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    Category: Dance

    Majorette Dancing Is For Every Body, Period.

      November 3, 2023
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    Majorette dance style is, hands down, one of the swaggiest ways a person can express themselves physically, which is why so many dancers (and people on TikTok) flock to it.

    Majorette dancers, known for their bedazzled pageant-worthy costumes, synchronicity, and smooth-like-butter choreography, build intrigue and excitement for the bands they accompany during games, centering school pride and comradery. For those who have the discipline and can pull off the moves, these dance teams offer space for students to tap into profoundly artistic and powerful parts of themselves.

    The majorette dance style, which is a fusion of hip-hop, jazz, and West African dance styles, is a celebration of the Black excellence that exists in Southern culture especially ― and in the legacy of HBCUs. This, of course, can sometimes come with some extremely limiting beliefs about what excellence looks like, how it should be expressed, and who is allowed to participate in it. However, North Carolina A&T’s first plus-size majorette team, Liquid Gold, is challenging these notions by reminding us the beauty of Black culture truly lies in the multitudes of its niches.

    Jada Mayes and Leah Bell, students at the school, co-founded the team to create space for people with bigger bodies to explore majorette dance. Mayes grew up dancing ballet, jazz and hip-hop from the age of 5, but it wasn’t until she was a pre-teen that she realized she was drawn to the high-energy and semi-acrobatic dance moves of Black majorettes.

    “I was in summer camp, we would make dance teams with each other, and one of my friends put me on to the show ‘Bring It,’” says Mayes, who talks about how the reality show, which previously aired on TLC and centers Miss D’s Dancing Dolls majorette team from Jackson, Mississippi, inspired her. “I liked their style and everything. So I was like, I want to try this,” says Mayes.

    Mayes had previously been part of two majorette teams before forming her own at North Carolina A&T, the impetus being creating another type of safe space for those looking for it. She noticed that while the university’s dance teams did invite people of all shapes and sizes to participate, there was a tendency to underestimate individuals whose bodies did not fit the “norm.” In the world of majorette dancing ― and the world in general ― there’s the long held belief that people with thinner bodies are naturally athletic and more capable of pulling off the intense stunts seen in majorette choreography.

    “There were a bunch of plus-size girls, and often they would be highlighted, I’m not gonna say in a bad way, but …I don’t know, it did not feel authentic,” says Mayes, adding that she often felt like she had to work harder to prove herself.

    “All the tricks and everything, it takes a certain type of agility that people don’t expect plus-size girls to have,” she says. Ultimately, practice and motivation really determines how successful you are at this type of dance — and Mayes and Bell wanted to reinforce that truth.

    “I know a good amount of majorette dancers who are beasts, that are powerhouses, and that can go toe-to-toe with anybody you put in front of them…who were discouraged about joining their [school’s] majorette team because there was nobody on that team that looked like them,” says Mayes, who feels like these barriers need to be broken down in order to truly put on display the full breadth of beauty and talent the majorettes embody.

    The majorette dance is just one example of POC spaces that sometimes reinforce harmful body ideals. Thinness is seen as a virtue in most spaces on planet Earth, but especially in spaces where Black women hold public-facing positions. Black girls grow up observing people (especially women) around them hyper-fixate on having curves in only the “right” places. We are taught that being smaller can make us more palatable when our skin tone, facial features, socio-economic standing, accents, and ideas don’t.

    Having a smaller body can influence our access to community and opportunities like jobs, other types of income, and in some cases — a spot on the team. But these beliefs are deeply damaging on a spiritual level, especially because the most natural and beautiful thing about our bodies is that they are all different and ever-evolving. By holding on to the toxic belief that thinner bodies are the only bodies able to succeed as dancers, athletes, and just in general, we are holding on to extensions of fatphobia and ableism. It’s time to let all that go.

    Mayes and her team are joining a proud and successful cohort who have made space for plus-size people in the HBCU majorette dance world. She looks to Alabama State’s Honeybees and their recent collaboration with their school’s official majorette team, The Sensational Stingettes, as a sign of progress. She hopes that, at some point, Liquid Gold not only has a chance to collaborate with The Golden Delight Girls, A&T’s official majorette team, but that Liquid Gold itself is accepted as an official A&T majorette team, so they march side by side. And her greatest hope is that one day, the need for totally separate majorette teams will no longer exist.

    So far, Liquid Gold has participated in on-campus events put on by other clubs, home football games, and off-campus events like Greensboro Pride, allowing them to garner their own fan base.

    “We’ve been getting a lot of support. We’ve been collaborating with other organizations. They see us, and they like us. And that makes me happy,” Mayes tells me.

    This support is what has kept Mayes going, along with her devotion to her teammates, whom she knows without a doubt deserve the opportunity to have the majorette experience. “To be able to finally perform, and to be able to finally show our talents to the school, to the world, it feels really surreal,” says Mayes.



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    The Pleasure and Pitfalls of Creating Ballets Based on Contemporary Literature

      November 2, 2023
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    In the closing scene of The Handmaid’s Tale, choreographed by Lila York for Royal Winnipeg Ballet and based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, peace washes over the stage. Arvo Pärt’s celestial music accompanies the lead dancer in a seamless, spiraling solo evocative of a cloud-borne dream. In the book, the central character’s fate is left ambiguous, but York chose to leave the audience with a sense of hope and possibility. She wanted to give the viewers a way out, she says, after the intensity of Atwood’s cautionary vision of a world without autonomy or reproductive rights.

    “The novel is so powerful, and so plausible,” says York. “The loss of liberty depicted in the book really jarred me. It wasn’t my job to politicize it. All you can do, as an artist, is put out a warning signal.”

    York is among a growing number of ballet choreographers turning to modern literature as a basis for their work. The weaving together of movement and language into art seems natural and inevitable, given ballet’s long history as a narrative art form, and our current cultural infatuation with visual storytelling as a means of communication. Yet choreographers’ interest in tying ballet directly to literature is a notable turnaround from the 20th century’s Balanchine-influenced rise of abstract, plotless ballets.

    Using ballet vocabulary to retell the works of great writers is fraught with potential pitfalls. But the medium of dance can also illuminate a book (or short story, or play) afresh, encouraging new dialogue, questioning, connection, and, yes, hope.

    Ballet as a Storytelling Art

    The history of ballet as a storytelling art reaches back to even before the French Romantic era, and continued under Petipa, when ballet “began its transformation from popular to high art,” says dance historian Elizabeth Kendall. “You could argue that Sleeping Beauty was based on written text—tales collected by Charles Perrault—and the gestures of Vaganova training are somewhat narrative.”

    Lila York (front) in rehearsal at Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Courtesy RWB.

    But ballets inspired by contemporary literature (rather than classics, myths, or fairy tales) were rare. Notably, in 1952 Valerie Bettis choreographed A Streetcar Named Desire for the Slavenska-Franklin Ballet (later performed by American Ballet Theatre and Dance Theatre of Harlem), breaking new ground by using the symbolism and idiomatic language of dance to present a visually gripping take on the complex social themes of Tennessee Williams’ play.

