Dance performance C/D S/D

Do you like dance, as an art form? Why or why not? Please feel free to share experiences you've had at dance performances.

I recently saw the Batsheva Company's Max. I haven't seen much dance in my day but I hope to rectify this speedily.

Max was alright but it got realllllly boring in the middle. their whole thing is really, really still choreography with sudden outburts of neurotic movement. but the music got VERY repetitive in the middle and it was like minimalism-gone-torture.

I don't go enough. I have friends who email about their events regularly but they're more expensive than any other event I would go to ($25 and up) and are often inconveniently scheduled for me. Guilty of not going.

i generally get free tix, otherwise it would be really hard for me as well.

a friend's wife, Ivy Baldwin, is doing a show called Bear Crown at Dance Theater Workshop on March 18 - 21. $10 online.

"The young Ivy Baldwin is a choreographer with a knack for creating oddly coherent other worlds. Her peripatetic imagination turns her dancers into composite creatures, funny and poignant, whose gaits, gestures and behaviors eliecit fascination and empathy" -- the New Yorker

Love. Used to be part of a dance ensemble, but had to give it up in my third year of college because my grades were suffering. i miss it a lot. :(

You can all come to my performances, though. Most of the public ones are free.

I was really into dance as a teenager. Even wrote my senior English paper on the history of modern dance. The David Parsons Dance Company was always my favorite -- very playful, great sense of humor to it. I like Paul Taylor a lot too.

i saw a piece by john jasperse a year ago that was also very playful. the set consisted of found objects in ornate arrangements, and the music was dirty, clunky and atomspheric. the choreography consisted of segments like a jeans dance (4 or 5 dancers, each folding and unfolding a pair of jeans, slapping them against the floor etc), and a man vacuuming getting stuck in a cloud of wire hangers. really fun.

I like dance performance because I make money off of it. Also, pretty enjoyable in and of itself.

i forget now what you do

tap/hiphop: teaching, choreography, (less often) performance

wow! awes

I made Mr. Que go to see the NYC Ballet in a mixed repertory with me on Sunday. An enjoyable thing to do every once in a while, but I don't need to do it more than a couple of times a year.

Took an ex girlfriend to see the Rambert dance company years ago as a treat, I was expecting to be bored out of my mind, but I loved it. I’d love to go again, but I’ve not met anyone since who I thought would be into it.

excited about the IBD show tonight:
http://www.dancetheaterworkshop.org/ivy_baldwin

well that wasn't what i was expecting...

Sylvain Émard Danse

http://www.ubishops.ca/centennial/pictures/program/cas-public-2.jpg

http://www.ubishops.ca/centennial/pictures/program/cas-public-1.jpg

sexy as you like. men in high heels, women on point, on stage snogging (M-M, M-F, F-F), bodies that make you go o_O, tits, grand painos being rolled across the stage while the pianist follows the keyboard tying to continue to play, female dancers on full drum kits, contact miked sections of floor so you can hear every step then when they collapse, exhausted, and try to catch their breath you can hear evey breath amplified through the auditorium THEN the breath gets looped into a rythm and all the other dancers come on stage to use their breath on contact-mikes to inmpovise around that breath-loop.

just. so. exhilarating!

wow, that sounds awesome

totally!

omfg

ws (would see)

would smash also, believe me.

ugh

jed we have trisha brown and merce cunningham at work this season -- any thoughts? never seen either

have seen trisha brown years ago performing to philip glass. very good work, great technique & quite classical. merce have not seen (or smashed) but would do both if i had the chance!

score to trisha includes laurie anderson and sonic youth!

Tramway, Glasgow

Temps de Chien/Wave, Star rating: ****

And Suites Cruelles, Star rating: *****

New Territories 09 ended on the kind of high note that leaves you craving more, more, more of the radical vision and technical brio that seems to be the default setting for Quebecois contemporary dance.

Sylvain Emard's epic trilogy, The Climatology Of Bodies, progressed through Temps de Chien (Dog Days) and finally into Wave: the former, a sextet (three men, three women) whose turbulent interactions seethed like sudden tropical storms full of sultry heat and violent force while the latter, with an all-female cast of five, extended Emard's climate-based metaphors into a mystical siren-sisterhood whose rapport ebbed and flowed like the sea-scape ripples projected onto up-stage screens.

