September 11, 8:20 AM, ending at 8:46 AM
Josie Robertson Plaza, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Complete information here

Sarah Skaggs Dance
9/11 Dance -- A Roving Memorial
 
An 11-minute meditative dance for large groups of dancers, performed simultaneously on September 11 from Noon to 3pm at multiple locations:

• Three New York City parks (Union Square, Washington Square and Battery Park)
• Washington, DC in the atrium of the National Museum of Women in the Arts and as part of the Arts on Foot Festival
• Shanksville, PA at Memorial Park

In shaping the work, Skaggs was driven by such questions as: What is the function of dance post-9/11? What is the role of the body in an anxious and fearful climate? And can multiple bodies moving slowly in space create a shift in public consciousness?

The project will be broadcast on YouTube following the events. Visit Sarah Skaggs Dance.

DC dance critiqued by one of its own

Work in Progress: What’s Wrong With D.C.’s Modern Dance Scene?
by Amanda Abrams, Washington City Paper, May 25, 2011

Into the deep with Holland Cotter

From the Deep, a Diva with Many Faces
by Holland Cotter, The New York Times, April 3, 2009

Not dance, but a Holland Cotter review--yes!--of a must-see show, and I intend to dance down to DC to see it!

Yes, we can can...yes, we can can!

dance/metroDC’s inaugural Barack buttons
from A Time to Dance blog