    Translating Books Into Dance

    Cathy Marston was idly browsing in a British bookstore when the cover of Charles Webb’s The Graduate caught her eye. With a commission from San Francisco Ballet on her agenda, the concept of reworking the story with a different light on the iconic character of Mrs. Robinson sprang to mind. The story and its film version had painted a picture of her as a pitiful, lonely alcoholic, but Marston wanted to go deeper. “What if Mrs. Robinson had read and been inspired by the feminist movement? Would she have joined the revolution?” Marston asks. “I love investigating characters from a different perspective, looking at who they are and what they stand for, and turning those ideas on their head. There’s a lot of freedom, actually, to fill in the space between the words that have been written.”

    a group of female dancers wearing red and black leaning on each other while performing
    Royal Winnipeg Ballet in Lila York’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Photo by Vince Pahkala, Courtesy RWB.

    But why make a ballet based on the book instead of simply choreographing a piece about feminism? Marston finds that character specificity encourages empathy. “If you have a pas de deux about love, I want to know who’s in love and why,” she says. “It’s about joining the dots and creating something that takes you on a journey. For me, choreographing a single idea or set of ideas doesn’t do that.”

    Respecting Plot While Speaking to the Present

    In 2020, after taking part in a roundtable discussion on the relevance of ballet, choreographer Iyun Ashani Harrison came away wondering how he could continue making work that mattered in a time when racial, social, and cultural pre­cedents were being vigorously challenged. One of the reasons he decided to choreograph an adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room was that he resonated personally with David, its main character.

    a female dancer wearing a long black dress standing center while other pairs of dancers move behind her
    Here and below: Sarah Van Patten in San Francisco Ballet’s production of Cathy Marston’s Mrs. Robinson. Photo by Erik Tomasson, Courtesy SFB (2).
    a female dancer wearing an orange dress siting on a block, dancers move in a blur behind her

    “One of the things that came out of 2020 is that the stories we tell are important,” Harrison says. “Giovanni’s Room is one of Baldwin’s strongest works, yet one that people are least aware of. I thought, Let’s elevate that.”

    Scholars admire the book for its poignant representations of queer life at a time when such depictions were all but verboten in mainstream U.S. literary culture. In his adaptation for his company, Ballet Ashani, Harrison saw a chance to create dialogue about the book’s themes by situating Baldwin’s characters in a world that reflects his own—and many others’—experiences, without losing the specificity of its plot.

    two male dancers, one leaping with the other supporting him
    Brandon Penn (left) and Jam Neil Delgado Castro in Giovanni’s Room. Photo by Alec Himwich, Courtesy Harrison.

    “I’m stepping away from the text to make sure certain things make sense in the medium of dance,” he says. “I use theatrical tricks as metaphor to suggest, to imply, versus being more literal and using props as in classical ballets. I want the audience to have a sense of suspended belief.” The musical score, which includes compositions by Maurice Ravel and original electronic music by Aaron Brown that incorporates spoken dialogue from the book, links the past and present, and dancers of color are cast in roles written as white.

    “I want people to see inside the book, but also see my creative shifts,” he says. “The work gets into the idea there can be so much more fluidity in how people love or desire, and to keep creating understanding about people who might feel marginalized or ‘othered.’ ”

    a man helping two dancers wearing animal costumes
    Iyun Ashani Harrison (center) with Giovanni’s Room dancers Anthony Otto Nelson Jr. and Martin Skocelas-Hunter. Photo by Alec Himwich, Courtesy Harrison.

    “It’s Not a Movie, It’s a Ballet”

    As marketing departments have long understood, a familiar literary title tends to attract audiences. But preconceived notions of what a popular book “should” look like can cloud viewers’ impressions when they see it in movement form. On the other hand, adhering too closely to the complexities of a written narrative, where multiple characters and subplots may lack physical action, can also backfire.

    a male dancer holding a female dancer upside down with her legs extended
    Ballet West in Val Caniparoli’s The Lottery. Photo by Luke Isley, Courtesy Ballet West.

    With The Handmaid’s Tale, York (whose ballet preceded the TV series) didn’t want to graphically represent the violence in the book, even though she knew certain audiences expected it. “The book has three rapes and two hangings, but I made it in a way that was stylized, that adults would understand but would not upset children,” York says. “To make it too dark and literal would not have accomplished much in the way of my goal, which was to awaken people. It’s not a movie, it’s a ballet!”

    Val Caniparoli took the opposite approach with Shirley Jackson’s famously disturbing short story “The Lottery.” He used the built-in uncertainty of live performance to intensify the story’s messages about the devastating consequences that can result from societal pressure, conformity, and ritual. In Caniparoli’s self-described “experiment,” the casting of the principal character, who performs a fiendish solo before being stoned to death, is decided each night by the dancers in an actual, onstage lottery.

    a male dancer wearing a suit kicking front while holding a box
    Ballet West in Val Caniparoli’s The Lottery. Photo by Luke Isley, Courtesy Ballet West.

    “The uneasiness the dancers had onstage, I knew the audience would also have,” he says. “It was shocking to everyone—you could hear the audience gasp every night. There’s a lot of power in that.” Blending the literal—an actual lottery—with a metaphorical climax pulls the audience that much closer, casting them as witnesses and players complicit in the tragic outcome. Caniparoli says that’s what makes a dance adaptation work.

    “You have to get the audience invested, to really care about and feel for the characters onstage,” he says. “If you don’t feel for these people, it’s empty.”

    Why Literary Ballet Adaptations Matter

    Choreographers like Marston, Harrison, Caniparoli, and York have discovered that presenting a writer’s work through the medium of dance—where, unlike reading a book that can be set aside, they’ll take in the entire experience in one sitting—makes a special sort of impact.

    a man dressed in brown kneeling with a female dancer standing directly behind him
    The Royal Ballet’s Marcelino Sambé and Lauren Cuthbertson in Cathy Marston’s The Cellist. Photo by Bill Cooper, Courtesy Royal Opera House.

    “The body can say more than one thing at a time,” says Marston. “Dance gets to an internal world more easily than through words, which are something that live in our outer world. Very often, you feel one thing and think another thing, or want two things at the same time. In movement, you can layer those things even within one body, amplifying and playing with them.”

    The legalities of getting the rights to adapt a literary work, finding or creating a musical score, and securing a commission or backing to produce the work can take years. Both Caniparoli and York said their pieces were more than a decade in the making. But in today’s visually obsessed world, dance can revitalize a work of literature more than ever before. And while choreographing literature can regenerate excitement about a writer’s work, it’s also important for the dance world, Kendall says.

    “Dance has to stay alive, to keep up with the times, to have people using this language to tell a story,” she says. “It’s the lifeblood of the art form. People should ask themselves, ‘What book would I like to see danced?’ ”

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    This ‘Fairy Queen’ Connects the Dots Between Purcell and Street Dance

      November 1, 2023
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    A dancer spins on his back gyroscopically, his legs spiraling in the air. He bounces off his shoulders and stands on his head. The moves come from breaking and hip-hop, but the music is Baroque opera, and the words the moves illustrate are classically allegorical.

