There’s an interactive feature with my friend, dancer Taylor Gordon, in the New York Times today. She talks about her career as a freelance ballet dancer – from performing in Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas Spectacular to taking extra work in ABT Met season productions, to venturing into jazz and contemporary roles. Yay Taylor!
And here is the full article by Claudia La Rocco.
Photo above by Rosalie O’Connor, taken from Explore Dance.
Interesting article by Claudia La Rocco in the NY Times about the influence of SYTYCD on studios. (I missed SYTYCD this week; had really wanted to watch Thursday night but was at New York City Ballet all settled in my seat excitedly waiting for the premiere of Mauro Bigonzetti’s Luce Nascosta when I realized I’d forgotten to tape it).
Anyway, regarding this article: I have noticed in the last few Dance Times Square performance showcases that there have been several student / pro hip hop and lyrical routines (lyrical there meaning balletic modern, without shoes, like a contemporary routine on SYTYCD), which is odd given that it’s a ballroom / Latin studio. And the students are dancing with their same teachers, which means that ballroom / Latin specialists are teaching performance-level hip hop and modern dance. Perhaps in the future ballroom instructors will have to show fluency in more styles to get their jobs.
Broadway Dance Center (mentioned in the article), where I’ve taken ballet and jazz is an excellent studio by the way, if you’re in NY. So is Alvin Ailey extension, where I’ve taken Samba (Brazilian social / Carnival, not ballroom samba). They have everything at AA now, including Salsa and other ballroom dances, though I think they’re more geared toward social than competitive. But I think the attraction to Dance Times Square (aside from the fact the studio owners are now celebrities thanks to SYTYCD) is that they put on performances in real NY theaters, which gives students the chance to dance on a real stage. Alvin Ailey extension does too now; the students are performing in the theater inside AA studios, and Broadway Dance Center has its student showcases in the Martin Luther King Jr. High School auditorium, but it just feels different when it’s on a Broadway stage.
Anyway, I’m getting off track. But I do think dance styles are merging. You see more ballroom routines both in studios’ student showcases and on Dancing with the Stars that are looking lyrical these days, and more Latin routines that are looking very hip hop. And, as is mentioned in the article, some dance styles – like tap – are not visible on SYTYCD at all and are losing popularity in studios as well. I guess no one wants to bother learning an “unpopular” dance style… Nigel Lythgoe told La Rocco he didn’t think tap worked for the show because it’s so specific – it’s too hard to train general dancers in tap at such a level as to get performance-quality work out of them. Obviously it’s the same with ballet. It takes years, decades, to learn proper ballet technique, to even try going on pointe.
I really hope though that Lythgoe will continue trying to introduce general audiences to those styles not in competition on the show. Savion Glover and Jason Samuels Smith will sufficiently wow audiences (one of them has been on before, can’t remember which one), and all he has to do to make the masses swoon over ballet is to have Natalia Osipova on the show. I think the fun of ballroom and hip hop is in large part to learn them yourself, but the excitement of ballet is just watching.
Photo above of Mandy Moore and students by Stanley Kranitz, taken from the Times.
I’ve got to go to small, experimental dance performances more often. It really is where much of the groundbreaking work happens these days.
I recently went to see Kisaeng becomes you at Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea, with Claudia La Rocco’s WNYC performance club. Kisaeng is a collaboration between experimental dance-maker Dean Moss and Korean choreographer Yoon Jin Kim and it explores, through movement, multimedia, and spoken word the lives of the kisaeng, women courtesans in Korea from the 10th Century on, who were, kind of like Japanese Geisha, well-trained in poetry and the arts and existing for the entertainment of Korean aristocracy.
What was really novel here, I felt, was the choreographers’ use of audience members. Apparently, they asked three women and one man in the lobby before the performance if they would participate in the production, without telling them what their roles would be. There are five professional female performers depicting the kisaeng (and, by the way, all were costumed in contemporary clothing — pants and t-shirts, etc.). The dance opens with one of them piercing her skin with a needle, and embroidering her palm with thread — very difficult to watch. This was live-videoed and projected onto a large screen at the back of the stage so you couldn’t help but watch. At the same time, another dancer takes center stage and opens her mouth, Scream-like, bending her neck far backward so she’s looking up toward the ceiling, like frantically crying out, or yearning for more. Several other dancers follow her, and soon all five are making that same, rather haunting movement.
Yesterday, Ariel invited me to a rehearsal at New York City Ballet. I love watching rehearsals! Especially with performers you really like; you kind of get to know their personalities a bit more. I don’t think we’re supposed to talk about anything in detail, but can I just say, methinks Tyler Angle must be every girl’s Dream partner 😀
Anyway, afterward, Ariel told me about the new cafe at Alice Tully Hall, the northernmost building of Lincoln Center, that houses mainly music concerts. She’d heard the restaurant portion (apparently the mac ‘n cheese) got some negative reviews, but I thought their coffee was rich and the American cheesecake we had, which was creamy and topped with little swirls of white chocolate, was delic. The spacious cafe is on the bottom floor and, encased in glass, it lets a lot of sunlight in and gives you an excellent view of the surrounding area.
(this is facing east).
(and this south, toward the rest of Lincoln Center. Ariel picking delicately at her cheesecake in foreground 🙂 )
(the renovated Juilliard School aka Irene Diamond Building atop Alice Tully Hall).
Lincoln Center’s been under construction forever, so it’s nice to finally see some of the building facades begin to crawl out from under their shells.
Also, last night I went to a very intriguing performance at Dance Theater Workshop, called Kisaeng becomes you by experimental dance-makers Dean Moss and Yoon Jin Kim. It’s on for one night more — tonight — and I highly recommend it if you’re in New York. I went to see it as part of Claudia La Rocco’s WNYC performance club. I found it to be powerful but subtle, and at least in part about the commodification of Asian women in contemporary society, although club members, who discussed the performance a bit afterward at a nearby French restaurant, saw different things. Review coming soon! In the meantime, here’s Gia Kourlas’s NYTimes write-up.
If you’re in New York, please do join the performance club dance writer (and my friend) Claudia La Rocco has set up over at the WNYC blog!
I had to miss out on last month’s performances, but this month the group is seeing Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet (which I went to last week and will post about very shortly) and Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment, a new dance by a Korean-American woman about black identity politics, which looks fascinating and which I can’t wait to see.
I think she has it set up so that you can either go to these performances with the group, or go see them at another time more convenient to you, and then everyone will discuss them online at the club’s WNYC forum.
In the meantime, or if you’re not in NY, watch the video and interview she posted. This is from Cedar Lake’s performance of the Didy Veldman dance that I’d gone on about earlier. I love the slow motion fight scene!