Everything about Emard's work - not just the movement but the set design, costuming, lighting and sound-score - has an intensely poetic feel to it. His dancers carry that sensibility, that rich palette of expressive imagery, into every gesture of his choreography - even the simplest touch, the abrupt shift away from an embrace, the recurring motif of an agitated hopping on one leg, speaks of inner states with an affecting clarity.

These pieces are profound excursions into how we inhabit our skins, our relationships, our environment. Plenty of choreographers set out with ground-breaking artistic ambitions: Emard has the intellect and creative ability to see his through.

So, too, does Helene Blackburn whose Suites Cruelles erupted on to the stage with a stonking, strutting routine that featured everyone - even the two male pianists - in black high-heels, boogieing on down to These Boots Are Made For Walkin'. Thereafter, it was a fabulous roller-coaster ride through all kinds of impassioned pleasure and pain with the eight dancers of her Cas Public company - four men, four women, all mostly in transparent black scanties - flirting hard with the thresholds of mental and physical abandon. Serious games of domination and submission turned funny, and vice-versa.

The women donned pointe-shoes for couplings that were balletic Apache dances sizzling with combative athleticism and sexual attraction. Bodies snarled together in a devouring frenzy - then ricocheted apart, for solo outpourings of urgent, unresolved desires.

A terrible beauty flooded the space. A raw, unsentimental charge of dark ecstasy that invited laughter and tears because it all felt so very real and honest. Blackburn is blessed with exceptionally talented dancers and musicians who are willing to go headlong off-road, as it were ... which is what New Territories was, is, all about.

JUST RUB IT IN WHY DONTCHA

;)

:D

Jan Fabre's "Orgy of Tolerance" - absolutely superb stuff. saw it last night. will say more about it soon.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2009/2/26/1235665149510/Jan-Fabres-Orgy-of-Tolera-002.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Io59RiXF4fM/Sci_tkwTdEI/AAAAAAAAABY/7_nzze8ceT0/S220/Orgy+of+Tolerance+(cross).jpg

sur, ann liv young is having a "thing" in nyc tonight:

SCARAMOUCHE GALLERY (53 STANTON ST. nyc 10002 212. 228. 2229 (www.scaramoucheart.com)/
come see Sherry and Gloria break it down fundraiser style for you and yours. bring your cash cause you'll want to spend it.
there will be drinks and food begins at 7pm. small space. get there fast/don't forget. phat wallet.

didn't make it.

BUT i did see merce cunningham this past friday. was wonderful.

the Times review was full of shit though. it didn't appreciate the sheer beauty that was the music and set design.

oh man I'm bummed I didn't see this earlier to tell you that trisha brown is AWESOME. love her love her. we have a big dance festival once a year down here and it is pretty much my favorite part of the year.

so excited to see her at the end of the month

i enjoyed the dance element of the recent david byrne shows (three dancers "interacting" with the musicians, made an okay gig outstanding).

during the Merce piece, i was mesmerized by one dancer. he was simply one of the most beautiful men i'd ever seen

afterward, my boyfriend looked him up online. turns out he's one of our good friends' roomates. it's almost too much for me.

http://www.merce.org/images/Rienercopy.jpg

and this doesn't do him justice, like, at all. that bod

also his name is Silas

i like.

i wonder if julio went to see ann liv young? i'm seeing her tomorrow. psyched!

is trisha brown at BAM? and is it sold out?

ya at BAM! and it's not sold out -- let's talk

huge drag there isn't more midwest dance. what we do have, like this
http://www.lichiaopingdance.org/events/index.htm
is excellent. wish there were more

the Times review was full of shit though. it didn't appreciate the sheer beauty that was the music and set design.

i thought the Times was too down on music/set and too up on choreography, but more on point than not. the set looked like a Skylab docking device, and Kim was kinda distracting during the second half.

Re dance in the Midwest: a slightly more casual event (an AIDS benefit, actually) that I'm posting for a friend:

Detroit Dance Loft instructors Christopher Leadbitter and Nia Silao will perform an original aerial/dance piece in the amazing setting of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. They will be joined by DDL student Molly Faultersack and the director of the Detroit Flyhouse, Micha.