    Henry Purcell’s semi-opera “The Fairy Queen” (1692) is the kind of work that the esteemed early-music ensemble Les Arts Florissants is known for keeping alive in performance. The production of “The Fairy Queen” that the group is bringing to Lincoln Center on Thursday is a little different, though. It is staged by the French Algerian hip-hop choreographer Mourad Merzouki and features dancers from his troupe, Compagnie Käfig.

    And the singers aren’t members of Les Arts Florissants. They’re graduates of Le Jardin des Voix, an intensive training program for young singers that Les Arts’ founder, William Christie, and his co-artistic director, Paul Agnew, have been running for 20 years. From an international pool of more than 200 applicants, just six to eight singers are chosen for the program every two years. In two and a half weeks, they rehearse a production, which then tours the world with Les Arts Florissants musicians.

    “We tell the kids that we’re not going to make excuses for them,” Agnew, the production’s musical director, said on a recent video call from France. “They have to be at the level of Les Arts Florissants.”

    “We throw them in the deep end of the swimming pool,” Christie said. “And either they sink or swim.”

    This time, the swimming has some added difficulty: Merzouki asks the singers to dance.

    “The Fairy Queen,” tangentially related to Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and sometimes performed in combination with the play, is a series of court masques. Its songs and arias are sung by allegorical figures like Night, Sleep and the four seasons. Christie can list productions of it that he’s been involved with going back more than half a century, but this one, he said, is “unique.”

    “In the opera world, the chorus generally has their feet nailed to the floor,” Christie said. “But Mourad has been able, in an extraordinarily efficient way, to turn dancers into singers and singers into dancers. I’ve never seen it happen anywhere else.”

    “There was a will from the start that it would not be singing or dancing, but one show all together,” Merzouki said in French, speaking through an interpreter.

    In Merzouki’s staging, the singers don’t do head spins, but they do continually move together with a group of dancers who are dressed indistinguishably from them. The full ensemble of singers and dancers acts out much of the text: playing blindman’s buff, tossing and turning in slumber, swirling like a leaf storm.

    Here and there, the dancers — who also include a Juilliard student and a recent graduate — expand into more elaborate and technically demanding choreography, applying Compagnie Käfig’s bouncy footwork, articulated isolations and supple hip-hop acrobatics to Baroque rhythms.

    “Purcell proved to have many points in common with street dance,” Merzouki said.

    This production isn’t an update, the collaborators stressed. “We’re not saying let’s make Purcell sound like hip-hop,” Agnew said. “We want the singers to sing with the right ornaments and phrasing, exactly as Purcell might have heard it. But everything that Purcell produced lends itself absolutely to the same rhythmic energy and excitement that Mourad produces in dance.”

    Another commonality: Both singers and dancers, though drawing from different traditions, have the freedom to find new surprises. “There’s a lot of improvisation in Baroque music,” Christie said. “Every night something different is happening.”

    “It’s never the same show,” Agnew said. “Trying to do it the same as yesterday is the biggest mistake you can make.”

    Although this is the first opera that Merzouki has staged, his productions with Compagnie Käfig have long experimented with mixing hip-hop and other disciplines. This collaboration, he said, shows how hip-hop is a mature enough art form to fit with opera: “It sends a message that it is possible to break through boundaries, that this improbable meeting is not only possible but successful.”

    Christie cited his own long experience resisting snobbery. “I get people who say to me, ‘How can an American conduct French 17th-century music?’ Or ‘You can’t possibly bring the 17th century into the 21st century,’” he said. “Those barriers shouldn’t exist. Mourad’s world and ours have something to say to each other.”

    And what is that connection? “Spontaneity,” he said. “I’ve always said that Arts Florissants should give the audience the impression that this music was written perhaps the day before yesterday. That’s why I think Mourad’s world and our world are so close.”

    Agnew agreed: “I always have to remind myself that composers like Purcell worked in modern music. And so when we do this piece, it shouldn’t have any wrinkles on it. It should be brand-spanking new.”

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    Here is Principal Casting for English National Ballet ‘s Giselle

      October 31, 2023
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    English National Ballet  
    Giselle by Mary Skeaping  
    London Coliseum 
    11 – 21 January 2024 

    Artists of English National Ballet in Giselle by Mary Skeaping © Laurent Liotardo

    English National Ballet will perform Giselle by Mary Skeaping at the London Coliseum from 11-21 January 2024. 
     
    One of the great Romantic ballets, this celebrated production, with its classical language, features some of ballet’s most dramatic scenes and otherworldly images. Adolphe Adam’s lush score is performed live by English National Ballet Philharmonic.  

    Lead Principals, Sangeun Lee, Emma Hawes and Shiori Kase will make their debut in the title role. Lead Principals Aitor Arrieta and Francesco Gabriele Frola, First Soloist Gareth Haw, Soloist Fernando Carratalá Coloma and Junior Soloist Vsevolod Maievskyi, debut as Albrecht. First Soloist Junor Souza, Soloist Erik Woolhouse, Junior Soloist Henry Dowden, and First Artist Giorgio Garrett perform the role of Hilarion for the first time. Soloist Precious Adams, Junior Soloists Anna Nevzorova and Emily Suzuki and First Artist Angela Wood, debut in the role of Myrtha. 

    English National Ballet has offered audiences the chance to see two versions of Giselle this season, with Akram Khan’s reimagining having been performed on tour by the Company in Manchester and Bristol in autumn 2023.  

    Giselle follows English National Ballet’s performances of Nutcracker (14 December 2023 – 07 January 2024), also at the London Coliseum.  

    Full Principal Casting:  
    (Giselle / Albrecht / Hilarion / Myrtha / Peasant Pas de Deux) 

    Katja Khaniukova / Aitor Arrieta* / Fabian Reimair / Alison McWhinney / Ivana Bueno* / Daniel McCormick* 
    11th January 19:30, 16th January 19:30, 21st January 14:30 

    Fernanda Oliveira / Francesco Gabriele Frola* / Henry Dowden* / Jung ah Choi / Adriana Lizardi* / Miguel Angel Maidana* 
    12th January 19:30, 14th January 14:30 

    Sangeun Lee*/ Gareth Haw* / Junor Souza* / Anna Nevzorova* / Julia Conway* / Victor Prigent* 
    13th January 14:30, 19th January 19:30 

    Erina Takahashi / Fernando Carratala Coloma* / Erik Woolhouse* / Emily Suzuki* / Francesca Velicu* / Shunhei Fuchiyama* 
    13th January 19:30, 17th January 19:30 

    Emma Hawes* / Vsevolod Maievskyi* / James Streeter / Precious Adams* / Chloe Keneally* / Noam Durand* 
    18th January 14:30, 20th January 19:30 

    Shiori Kase* / Ken Saruhashi / Giorgio Garrett* / Angela Wood* / Ivana Bueno / Daniel McCormick 
    18th January 19:30, 20th January 14:30 

    *Debut 

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    Ann Reinking, Tony-Winning Choreographer And Actress, Dead At 71

      October 30, 2023
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    NEW YORK (AP) — Ann Reinking, the Tony Award-winning choreographer, actress and Bob Fosse collaborator who helped spread a cool, muscular hybrid of jazz and burlesque movement to Broadway and beyond, has died. She was 71.

    Reinking died Saturday while visiting family in Seattle, said her manager, Lee Gross. No cause of death was disclosed.

