Chicago arts, you've got a mayor!

Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel on the arts: Dance, gritty theater and a shift towards neighborhoods
by Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune, March 4, 2011

Struggling Brooklyn church shelters artists

Artists Find Accommodating Landlord: A Struggling Brooklyn Parish
by Tim Sohn, The New York Times, March 6, 2011

But where will the tribes gather?

Place in East Village Where Emotions Became Poetry Is for Sale
by Colin Moynihan, The New York Times, March 6, 2011

Tribute to Odetta

Performances @ the Schomburg presents

Women’s Jazz Festival:
In Tribute to Odetta: This Little Light Of Mine
with Bernice Johnson Reagon, Lizz Wright and Toshi Reagon

Monday, March 28, 7pm

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
New York Public Library
515 Malcolm X Boulevard, Manhattan
(directions)

As both a woman and musician Odetta was a pioneer. There were others who had introduced African American songs and singing to the concert stage before she began her work. However, Odetta plowed a new road of expression and information as she wove together her distinctively powerful voice, her understanding of the classical approach, and a masterfully curated gathering of songs from a wide breath of American history and experience. Her repertoire included work songs, prison songs, freedom songs of the Civil Rights movement, blues, spirituals, and great American ballads. She could not be held to a category and her signature delivery of conviction and focus could reveal each song as a living poem, continuously unfolding in perspective and meaning.

 For information and ticketing, click here.

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)

High honor to Jacob's Pillow dance fest

Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival Receives National Medal of Arts
by Debra Levine, The Huffington Post, March 4, 2011

Reminder: DTW Writing on Dance application deadline

Here's a quick reminder that the deadline for applying for my Writing on Dance series at Dance Theater Workshop is Friday, March 18! Details below.

photo by Deborah Feller

I'm honored to be facilitating a new session of Writing on Dance (Spring 2011) for Dance Theater Workshop, beginning March 30!

This series will be an informal, supportive lab for discovery of your self as writer; for lively engagement with art; for celebration of your unique voice and creative response.

We share this lab with others who are also questioning: Why do I write? Who am I as perceiver and witness of art? How do I relate and respond to dance? Why write about dance? What is my role? Who is my reader? What is the larger context in which art is made, presented, experienced and interpreted for the public? How can I, as writer, make something new, meaningful and useful in this time of disruption and transition?

Please note: Although I will encourage participants to attend, contemplate and write about dance performances during this course, our work will not focus on the nuts and bolts of dance criticism or dance journalism, and our group need not be limited to students who wish to pursue a professional career in dance criticism.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: March 18

For Writing on Dance's complete schedule and application details, please click here.