Review: Merce Cunningham at BAM

Merce Cunningham Dance Company at BAM
Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Dance Magazine

Frankie Manning, Lindy Hop master, 94

Frankie Manning, the Ambassador And Master of Lindy Hop, Dies at 94
by Terry Monaghan, The New York Times, April 28, 2009

Berkeley crisis--Pt. 2: Body and Soul podcast

Carissa Kranz

Carissa Kranz is a ballerina and studies law at the University of California, Berkeley (Boalt). She's also one of many Berkeley students protesting proposed budget cuts that would greatly diminish the school's much-respected physical education department and its dance classes. Hear why this program is important to the 5,000 students it serves each year and how students like Kranz are organizing to save it.

Berkeley crisis--Pt. 1 featured David E. Garcia, a graduate student in the Chemistry department, dancer and choreographer.

Join the Save the UCB PE Department! group on Facebook.

"Don't Hurt the Body for the Mind" by 12 Lecturers of The Physical Education Program, The Daily Californian Online (March 13, 2009)

The Daily Californian

UC Berkeley Department of Physical Education

(c)2009, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

MP3 File

Berkeley crisis--Pt. 1: Body and Soul podcast

David E. Garcia is a graduate student in Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley. He's also a dancer, a choreographer and one of many Berkeley students protesting proposed budget cuts that would greatly diminish the school's much-respected physical education department and its dance classes. Hear why this program is important to the 5,000 students it serves each year and how students like Garcia are organizing to save it.

Berkeley crisis--Pt. 2 will feature law student and ballerina Carissa Kranz.

Join the Save the UCB PE Department! group on Facebook.

"Don't Hurt the Body for the Mind" by 12 Lecturers of The Physical Education Program, The Daily Californian Online (March 13, 2009)

The Daily Californian

UC Berkeley Department of Physical Education

(c)2009, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

MP3 File

The audacity of Leichter

The Barnard Project--a collaboration of Dance Theater Workshop and Barnard College's dance department--brings students together with some of the foxiest choreographers around. The artistic residency program culminates in a season of new and developing works at DTW, and this year's lineup features pieces by Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis), Nora Chipaumire, Susan Rethorst and Nicholas Leichter.

Thorson's Monuments and Other Points of Interest: A Revisionist Construction of Closeness deploys an ensemble of bare-legged, skittering, sloshing women in bonnets that look like a soft-blue version of what the Sisters of Charity nuns wear in Doubt. There are also long tables wrapped in blue ruffled skirts, and I really can't tell what's going on here, but I enjoyed the tickling, eccentric musicality of the movements. Chipaumire's bismillah (which means, "in the name of Allah") evokes a tight-knit community of women. Among its subtle graces is the way the choreographer--herself, an extraordinary performer--has taught her young dancers to articulate the muscles in their torsos. Rethorst has shaped her corps of dancers into an ecosystem in a piece marred only by a tendency towards cutesiness. All three of these choreographers seem to be dreaming up societies and have shaped respectable, if not yet exciting, works out of these imaginings.

And then there's Leichter's Waltzes, Wonder and First Choice--made "with additional choreography and assistance by Aaron Draper"--which is a little bit different.

For one thing, it has a high-charged pop soundtrack--Mariah Carey and John Legend's "Born Again," Alicia Keys's "Falling," First Choice's "It's Not Over" and more. It has young men in business shirts and ties paired with women in--uh-oh!--midnight-blue party dresses. And you know exactly what's going on when it starts off with two of these dancing at--instead of with--each other, coldly missing opportunities to touch, hold and connect.

As the businessmen confront their dates--and, sometimes, one another--the mood becomes hectic, desperate and sometimes downright mean. The movement--broad and often awkward to a cartoonish extent--challenges each member of the hardworking corps with the speed and complexity of its isolations. I think Leichter, in working with these fledgling dancers, got the project precisely right. His work always strikes me as raw, almost like outsider art. He tosses street and club and folk stuff in with the fact of doing theatrical dance on a stage, and he refuses to smooth it back. I think these young Barnard dancers click with something there and grab hold and go with it.

The Barnard Project continues this evening at 7:30 and concludes with 2pm and 7:30pm performances on Saturday. Click here for information and ticketing.

Memories of Daniel Nagrin

To contribute to the Daniel Nagrin Digital Memory Book, please send thoughts, memories, stories, images or pictures about Nagrin either in the body of the e-mail, a Word document attachment or a .jpeg attachment. Submissions may be sent to Margie Wolf at mrwolf@mpsaz.org.

May 9th celebration of Nagrin's life and career (Arizona State University Herberger College Dance)

Further information: Beth Lessard at 480-838-5551, icexl@asu.edu

No Bessies in 2009

Danspace Project's site contains a brief announcement of the cancellation of the 2009 Bessie (New York Dance and Performance) Awards.