    Tributes poured in from the Broadway community, including from Tony Yazbeck, who called her “an absolute inspiration” and Leslie Odom, Jr., who thanked Reinking for being a mentor: “She honored the calling for real. RIP to a legend.” Bernadette Peters took to Twitter to say her heart was broken and Billy Eichner said she was “one of the most mesmerizing people I’ve ever seen on stage. A singular genius. RIP.”

    Ann Reinking poses backstage with her award in the Best Choreography catagory for the musical "Chicago" at the American Theatre Wing's 1997 Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall in New York.

    Jeff Christensen / Reuters

    Trained as a ballet dancer, Reinking was known for her bold style of dance epitomized by her work in the revival of the Kander and Ebb musical “Chicago,” complete with net stockings, chair dancing and plenty of pelvic thrusts.

    Reinking co-starred as Roxie Hart along with Bebe Neuwirth’s Velma, and created the choreography “in the style of Bob Fosse,” the show’s original director and choreographer who died in 1987. She and Fosse worked together for 15 years and she was also his lover for several of them.

    “I’m beyond words to hear of the sudden and untimely passing of my dear friend Ann Reinking. The world has lost such a beautiful soul and talent,” said Chita Rivera. “I loved sharing the stage with her whenever we could. Her spirit and razzle-dazzle will be with me forever.”

    Reinking’s work on “Chicago” earned her a 1997 Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards. Reinking replicated its choreography in productions throughout the world — England, Australia, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands and elsewhere. She was portrayed by Margaret Qualley in the recent FX series “Fosse/Verdon.”

    The musical’s revival was first done in a concert version at City Center’s “Encores” series in 1996 and then moved to Broadway, where in 2011 it became the second longest-running show in Broadway history.

    “You know how you hear sometimes a woman goes into labor and 10 minutes later she’s got this beautiful baby? You couldn’t believe that it was materializing in such a beautiful way,” she told The Associated Press in 2011 about the early days of the revival.

    [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8PxTU5SQNM[/embed]

    In 1998, she co-directed “Fosse,” a salute to the man who had the largest influence, both professionally and personally, on her life. He once called her “one of the finest dancers in the jazz-modern idiom.”

    Her movie credits include “Annie” (1982), “Movie, Movie” (1978) and the documentary “Mad Hot Ballroom” (2005), which portrayed Reinking as a ballroom-dance competition judge for New York City kids.

    Reinking’s career began in Seattle, where she grew up. In the beginning, she wanted to be a ballet dancer, “like all girls,” she said. As a student, she won a scholarship in San Francisco with the Joffrey Ballet, but at many of the students’ after-hours improvisations, she would just sing and not dance.

    Robert Joffrey said that with her outgoing personality and other abilities, she should pursue musical theater. “I waited tables to save up enough money to get here,” she said of New York City, where she arrived with a round-trip ticket back to Seattle and $500. She didn’t need the return trip.

    “You wouldn’t get into this if you had a guarantee. People who get into this have a certain sense of the high stakes,” she said. “You need the break and when you get it, you’d better be ready for it.”

    Reinking’s break was strung out over several shows. She was in the ensemble for Broadway’s “Coco,” which starred Katharine Hepburn as Coco Chanel, in 1969, and was in the chorus of “Pippin” in 1972, picked by its director and choreographer, Fosse. The ensemble was so small — there were only eight — that the dancers were really seen.

    Choreographer Pat Birch was one who noticed, and in 1974 put her in “Over Here,” a World War II musical starring two of the three Andrews Sisters and featuring another unknown, John Travolta.

    It led to a starring role in “Goodtime Charley,” a musical about Joan of Arc opposite Joel Grey. The musical was not a success, but it did make theatergoers look at Reinking as a principal performer and not just a member of the chorus.

    [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNQeDSIp5zs[/embed]

    Her other big break, she said, was in “Dancin’” in 1978, “because I realized you had to be in an original part and that show has to be a hit.” The music-and-dance revue directed and choreographed by Fosse was, running more than three years and earned her a 1978 Tony nomination.

    But it was her work on the revival of “Chicago” where Reinking basked in the most attention. The original, a dark indictment of celebrity and hucksterism, opened in the summer of 1975 and ran for about 900 performances. Though not in the opening night cast, Reinking eventually slipped into the role of Roxie Hart, taking over the part from Gwen Verdon, Fosse’s third wife and dancing alter ego. In the 1996 revival, which is still on Broadway, Reinking kept the part of Hart opposite Gray and Neuwirth.

    Lin-Manuel Miranda was among those praising her talent. “A singular talent has left us,” he wrote on Twitter. Jason Alexander added: “She was a pure joy — fun and funny and endlessly kind and talented. Heaven’s chorus line just got a star.”

    Reinking also gained experience — and stayed in shape — by replacing stars in hit shows: Donna McKechnie in “A Chorus Line”; Gwen Verdon in Fosse’s original “Chicago”; and Debbie Allen in the 1986 revival of “Sweet Charity.”

    And she embarked on an eclectic film career — from playing Roy Scheider’s lover in Fosse’s 1979 semi-autobiographical film “All That Jazz,” to the screen version of “Annie” to Blake Edwards’ “Micki and Maude.”

    She also created dances for a revival of “Pal Joey” at Chicago’s Goodman Theater and a musical about first lady Eleanor Roosevelt called “Eleanor.” She was on the national tour of “Bye Bye Birdie” opposite Tommy Tune.

    After “Eleanor,” offers to choreograph “kept falling in my lap,” Reinking said. She created dances for a pre-Encores “Chicago” in Long Beach, California, with Neuwirth and Juliet Prowse.

    In one of the more cringe-worthy moments in her career, Reinking was asked to sing and perform the Oscar nominated song “Against All Odds” by Phil Collins at the 1985 telecast. Reinking lip-synched as she danced a bombastic, cheesy rendition marred by fog.

    In recent years, she choreographed “The Look of Love” on Broadway and the Roger Rees-directed off-Broadway “Here Lies Jenny” (2004), starring Neuwirth. In 2011, she helped choreograph “An Evening with Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin” on Broadway.

    Reinking also produced a documentary called “In My Hands,” about working with children of Marfan’s Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder of the connective tissues that often leaves its victims with limbs that are disproportionately long. She also produced the film “Two Worlds, One Planet,” about “high-functioning” autism.

    Reinking’s first three marriages ended in divorce. Since 1994, she had been married to Peter Talbert. She also is survived by a son, Christopher, who has been diagnosed with Marfan syndrome and autism.

    “If there is a heaven, I think Bob can look down and be satisfied. He really did have an exponential effect on the next generation of choreographers and dancers,” Reinking once said.

    “He demanded the best from you and you wanted to give it. So you got better. All great directors — however, they do it — make you want to be good. I hope I do it. It’s like being a parent, a psychiatrist, a disciplinarian and a friend. You really have to know when to hold them and when to show them.”