The movement and projected images of birds in flight are set to the haunting sounds of an electric cello played by Diana Nucera. A spectacle of movement, music and imagery will consume the senses of the audience.

Saturday, April 25, 2009
8:00pm - 10:00pm
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD)
4454 Woodward Ave

i thought the Times was too down on music/set and too up on choreography, but more on point than not. the set looked like a Skylab docking device, and Kim was kinda distracting during the second half.

― loaded forbear (gabbneb), Thursday, 23 April 2009 17:19 (26 minutes ago) Permalink

i loooved how she was staring at the audience, ha

the set made me feel like i was watching a show in 1985, which i really appreciated

ok sooo i was wrong about my dancer guy above.

yup -- the guy whose picture i posted is NOT the dancer i loved. brandon collwes is. he's beautiful. here he is.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3212/2675997515_90fd21b6a7.jpg?v=0

jed - how was ann liv? She's doing her performances in London mid-May.

I'll try and go, definitely.

i've never been to a dance performance but i think....i'd like it?

julio, absolutely fantastic. i posted something on the theatre thread because this was definitely the least dance based thing she has done. that post doesn't really say anything though. to be honest i don't really know what to say yet apart from that i loved it. it is utterly unique. all i could do is describe it but that would ruin the experience for you.

wait is this the jefferson one?

i'm pretty sure i'd love dance performance, based on the scant few clips of things i've seen. i envy dancers' grace something fierce.

i mean washington

yea ppl really liked that one

yes, the george washington one. definitely a huge step forward for her but not much dance in it unless you count grinding on random audience members in a fishnet leotard to billie jean?

sad I missed the a.l.young :((((((((((((

you should be!

sorry too busy having a mental breakdown :P

aw man.

les ballets c de la be next week will sort you out.

oh snap! nice, I totally forgot

lynne is back then too, so see you there :D

i think it's the week after that actually but i'm going to see scottish dance theatre tomorrow, possibly.

Hi!! Want!

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is the greatest.

good clips from Myth here, possibly the greatest thing i have ever seen:

omg check out the box topple at 1:30 on this clip!!!!!!!!!

omg omg omg

see, that's dance. some of the images in that 2nd clip are downright frightening. that's what i should feel.

fitting that i find more feeling in these clips than in the dirge i saw last night (trisha brown). grow some balls.

omg i was in an angry mood this morning.

but really i hated the show kinda. times thought it was nice.

but actually the 1 segment i liked nobody else did! it was the 1 w/ no music

sorry to hear that!

know anything good happening in may dance-wise, ramz?

you know, i'm sorry too -- it was more a question of editing than anything else, which can be more frustrating, to see like glimmers of something great.

i will let you know if i hear of anything coming up! ailey will be at B4M early june and i've never seen them so that might be good. also i'm going to an indian piece mid-may choreographed by a friend of mine, kind of traditional indian folk dancing.

http://www.rajikapuri.com/tapasya_flier.html

i wish you could both come over to glasgow next week and see les ballets c de la b with me.

Pina Bausch died :|

oh no!!!!

this is so sad :(

rip

68? i thought she was older.

i actually thought she was younger! i guess she was just diagnosed like a week ago...

it was, perhaps, mercifully quick.

go, y/n?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PWAQPbOx7I

of course!

(although i find that kind of thing curiously old-fashioned, does that make sense?)

it looks like an experience all the same.

I didn't blink for 3 minutes and 22 seconds. Don't walk, run to see this.

:)

where dis you see it spinspin?

did*

ah you meant you didn't blink during the youtube video? i wondered why you mentioned 3"22'!

Only saw the clip, but I'm tracking this guy down. That was the best avant-garde dance performance I've ever seen.

i saw something similar in style recently by chunky move

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLAOs_e1Guk

(and yes definitely go)

spinspin, if it even comes close to touching this, which is still burned in my mind two years on from seeing it, i'll be happy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu00btz4gRk

admittedly, the video does it no justice. it was incredibly intense.

seeing PINA BAUSCH tonight! well, her company, obviously.