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    Choreographer Akram Khan Reimagines a Rudyard Kipling Classic

      October 29, 2023
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    Akram Khan Company in Jungle Book reimagined | Credit: Camilla Greenwell

    Akram Khan is an internationally renowned choreographer and dancer based in the U.K. In addition to many other prestigious awards, he has an MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for his services to dance. He made his West Coast debut 20 years ago with his first evening-length work, Kaash, at the San Francisco International Arts Festival in its inaugural season. In 2019, he performed his solo XENOS at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall to enormous acclaim. Now, the Akram Khan Company will be performing his Jungle Book reimagined at Santa Monica’s BroadStage Oct. 26–28 and at Stanford Live Dec. 2–3.

    Born in London to parents from Bangladesh, Khan says his involvement with dance started at age 3, when his mother and aunties taught him folk dances from their native country. “My mother was a very good teacher,” explains Khan, “but my aunties also put in their two pence. I studied with them until about 7, and then I went to a school for kathak. That’s like doing classical ballet. It’s hardcore. The class was serious, but I was still a kid, and I think I didn’t get serious about it [then].”

    Akram Khan | Credit: Max Barnett

    He studied with Pratap Pawar, who later became his guru. At age 10, Khan made his professional dance debut touring in The Adventures of Mowgli, produced by the Academy of Indian Dance, with music composed by a student of Ravi Shankar’s. Not surprisingly, Khan played the young boy Mowgli. A few years later, at 13, he joined the esteemed Peter Brook production of The Mahabharata, traveling internationally between 1987 and 1989, including an appearance in the televised version of the play.

    “When I came back,“ Khan relates, “I think something shifted in me, and I got heavily into it [kathak]. When you spend a year and three months working with some of the greatest actors in the world, and with a giant like Peter Brook, of course, the way they worked rubbed off on me. I went back to school, and I felt school was the wrong place for me. I realized that actually, I want to see the world through the world of dance.”

    Asked when and how he began incorporating contemporary dance with kathak, Khan says, “That was accidental. I went to university to study under the pressure of the community. I thought, ‘Well, if I’m going to study at university, I’m not going to do law or medicine. I wouldn’t even get in. So I want to do what I love doing.’ I went to study dance — really performing arts, and there were modules on contemporary dance. I didn’t know what the hell that was. But I decided because it’s dance, I’ll do that.

    “I don’t think anybody really knows how to combine the two [forms]. I think it’s mostly superficial. It’s on the surface. I think what’s important to say is my body got confused, and I celebrated that confusion. I equally studied contemporary dance and ballet as I studied Indian classical dance. It’s a melting pot over a long period of time. It’s not something that just manifested itself. It took four or five years of intense training in contemporary dance, sometimes three times a day.

    “It was a conservatoire, and on top of that, I didn’t stop my kathak training — 5 till 8 in the morning before class started. I would bribe the caretaker to let me in, and while they were cleaning, I would train in kathak, and I haven’t stopped since. That’s my opening to every day of my life.”

    Akram Khan in XENOS | Credit: Jean-Louis Fernandez

    Khan continues, “I think there is a discipline there that [by promising myself to pursue] both, I wouldn’t compromise either one. And I think that is what’s allowed the tension and pressure of having two forms collide with each other to be so intense. My training was almost like an athlete’s. Somehow that manifested itself in what [my company] does right now.

    “But I can’t just say it’s only kathak and contemporary. I grew up watching Michael Jackson when I was a child and then seeing Prince, Kate Bush, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Muhammad Ali, and Bruce Lee. I copied all of them. They were a huge influence in my life, not just philosophically and politically but definitely in terms of the way they moved.”

    Khan has taken in other types of dance as well, such as Butoh. “‘Beautiful’ is not the word. It’s super intense,” he says about the avant-garde Japanese form. “It’s funny, the opening of [my] Jungle Book is inspired by it. ... I find Butoh to be very much about deep time. This generation, our generation, doesn’t connect anymore with this because technology has clouded our sense of natural time and deep time. It’s taken over.”

    Akram Khan Company in Jungle Book reimagined | Credit: Camilla Greenwell

    Asked why he chose to reimagine The Jungle Book now and what the process was like, Khan says, “I performed in The Jungle Book when I was a child. I saw the Disney version before I even did the dance production. When I saw The Jungle Book, I went, ‘Oh my god, that boy looks like me. He has long black hair, curly black hair. And he’s brown.’ It was the first time I found and identified with someone [onscreen] that resembled me — and in a cartoon. The Jungle Book had a huge impact on me.

    “Of course, there are lots of things now as an adult that I disagree with, and that’s why I wanted to reimagine it and reclaim it. The Jungle Book is inspired really by what Rudyard Kipling did [to write it]. At least he honestly said that it’s taken from Indian myths and fables. He was a lover of empire, and he openly said so. It was very much from a white male perspective. Disney just took the Mowgli version of it.

    “I wanted to relook at it at some point in my life. It’s important to say that I didn’t know what my entry point would be. I felt I wanted to say, ‘What am I passing down?’ One of the things that we all are talking about right now is climate change. That’s what we’re passing down. I felt like this is in the young generations’ minds because they’re the ones that are inheriting it.

    Akram Khan Company in Jungle Book reimagined | Credit: Camilla Greenwell

    “It’s the unraveling of our civilization. It’s meant to be. We build an empire, and then that unravels. We build another, then that unravels. It’s our time to let go now. We deserve what we deserve. It’s just that our children don’t deserve that. The only thing I feel really terrible about is [how] they deserve better. They’re the innocent. What are the stories that I want to share, that I want to tap into, the untold stories, the forgotten stories that should be told to our children?

    “My mother’s the perfect feminist — resilient, strong, and she gets things done. She’s always been an activist in that way, and she always told me stories through the female lens. My mother was a literature expert. She collected books, so she would tell me stories as a child from Hindu mythology to Islamic stories to Chinese mythology, some African mythology, a lot of Greek mythology, and some Indonesian mythology. I grew up studying, listening to her stories. Later, I realized her version was completely different because it was not about the Prophet Muhammad. It wasn’t through his lens; it was through his wife’s lens. Adam and Eve, it was through Eve’s lens. Jesus Christ, it was through Mary Magdalene’s lens. All the stories were through a female lens. Even Mahabharata was through Gandhari’s lens or Kunti’s lens, never through Arjun’s lens.

    “I only realized much later that I was arguing with everyone: ‘No, that’s not the [real] version.’ And they would say, ‘Yes, it is the [real] version.’ I realized that their version was very, very different from mine.

    “[My mother] played a big part in the way I see the world, and then I think Peter Brook also did. My mother’s was a matriarchal perspective. Peter’s was really the patriarchal perspective of the same story — Mahabharata — what I have are just two very different perspectives. She said to me, ‘Look at history. Why is it his story? Why is it written by men?’ You have to hear the other side, the other perspective. Otherwise, you’ll never truly feel empathy if you never learn to listen to the other side. She always said to me, ‘Why isn’t it her story?’”

    Khan, in addition to running his own company, also works with large ballet companies and even forges creative collaborations with artists in other mediums. He describes his work with English National Ballet, where his first piece was Dust, followed by an evening-length retelling of Giselle.

    “I love that company and what it represents,” Khan says. “They gave me everything I needed to make this work happen, and that doesn’t happen often. I was so excited to be part of that legacy of creating work that has underneath it ‘ahbinaya’ [which means ‘to carry the spectator toward the meaning’] from Indian classical dance. The form itself is neoclassical or whatever you want to call it with my language. I don’t even think it’s my language. It’s all a mixture of different people’s languages, really. There’s no such thing as my language.

    “But what I’m really excited about is Boston Ballet just did a world premiere, a reimagined version of an old work of mine called Vertical Road. It’s the first American company to do my work. That meant a lot.” Fingers crossed that at least one California ballet company will want to acquire some of Khan’s choreography in the near future.

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    Joey Evans Is Back. This Time He’s a Struggling Artist.

      October 28, 2023
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    Those ancestors appear in the form of extraordinary tap dancers, including Dormeshia and Glover. And they keep reappearing throughout the show to remind Joey of his authentic self. This Joey, played by Ephraim Sykes, has a soul, and that soul expresses itself in the deeply rooted sound of Savion Glover’s tap dancing.

    The Griots are “a connection to something very old,” Beaty said. “The artists who have danced, sang and acted this path before. I have sat with many of them: Ossie Davis, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte. Ruby Dee told me, ‘We have always had to dance with a gun at our feet, but still we must dance.’”

    Glover, too, has always been an artist attuned to his ancestors, especially the veteran tap dancers who mentored him when he was a child. His solo shows can feel like séances, his jazz improvisations quoting those dead teachers and summoning their spirits. “Those Griots could be Jimmy Slyde, Lon Chaney, Chuck Green and Buster Brown,” he said, listing four hoofer-mentors he celebrated in the 1996 Broadway musical “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” for which he won a Tony Award for choreography.

    “Wherever I am, they will be,” he added. “They walk with me.”

    And not just in the Griot sections. At a recent rehearsal of one of Joey’s nightclub numbers, Glover stressed that he was stealing a rhythm from Henry LeTang, who choreographed “Black and Blue,” the 1989 Broadway show in which a teenage Glover shared the stage with Slyde, Chaney and other tap masters.

    “I appreciate the platform for dance to be part of the storytelling,” Glover said. “But if I have a side agenda, it would be to remind people of the contribution of those old cats.”

    The first Joey, in 1940, was a then-little-known Gene Kelly, who vaulted from the part into Hollywood fame. Frank Sinatra played Joey for the sanitized 1957 film. Revivals at City Center in the 1960s starred Bob Fosse, years before he directed shows like “Chicago” that made Joey’s sleaze into a dominant style.

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    Introducing Mackenzie Brown | Promoted to Principal at Stuttgart Ballet

      October 27, 2023
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    Chr.: John Cranko
    Dancer: Mackenzie Brown
    © Roman Novitzky / Stuttgarter Ballett

    Following her debut as Juliet in John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet on October 22, 2023, Mackenzie Brown, Soloist with the Stuttgart Ballet, was promoted to Principal Dancer by Artistic Director Tamas Detrich.

    Mackenzie Brown grew up in Stafford, Virginia (USA). She began dance classes at the Barton & Williams School of Classical Dance and continued her classical ballet training at the “Classical Ballet of Fredericksburg”. In 2016 she won a scholarship to the Académie de Danse Classique Princess Grace in Monte Carlo from which she graduated in 2020. In 2019 she participated at the Prix de Lausanne and won the Gold medal, the Contemporary Dance Prize as well as the Audience Favourite Prize. In March 2023 she won the Erik Bruhn Prize. In 2020 Mackenzie Brown became a member of Stuttgart Ballet’s Corps de ballet. After a very successful first season she was promoted to Demi-Soloist, at the beginning of the 2022/23 season to Soloist.

    Her repertory includes solo roles such as Olga in Onegin and Bianca and Pas de six in The Taming of the Shrew (all: John Cranko), Aurora in Marcia Haydée’s The Sleeping Beauty (after Petipa), Aurora in Aurora’s Nap (Johan Inger), Prudence Duvernoy in The Lady of the Camellias (John Neumeier) and Princess Louise in Mayerling (Kenneth MacMillan), as well as solo roles in ballets by John Cranko, William Forsythe, Marco Goecke, Johan Inger, Jiří Kylián, Hans van Manen and Christian Spuck. The choreographers Mauro Bigonzetti, Alessandro Giaquinto, Vittoria Girelli, Marco Goecke and Roman Novitzky have created roles for her.

    On Sunday, October 22, 2023, she gave her debut as Juliet in John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet, together with Principal Dancer Martí Fernández Paixà as Romeo. After this debut, Artistic Director Tamas Detrich appointed her to Principal Dancer on stage. Stuttgart Ballet warmly congratulates Mackenzie Brown on her promotion.

    “Mackenzie has a brilliant technique, a natural acting talent as well as a stage presence that makes every performance a stellar event,” said Artistic Director Tamas Detrich.

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    11 Home Workouts That Will Mix Up Your Exercise Routine

      October 26, 2023
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    If the novelty of exercising at home has truly worn off, it’s time to shake things up.

    You may have spent the past 10 months doing the same YouTube workout over and over again ― or you may have yet to delve into the world of online fitness.

    But there are thousands of videos, live streams and on demand services out there. Eventually, you’re likely to find something you (learn to) love.

    Trying new workouts is never a bad idea, says Jemma Thomas, a personal trainer and founder of Jemmas Health Hub, as it’ll help boost motivation.

    “If you do the same exercise over and over again you’ll get bored and begin to see it as a chore and that’s the last thing you want; exercise should be an outlet for your stresses and an escape from the real world,” she says.

    “It’s a time for you to let off steam, release some essential endorphins and make you feel good.”

    Giving your muscles and joints time to rest and recover in between workouts is important, adds Thomas, so consider trying lots of different types of exercise, instead of just one.

    “Perhaps on a Monday focus on the legs, on Wednesday do an arm workout using weights or tin cans, Friday do a yoga class and at the weekend you could do a low intensity work out, such as a gentle 5k run outside,” she says.

    Looking for some new options? We’ve got you covered:

    HIIT 💪

    “HIIT is high intensity interval training and is suitable for people who might be very time poor, people who might work very long hours or have a busy family to look after so struggle to fit in time for much exercise. Essentially, it’s going hard or going home!” says Thomas. “A HIIT work out is a hugely effective way of getting your heart rate up in a short amount of time and feeling good about yourself.” Here are some options to try:

    The Body Coach

    [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI9YG1Huq88[/embed]

    Joe Wicks, aka The Body Coach, was creating HIIT workouts for adults long before he gained a reputation as the nation’s PE teacher.

    Don’t let the kids have all the fun, check out his workouts for free on YouTube, where you’ll find options for a range of fitness levels.

    MadFit

    [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siN36IQGX3A[/embed]

    Maddie Lymburner’s YouTube channel MadFit has a great range of HIIT workouts, as well as dance-inspired cardio.

    The HIIT options include “no repeat workouts” for those who lose motivation doing the same moves over and over again, plus “apartment friendly workouts”, for those who don’t want to disturb their neighbours with lots of jumping.

    Dance 💃🏿

    “Dance is a brilliant form of exercise as not only does it keep your body fit, but it also tests your memory too as you have to remember dance moves and really concentrate,” says Thomas. “Often, because you’re concentrating so hard on the moves, you don’t realise you’ve been exercising for as long as you have meaning it’s great for your endurance.

    “It’s great for muscle tone, strength and balance and can be gentle on your body as you can go at different paces with different dance moves suitable for different fitness levels.” Here are some to try:

    Seen On Screen

    Seen on Screen - the dance classes famed for bringing Beyoncé masterclasses to the masses – launched ‘SOS On Demand’ last year, with classes taught over Zoom. Expect empowering, sexy routines and a whole lotta sister love.

    For £11.99 a month, you’ll get minimum of five new classes added every week. Content is recorded and uploaded to an archive, which subscribers can access at a time to suit you if you couldn’t make it to class.

    Pineapple Live

    If you’re looking for a one-off dance class rather than a subscription service, try Pineapple. The London studio has created ‘Pineapple Live’ – an online timetable offering hundreds of live-stream classes that are mostly £6-£8 per session.

    You’ll find street dance, commercial, ballet, jazz, tap, contemporary, ballroom and latin, musical theatre and more.

    Strength training 🏋️‍♀️

    “Strength training helps to improve muscle tone and by lifting weights you’re switching on lots of different, often unused, muscles in the body and this helps to strengthen the bones and improve balance,” says Thomas. “It also helps to improve your posture.”

    Hasfit

    [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB0zWj3DZLM[/embed]

    HASfit has a whole playlist on YouTube dedicated to strength training and it’s not as intimidating as other options out there – you won’t find any shirtless, ripped dudes here.

    Instead, expect accessible sessions for men or women, featuring dumbbells, resistance bands, or sometimes, no equipment at all.

    Heather Robertson

    [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wlsd4Ponhz0[/embed]

    Personal trainer Heather Robertson offers a variety of workouts on her YouTube channel, but we love the ones for strength training.

    You’ll find options with dumbbells and kettle bells. There’s also a whole playlist of apartment-friendly workouts if you need to be mindful of neighbours.

    Yoga 🧘🏽‍♀️

    “Yoga has a whole host of benefits – both for men and women,” says Cheryl MacDonald founder of YogaBellies, which specialises in yoga for women at “every stage of your life”, from pregnancy to menopause. “It is a fantastic way to relax and release stress, whilst toning the body.”

    The franchise is offering online sessions during the pandemic. Here are some other options to try, too.

    Yoga with Adriene

    [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSIp00SewO8[/embed]

    Adriene Mishler is the queen of YouTube yoga and there’s a reason why: her Yoga With Adriene channel is accessible for begginers and not irritating (all too common among yoga channels, it seems). Her dog Benji is also a delight.

    Mishler has launched a 30-day yoga journey for 2021, called Breath, which may be worth joining if you’re looking for a sense of community with your practice. If not, there are hundreds of uploaded videos on her channel to try.

    Shona Vertue

    [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Cf_q_vVMCU[/embed]

    Shona Vertue’s YouTube channel is full of all sorts of workouts, but she’s most famed for yoga, having once been David Beckham’s instructor.

    She offers yoga sequences for flexibility, mobility, waking up and more. We also adore the fun, short sketches in the intros.

    For A Bit Of Everything 🎉

    If you want a one-stop fitness shop for all your activities, signing up to an online gym or fitness studio could work for you.

    “Doing a variety of exercises will make you feel excited about your work out, and also not put too much pressure on the same parts of your body,” says Thomas. Here are a couple of options.

    Frame

    Frame has launched an on demand service allowing you to watch videos at a time to suit you. There’s a huge variety of options, including dance cardio, Pilates, yoga, barre, 80s aerobics, “abs and ass” (their take on tums and bums), dynamic stretch, rebounding (for those with a trampette) and more.

    The monthly plan is £10.99 per month, or if you’re willing to commit, that reduces to an upfront cost of £9 per month for a quarterly plan or £6 per month for a yearly plan.

    If you feel you need the accountability of ‘showing up’ to a class at a set time, the studio is also running a series of live streamed classes. The ‘Fix in Six’ package will give you access to six live streams a month.

    Blok TV

    Fitness studio Blok London has now launched Blok TV offering live and on demand classes. The best part? There’s a 30-day free trial, so you can try before you buy. After that, it’s £20 per month, or £10 per month if you sign up for a year.

    The studio offers classes boxing, dance, yoga, strength and conditioning, barre and more. Expect instructors with bags of enthusiasm to get you through the tough bits.

    Nike Training Club

    Nike Training Club has more than 190 workouts across strength, endurance, yoga and mobility – and they’re all completely free. Sessions range from 15–45 minutes and don’t worry, they’re not all as intense as the video above.

    This article originally appeared in HuffPost UK.



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    Review: Slow Poses and Clouds of White Powder

      October 25, 2023
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    Men with shaved heads, their bodies caked in white powder, move with exacting slowness. Their motions and poses are often inscrutable, but their faces are sometimes telegraphic, contorting into open-mouthed expressions of amusement or agony as readable as the masks of comedy and tragedy.

    Sankai Juku, the all-male Japanese company, which has been touring the world for nearly 50 years with a popularized version of the Japanese style Butoh, returned to the Joyce Theater on Tuesday for a two-week run. The group’s 80-minute show, “Kosa,” is a bit of a greatest-hits program, a series of excerpts strung together from older works. Sankai Juku is usually known for its spare yet spectacular set design, but “Kosa” has almost no décor. As a result, the choreography and essential vision of the artistic director, Ushio Amagatsu, stand exposed, and the exposure is brutal.

    If only, along with the sets, the company had discarded its music — always the worst part of the Sankai Juku experience. But the relaxing-classical Muzak is still here, cut for cheap effect with distorted electric guitar or the screams and booms of rockets and explosions. It’s as if we were in a massage parlor where a dystopian movie is playing.

    You can still appreciate the skill of the performers: the precision of their private sign language, a hand-jive heavy on thumbs, claw shapes and pointing fingers; the spindly elegance of their statuesque positions; the even glide of their runs. The lighting (by Genta Iwamura) is subtle and nuanced, so much so that all the slow posing can seem in service of the lighting design, providing bodily shapes and surfaces to illumine.

    The stitching together of the excerpts is also skillful, an overlapping structure that maintains the flow. But for me this had the discouraging effect of extending the seemingly interminable aspect of each section and the evening as a whole. Sankai Juku has long lacked the transgressive power to disturb or the numinous mystery that the best Butoh has. When moving quickly, the dancers give off clouds of white powder that hang briefly in the air, but little that Sankai Juku does has any lasting emotional or metaphorical resonance.

    And so when four of them cluster like a cabal, smirking as they raise their skirts to flash some leg, finger-painting on one another’s faces, breaking into silent hysterical laughter and pointing at the audience, they seem like the Three Stooges stripped of knockabout humor. And when the soloist proceeds glacially across the diagonal of the stage, gazing upward, his face eventually forming a rictus of pain, it isn’t mesmerizing or profound or time bending. It’s just tedious. “Kosa” is dull.

    Sankai Juku

    Through Nov. 5 at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org.

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    ‘The Crown’ Stars Dance To Lizzo In Video ‘Never Meant To See The Light Of Day’

      October 23, 2023
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    The stars of “The Crown” are feeling “Good As Hell” in this clip showing them dancing to Lizzo’s hit song. But, according to actor Gillian Anderson, the video was “never meant to see the light of day.”

    Anderson, who plays the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the hit Netflix show, explained Monday how the video — filmed on-set before the coronavirus pandemic during a break from a funeral scene — was originally only intended to be seen by friends of co-star Olivia Colman, who portrays Queen Elizabeth II.

    “Olivia apparently does a dance class in the area that she lives with a bunch of friends, on a regular basis, and the last time she did the class, they had danced to that Lizzo song,” Anderson recalled.

    “She asked if we would happen to be interested in maybe doing it, and she would video it. And then she would just share it only with her friends ― the other dancers. So it was never meant to see the light of day,” she explained.

    “And yet, here we are,” said Meyers, introducing the clip (from the 2:30 mark in the video below).

    [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl1JsZBDjBo[/embed]

    “It’s really good, you guys are really good,” Meyers said after airing the video of Anderson, Colman and their co-stars copying Lizzo’s moves.

    “So humiliating,” joked Anderson. “The look on my face ― such delight and shame all at once.”



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    ‘We just roll up our sleeves and do it’: Belfast’s dynamic DIY dance scene | Dance nation

      October 22, 2023
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    ‘This is still a segregated area, and will remain so,” says a tour guide, addressing a group gazing at sectarian murals and memorials off Belfast’s Shankill Road. The union flags waving next to front doors, the republican gift shop, the many kilometres of steel and wire that are the city’s peace walls: the past is still vivid here in west Belfast, but change is visible too.

    A few hundred metres from the site of the Shankill Road bombing, carried out by the IRA almost exactly 30 years ago, are the imposing black iron gates of the Shankill Road Mission. Founded in 1898 to help the local poor, the building had been empty for over a decade – with peeling walls, crumbling plaster and archaic fixtures – but now its corridors are full of timber, paint and tools as it’s transformed into studios by the artist collective Vault.

    Vault’s last space was in the east of the city, in another segregated area close to a peace wall, the musician and writer Mick McCullagh says. “We cultivated good relationships with our neighbours in the local community and hope to do the same on Shankill,” he says. “As a collective, our diversity of backgrounds is one of our great strengths, we’re an inclusive organisation.”

    They’re also a hands-on one, everyone pitching in with the renovations. Circus performers are proving the most handy, says McCullagh, all that rigging experience and muscle strength, they make quick work of scaffolding. Behind one door, with a sign saying “Bible Study Room” is a high-ceilinged studio shared by a juggler, a photographer and the dancer Emily McDonagh. Upstairs is what will be a dance and circus studio, with high vaulted ceiling, great views across the city and just a slight problem with a leaking roof. It’s a mammoth job, but they’re unfazed. “In Belfast we have a strong history of getting things done in spite of challenges, we just roll up our sleeves and do it anyway,” says Vault’s building manager Neal Campbell.

    That dance studio will be a much-needed resource for the city’s dance sector, which lacks affordable rehearsal space. Someone who’s got her eye on it already is choreographer Eileen McClory. “It’s going to be a beautiful studio – it’ll be a fight to get in there,” she laughs.

    Eileen McClory’s new work, Gutter.
    Eileen McClory’s new work, Gutter. Photograph: Neil Hainsworth

    McClory is a name to watch out for, a maker of political, satirical, darkly humorous dance theatre. She is a former schoolmate of Oona Doherty, who is Northern Ireland’s most successful choreographer, her show Hard to be Soft making her the toast of European festivals from Avignon to Venice. But Doherty has just left Belfast for France, saying it was unsustainable to make a living as a choreographer and working parent.

    Everywhere I go in Belfast people tell me there’s no lack of talent here, just opportunity, infrastructure and funding. There’s been no executive committee in the Northern Ireland government since February 2022. “Without an executive, we don’t have any long-term public spending or investment plans, everything is at an impasse,” says Richard Wakely, director of the Belfast international arts festival (BIAF), “And we’re already starting at a very low base.”

    The government grant for the arts in Northern Ireland works out at just over £5 per capita, compared with £10.51 in Wales, £11.77 in Scotland and £21.90 in the Republic of Ireland. Of that money, dance’s slice is significantly smaller than most other art forms. Still, artists talk about the Arts Council of Northern Ireland like friends, rather than bogeymen. It’s clearly a close-knit community.

    There’s a sense that things are shifting in the right direction. Upstairs at the Crescent Arts Centre, in the Helen Lewis Dance Studio (named after the dancer and Holocaust survivor who brought European modern dance to Belfast in the 1950s) McClory is rehearsing a new piece, Gutter, about the invidious nature of 24-hour TV news culture. Gutter premieres at BIAF, where another dance artist, the visually impaired choreographer Helen Hall, is this year’s artist in residence.

    Both McClory and Hall have been commissioned to make major works for next year’s Belfast 2024 festival (launched in lieu of Belfast’s application for European City of Culture, ineligible now due to “the Brexit mess”, says Wakely). “That’s the biggest funding that’s ever been available,” says McClory, “It’s really exciting that dance has been selected for two of the commissions, because we have never had that profile.”

    On top of that there’s the imminent formation of an all-Ireland national dance company, linking the republic and the north, with a significant investment of funds, and hopefully a new building to house it somewhere down the line. Wakely calls it “the most important cultural initiative since I returned to Ireland 26 years ago”.

    The longest standing dance company in Northern Ireland is Maiden Voyage, whose highly respected artistic director Nicola Curry has kept contemporary dance going here for two decades “It’s not a career for the faint hearted,” she tells me. Young artists to watch include the hotly tipped Michael McEvoy, whose work has addressed politics and sexuality; Clara Kerr, who incorporates traditional Irish dance into contemporary dance; and dancer and physical theatre-maker Gerard Headley. There’s a strong dance-theatre voice here, people suggest, and less abstract noodling. “Gritty” and “authentic” are descriptions that pop up. “I think there is something about living and growing here that you understand that there’s change to be made,” says choreographer and teacher Gary Rowntree-Finlay, although he laughs: “Even when I just made a lovely dance, people put all these [meanings] on it.”

    Rowntree-Finlay runs the dance department at St Louise’s Comprehensive College along with Louise White. The school is an important part of the dance ecology, it’s where Doherty and McClory trained, and unusually has been awarded Arts Council funding to hire an artist in residence. Former head of dance Marie Mannion saw the need when she joined the school in 1994. “The school is in supposedly one of the most deprived areas in Europe,” she says, “It takes money to train in dance and the money’s not available to many of these people. But there was a great hunger there for dance.”

    So Marie made it happen, as everyone is doing in their different ways. “You have to hustle,” says McClory. “You’ve got to be working together. I think the dance community here are really determined and they’ve got grit. I feel like we’re on the cusp of things starting to change. Oona’s success has really made people look at Northern Ireland.” Or as Wakely puts it: “Northern Ireland’s produced a European dance star. Holy shit, where did that come from?!” Now, says McClory, “The artists ourselves have got to step up. Because Oona’s set the standard and we need to match that.”

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